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8 years agodiscuss

I deleted my Reddit account which kept the old design on it. Now when I occasionally browse Reddit as a non-user, it looks like an awful implementation of material design with tons of wasted space. For example, I see about 1.5 cards per page on my 13" laptop. Who designed this? It is horrid and nearly unusable. Not that I'll be using Reddit that much anymore, but it's like they deprecated the desktop version for mobile-everywhere. There's a reason the form factors are different!

9 years agodiscuss

It was a major can of worms when we started image recognition years ago. I think privacy will naturally continue to decrease if there's no regulation. More information is ammo for both good and bad applications. At first something like this could be used for affirmative action: airport security, seeking potential employees; anything where your appearance might be important. I think The West has more or less learned to ridicule the idea that "some people that naturally look a certain way should be treated a certain way". But yeah, if you're sweaty and shady at a presidential convention, it would be nice to have this kind of technology in place.

9 years agodiscuss

Then they would give their algorithms more power and memory, upgrade their cameras to capture more spectrum and/or resolution and learn who has used a tattoo to cover up their face.

9 years agodiscuss

You are right, according to quantum mechanics. If you have a pair of electrons in a product state and measure the spin of one of them, you instantly know what the "other particle's" spin is going to be (if you knew what the initial state was). When you "peek at a card", you "make a measurement" and alter the system.

For anything that exists outside of a light-cone around the first electron, a measurement of the second electron will be truly random from the measurer's perspective.

9 years agodiscuss

I just had a really bad experience with Uber myself. Here's my data point:

I was just trying to get an Uber the other day in a large city and I waited over an hour in the rain. The first N-1 drivers that accepted my request cancelled on me after 5 minutes.

Eventually, a driver picked me up. He didn't want to pick me up where I was, and had a very hard time communicating to me where he was. After some back and forth walks-100-ft-"Do you see me now?"-repeat for about 10 minutes, he asked me to just cancel the request.

I said no. I wasn't going to risk paying a fee to cancel. I was already waiting in the rain for an hour.

Eventually the driver found me and took me to my location. The whole ride was quiet until the driver decided to break the silence with full-volume anti-slavery rhetoric on the radio.

That day I learned that Uber's algorithms, whatever they are, led to at least a single very bad experience. I didn't downvote the driver. Instead, I just didn't rate him. That said, I'd say 95% of my Uber experiences were very good.

9 years agodiscuss

Feel free to.

9 years agodiscuss

This is a fantastic comic. Technically correct -- the game of the learner. Pragmatics -- the game of the master.

9 years agodiscuss

I don't see why this research couldn't be applied to empirical data from an arbitrary system of coupled oscillators.

I am interested in EEG and fNIRs, but there are drawbacks. Naively, people will try and study this data without first doing a necessary back-of-the-napkin.

EEG and fNIRs have hard physical limitations. EEG is limited to pick up only large-scale EM field activity, where the higher resolution perturbations and effects are averaged out. This is because of an increased measurement distance and noise that is acquired through the skull and other intermediary tissue. This is unacceptable since the current scientific consensus is high frequency phase and activity is fairly important for information coding.

On the bright side, a lot of information might also be encoded in larger scale synchronized oscillation that happens in the brain (the stuff that EEG picks up on). This space is obviously lower in dimension.

The only work-around for this hard information limit is to explore invasive BCI technology (e.g. tetrodes connected to your neurons).

Relatively speaking, this isn't difficult for scientific laboratory research because:

  1. We don't care about invasive surgery on rats.

  2. We don't care how comfortable rats are.

  3. We don't care how mobile rats are.

On the other hand, for commercial purposes, it is not feasible to stick a wired-tetrode array into a human brain yet. We can't afford to lose a human. Engineering on the invasive BCI frontier is incredibly primitive right now.

9 years agodiscuss

It is tempting to be lazy and criticize this work because it contains a few instances of the phrase "quantum consciousness".

This paper has one purpose: To get people thinking of the brain and information-carrying systems from a physical perspective rather than solely a computer-science or information-theoretic perspective, or even worse -- a biological perspective. Physicists were largely responsible for computer science and information theory, and they will be largely responsible for breakthroughs in biology and machine-learning as interdisciplinary laboratories continue to grow.

