sdr

Karma: 271

sdr Jan 22, 2013, 2:00 PM
6 points
on: Update on Kim Suozzi (cancer patient in want of cryonics)
Farewell, and see you on the other side!

sdr Dec 7, 2012, 2:04 AM
6 points
in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Programming Thread
In ascending order of resolution:
- There are a lot of quicker ways to set up a website -a lot of hosting solutions come with one sort of web designer, or another; you can be up&running with a general blogger account in 2 minutes. If you have a specific end-goal (eg. moving inventory) in mind, this’ll give you disproportionally quicker bang for your time.
- Depending on what your goals are, the primary challenges of websites might not be the technical details, but rather clear communication & value presentation. If you have a goal, articulate it in writing first.
With that said...
- Knowing HTML allows you to create static websites; CSS gives you fine-grained control over presentation; Javascript (and specifically, JQuery) allows you to create client-side (in-browser) interactions. You can get through these without the understanding of CS basics (for JS specifically, there are a lot of online collections for scripts, etc)
- Web-specific domain languages (php, python, ruby) gives you server-side capabilities (storing & querying data, generating dynamic pages, business logic). More assembly required, and this needs some CS fundamentals.
In short: it depends on whether you see this website&programming as an instrumental goal towards something larger, or as a terminal goal towards “being a better website creator”. Hope this makes sense.

sdr May 17, 2012, 3:42 AM
−1 points
in reply to: TimS’s comment on: Tools versus agents

Yes, that assumes away tiredness, inattention, and the like, but I think that’s more an issue of relative speed than anything else

Exactly for those reasons. From the relevant utilitarianism perspective, we care about those things much more deeply. (also, try differentiating between “不労所得を得るにはまずこれ” and “スラッシュドット・”)

sdr May 17, 2012, 1:53 AM
8 points
on: Tools versus agents
You’re fundamentally assuming opaque AI, and ascribing intentions to it; this strikes me as generalizing from fictional evidence. So, let’s talk about currently operational strong super-human AIs. Take, for example, Bayesian-based spam filtering, which has the strong super-human ability to filter e-mails into categories of “spam”, and “not spam”. While the actual parameters of every token are opaque for a human observer, the algorithm itself is transparent: we know why it works, how it works, and what needs tweaking.

This is what Holden talks about, when he says:

Among other things, a tool-AGI would allow transparent views into the AGI’s reasoning and predictions without any reason to fear being purposefully misled

In fact, the operational AI R&D problem, is that you can not outsource understanding. See tried eg. neural networks, when trained with evolutionary algorithms: you can achieve a number of different tasks with these, but once you finish the training, there is no way to reverse-engineer how the actual algorithm works, making it impossible for humans to recognize conceptual shortcuts, and thereby improve performance.

Neural networks, for instance, are in the dock not only because they have been hyped to high heaven, (what hasn’t?) but also because you could create a successful net without understanding how it worked: the bunch of numbers that captures its behaviour would in all probability be “an opaque, unreadable table...valueless as a scientific resource”. ref

sdr Apr 4, 2012, 4:26 AM
2 points
on: SotW: Be Specific
Easy excercise on the 5-second level: ask the question “as opposed to what?” both loud, and when constructing what you’d like to tell. An easy trigger to remember is qualifiers -they’re usually a mark of motivated abstraction-switch.

Medium-level excercise: take one of your life failures at any level, and dismantle it via root cause analysis:

“The business failed.” “Why?”

“We failed to nail down the unit economics tightly before scaling up marketing” “why?”

“No one was dedicated to look over all the 6 pieces on the value chain” “why?”

...etc.

Also known as 5-whys, this practice basically drills down a single causality chain via “why” questions to 4-6 levels, untangling human, skill, intention, and other components that lead to the failure. You can verify, whether you were specific enough, by being able to come up with concrete solutions for each of these levels.

sdr 4 Nov 2011 4:46 UTC
6 points
on: How to manipulate future self into being productive?
You’re framing the problem wrong -within these conditions, there are no good solution. There are 3 shortcuts out:

First, realize, that you’re inherently time-locked: the current self is the only one on which you have some amount of control (you might put yourself in a situation, where your only way out is to “work hard” -eg. make a bet with a friend to pass that exam, etc- but I found these to be less effective, than the other two).

Second, reframe the problem. Some sample questions you might ask:
- In what ways might I get the most gratification out of this work?
- In what ways might I get the most XP out of this experience?
- In what ways might I learn the most of myself during this excercise?
- In what ways might I use this as a way to self-improve? You get the idea -reframing is key.
Third, “working” for most classes of work, is fundamentally muscles: as you do more, and more, try different ways out, your leverage, and ability to “get stuff done” will improve. So: start with baby steps, then use the positive feedback, and gained experience to improve, and apply it to other aspects of the task.

Hope this helps.