TLDR for the article:
The nascent field of AR games has not, heretofore, produced compelling experiences. There now is one wildly successful AR game, but it is successful because it taps into a massive, well-loved cultural phenomenon. This is "tragic".
My thoughts: I've met dozens of people while playing Pokemon Go in the past few days. Seen many clumps of strangers trading tips about where different Pokemon are and comparing the ones they caught. The gameplay is not particularly polished or deep, and the servers are constantly being overwhelmed by the game's success-disaster, but overall, I see a lot of promise. If they add more mechanics that encourage people to form groups and play together, it can drive a lot more positive, serendipitous connections in the world - a rebuttal to those who think that smartphones will necessarily make us more introverted and asocial.
I don't fault Niantic at all for the bugs, crashes, or capacity issues. Most apps have bugs and issues on their first release. Almost never do they surpass Twitter's DAU within their first week of launch. They should be lauded for such a great success and for keeping the lights on with so much usage.
One nice feature is that TensorFlow includes TensorBoard, a bundle of visualization tools (e.g. model visualizer and various charts). You can see an example here: https://www.tensorflow.org/tensorboard (try clicking around the tabs on the top).
This article is pure polemical, without any justification for its claims (not even a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what kind increase in taxes would result from ending offshore tax evasion). Outrage is not a substitute for mathematics or economics.
I personally support UBI, but we need to ensure that it's sustainable.
Well, what is really needed is a tax on international transactions... the moving of anything in, and currency out of the country. That would make evasion and funds shifting far less attractive. Beyond that would be what would be for some a very high base tax rate, universally... something close to 50%. I just have a problem with more than half of what you make going to taxes.
From there, funds should be dispersed into accounts... A portion would go to every tax paying citizen (filing income tax required for prior year) as a UBI. Everyone would get the same amount, every week.
Of the rest part would be distributed to states based on land size. Part would go to states based on population. The rest would be towards any federal spending...
In that, the budget would have to fit the means based on a percent of tax collected first... that would shift incentives a bit.
A UBI would also allow for many state and federal welfare programs and subsidies to be nuked. A larger portion multiplier could be applied to citizens over 65, then again at 70... To put those going into retirement years in a better position, displacing Social Security.
Taxing international transactions like international commerce and small things like travel? I don't think that would be good. We've been spending the better part of the last seven decades eliminating barriers to international transactions because of the problems tariffs caused... This would be a step backwards in that direction.
It can be incredibly easy and transparent... I'm not saying you can't order something internationally, only that it's taxed at the transaction... that's pretty close to how VAT systems work. Only that the tax is at the currency exchange, not the goods, to prevent cheating the system.
The back-of-the-envelope math I've done for the US indicates that to give families BI equivalent to the current poverty level (about $16250) means the deficit would double (annual expenditures would go to about $7tn). This was even after removing about half of the payments made to individuals & families under the current system (you'd have to leave Social Security for example, since it's a paid-in-advance system)
I agree that it's a worthy/interesting goal, but the numbers just don't support it.
I'm not sure I agree that there's enough clean, renewable energy - indeed it's the one thing we're most desperately short of - but this is the right way to think about economics. Too often people get distracted by the pretend numbers, and forget to look at the "raw" situation which provides insight. This can lead to absurd opinions like "breaking windows is good for the economy because it employs glazers" - yes, careful thought shows that the reasoning is fallacious (the money spent on glazers could have been spent elsewhere), but it's much quicker to trust in the common-sense principle that breaking stuff can't possibly create wealth.
Example: UK housing. There are hundreds of thousands of empty houses in the UK, roughly 10 for each homeless person or family - and yet there is a "housing shortage". The economics of supply and demand tell us that this shouldn't really happen, but it does. Investigating further, one finds that many of the empty houses are owned by people who cannot afford to renovate them to a standard where they can legally rent or sell them; like with the minimum wage, our so-called "standard of living" so impacts the liquidity of the market that many are forced to do without entirely. That doesn't mean that standard should be lowered, only that liquidity needs to be restored somehow - if those landlords were only lent the money they need to renovate the houses, they'd soon make the money back in rent. Therefore we do in fact have the resources to house everyone, just like we have the resources to feed everyone. But, through the pretend numbers, we've convinced ourselves we can't.
All economic resource problems can be categorised into "not enough resources" (increasingly rare nowadays, and soluble by technological development) and "not enough liquidity" ( e.g. "we have enough to go around but the pretend numbers say we don't").
This seems like an interesting article, but I found it very difficult to read. For example, from the introductory paragraph:
This literature equates the possibility of time travel with the existence of closed timelike curves (CTCs) or worldlines for material particles that are smooth, future-directed timelike curves with self-intersections.[3] Since time machines designate devices which bring about the existence of CTCs and thus enable time travel, the paradoxes of time travel are irrelevant for attempted “no-go” results for time machines because these results concern what happens before the emergence of CTCs.[4] This, in our opinion, is fortunate since the paradoxes of time travel are nothing more than a crude way of bringing out the fact that the application of familiar local laws of relativistic physics to a spacetime background which contains CTCs typically requires that consistency constraints on initial data must be met in order for a local solution of the laws to be extendable to a global solution.
I'm not sure what the intended audience for this is; combination philosopher physicists? Given that it's on SEP it seems unreasonable to assume that CTCs need no other explanation than that they are smooth, future-directed timelike curves with intersections. I would love it if someone would ELI5 this concept, though.
Meaning no abrupt kinks (for a notion of abrupt which is probably not physically achievable, so don't worry to much about it) or jumps/discontinuities in the path of a particle, applying to both space and time
> timelike
roughly speaking, traveling slower than the speed of light
> future-directed
meaning going into the direction of causality
> with intersections
meeting itself again.