Physics is the most sophisticated area of applied mathematics that currently exists. Whatever consciousness is, it will be understood through physics -- because, presumably, that's what it is.

That said, it is interesting to see a consolidated paper touching on common motifs. The brain exhibits many characteristics of any other state of matter; for example, it has phase transitions.

One thing I disliked about this paper is the conclusion is draws from its examples with the gold ring and the pond. They go on to say that information is not persistent in a pond; for example if you write your name on the surface, the energy will be propagated away and the surface will return to a higher entropy state fairly quickly. This is true, but one cannot say that the brain is different solely because of this. The brain is constantly under "external" influence. It is constantly being supplied with fresh nutrients; neurons are constantly being supplied with tugs from their neighbors. If you were to remove all incoming nutrients, the brain would surely collapse as an information processor, too (e.g. death of the organism).

I would go so far as to say that a conscious system requires constant input, and does not necessarily do anything in the absence of any input. This assertion is in direct contradiction to the heuristics ("principles") established in the paper. For example, computers, bacteria, and brains are all computing systems which require constant input.

9 years agodiscuss

Terrible advice! I tell all of my students to find as many analogies as they can. You can never lose by increasing the number of ways in which you understand something. Analogies, some may argue, are at the heart of mathematics.

> Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things

Poincare.

> The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality

Hilbert.

> The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

John Green.

> Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale.

David Mitchell.

There is an ounce of truth in what you say -- metaphors can be abused to draw false conclusions. This does not mean one should cower from using them.

9 years agodiscuss

Sometimes data is not beautiful, but very ugly. These results are based on a flawed premise. One red flag -- where is the word "dank" in your list? Where are words used by people who actually smoke weed? Also, is "where score > 100" a good heuristic for this kind of study? I would argue that "where score < 100" is a better heuristic.

For example, a shill or superuser (people getting top comment) will not be using domain specific language -- they will be using language that caters to a general audience. If this is true, you would end up squeezing most of the interesting language out of your study. Have you been to Grass City forums? I am guessing these people surely aren't using terms like "Donald Trump" in their everyday conversations about weed.

Reddit is a huge melting pot and probably isn't a good place for insight about potheads. Grass City might not be either -- Grass City users are not typical potheads. The best place would be 10th grade high school social circles and college dorms. It really is amazing how little data is produced by social networks, in the grand scheme of things. We are all so used to hearing about how much data is produced by the internet. There are orders more data in the raw world just waiting to be scooped up.

9 years agodiscuss

Leave it to a computer scientist to leave out the quantum tunneling metaphor. Well, here it is:

skips current hill

"I know somebody."

9 years agodiscuss

This is genius. The best ads do their work not in the 15 seconds they play -- but in the lifetime that follows.

Well done Burger King, after all -- what good is Google if you can't stand on their shoulders, right?

9 years agodiscuss

I can't stand articles like this -- they bait you into reading poetry at the promise of science. So many words, so few ideas that are actually substantive. Consciousness speculation articles are a dime a dozen today, this is part of the noise. Even worse when they ramble on for what seems pages of periodic content.

9 years agodiscuss

It doesn't seem to be fundamentally different than reCAPTCHA. They will probably replace the click-this-checkbox box with a set of elements already on the hosted page. Only indexing a page's HTML isn't good enough -- it's better to also know how people interact with the HTML. Unfortunately, as soon as they click a link on Google, Google is no longer invited to the party, and is blind to how the user interacts with the page.

The next best thing a search company can do is have every website willingly track their users' mouse and key movements, and then willingly send all of that data to the company's inbox. In return, Google provides them with a binary classifier trained on all of the user click-stream/click-move data which determines whether or not the user is a bot!

It's an OK deal for the website owner; it's a great deal for Google. Not to mention, the user is now sending anonymous data to Google, at the expense of the website's Privacy Policy.

Google gets website owners to willingly install live-cameras on every corner of their website, and then willingly send over all of the footage, in exchange for "protection" from bots. Cough The Government gets citizens to willingly fill out lengthy tax forms, and then willingly send over a bunch of money, in exchange for "protection" from criminals. Cough

9 years agodiscuss

Ironically, the people that said "No" just answered a binary question for $0.00. So, does that mean their answer is "yes"?