In other words, it's a path through space/time on which you experience your own local time as always running forward, but yet somehow you end up in the past.
Perhaps an analogy is in order. Suppose we were in 1+1 dimensions, with the time dimension being compact (closing in on itself). Visualize this as an infinite cylinder (the infinite axis being space). Now, let's impose a finite speed of light (for simplicity 1cm/s) and define the direction of causality, say counter-clockwise. Then, this spacetime has CTC, because we can find a path that, is smooth, future-directed (going around counter-clockwise) and timelike (going at angles < 45 degrees compared to the spacial axis). The simplest such would be a simple circle around the cylinder, but any curve that matches the above rules and intersects itself would be considered a CTC.
Now, as a final note " a crude way of bringing out the fact that the application of familiar local laws of relativistic physics to a spacetime background which contains CTCs typically requires that consistency constraints on initial data must be met in order for a local solution of the laws to be extendable to a global solution." means the following. When we usually do physics, we know what happens locally (e.g. ball get shot at wall, bounces back), so we simply have to figure out (or decide if we're doing a thought experiment) where everything is in the universe at some particular time, apply our rules everywhere and we essentially know what's happening everywhere, anywhere. This doesn't work any more in the presence of CTC. "Consistency conditions" basically just means that you have to chose your placement of objects in such a way that they don't cause any paradoxes (there's a more technical notion here, but that's essentially what's meant).
If time travel is possible, why is consistency a concern? If one thing changes at one time, couldn't another change at the same time? Could time travel exist without our being aware of it by constantly changing our understanding of events such that there appears to have been no change?
Does consistency mean that some change must cause many other changes in order to make everything end up in perfect alignment?
Larry Niven speculated that if time machines were possible, time travellers continually going into the past would change the circumstances that lead to them inventing their time machines and using them, resulting in an unstable timeline. The only steady state for this timeline would be one in which no time machine was ever invented.
So we may well live in a universe in which time travel is possible, and time travellers from alternate future timelines may even have arrived in it in the past (or may arrive in it in the future from more distant futures), but the 'final value' of the timeline would exclude the events that lead to their actual invention.
Consistency here is a mathematical statement. Think about the cylinder example, and suppose you want to assign a number of each location. Then, naturally, going once around the cylinder puts you back at the same spot on the cylinder, so it needs to have the same number. At this point it is useful to remember that the numbers on the cylinder are fixed. We're already representing time as the compact dimension of the cylinder, so there's no extra time dimension.
Now, with this setup, let's imagine living in this 1D world, just sitting still, reading off numbers. Our life would be cyclic with period cm/((2pi r)s).
Let me try to phrase this a different way. Suppose the universe is a database, where (t,x,y,z) are the unique keys. For every key there is some value of "physical reality" at that point in spacetime. All the original statement is saying that if you want to generate such a database by starting with only some of the entries and applying the laws of physics, then in the presence of CTC, there are some very strict conditions on what those initial rows can be if you don't want to run into a situation where you'd want to assign two different values to the same key (e.g. by getting to the same point forwards in time and backwards in time).
Perhaps the database administrator chose the unique keys (observer_id, subjective_observer_time).
Then, the (t,x,y,z) coordinates could all be parametric functions of observer_id and subjective_observer_time. If you follow a CTC and meet your younger self, then convince your younger self to not follow the CTC, you may simply be reassigning your younger self to a new observer_id, rather than creating a paradox that destroys the database integrity.
As long as all observers obey the rules of causality locally, your elder time-twin will never remember meeting their own elder time-twin, and your younger time-twin will never remember not meeting their own elder time-twin. The CTC has no way of knowing whether anyone ever followed it or not, because it isn't an observer. So if you ever meet yourself, you're no longer meeting yourself, because the person you meet is from that moment no longer you. If you do anything at all within the past half of your own light cone that interrupts causality, you are just creating a new observer.
So the photograph doesn't change itself, like in Back to the Future. Marty can't erase himself, but he could erase all references to himself from the historical record, except for whatever he carried through the CTC. He could then take a DNA test that proves him without a doubt to be the child of two people who cannot recall ever even touching one another. Even if he mostly restores causality, upon reversing through another CTC to a time before he entered the first CTC, there will be a different third child of his parents living with them when he gets back--someone who might not ever traverse a CTC.
If that's how it works, time travelers could do no worse than completely erase themselves from all historical records and the memories of every living person. They would be considered people who never previously existed, who spontaneously appeared, complete with memories of future events that might never come to pass. In that case, almost anything even remotely plausible could come out of either end of a CTC.
But this is not the same as a time machine. The article doesn't explain the difference between a machine you can use to travel back in time, and a contrived spacetime in which events run in a loop.
While it's dismissive of "paradox mongers" it doesn't deal with any of the very real issues created by very obvious potential paradoxes - not least of which is that physics fundamentals like conservations of energy stop working.
(If you can move anything or anyone back in time you have a universe with two of something instead of one of something - which means you can get something for nothing, over and over. If you can't do this because the CTC forms a time loop, you don't have a paradox, but you don't have much else of interest either.)
A contrived spacetime with a CTC is fundamentally useless as a practical time machine. And the whole point of a Thornian wormhole is that it offers practical engineering benefits - such as being able to travel in a way that effectively bypasses the speed of light limit.
In any case - relativistic speculations are metaphysical, because it's a fair bet that spacetime isn't a smooth continuous manifold at all. It just looks like one from a distance under normal conditions - normal meaning anything outside a singularity or black hole.
No one has much of a clue what spacetime is made of, and that makes it hard to say much about its properties under stress. For all anyone knows CTCs may be impossible because if you stress spacetime enough it may not act like a manifold any more, and a clean description of what happens at that point needs new completely physics.
There is a fair overlap between the analytic-philosophy community and physicists and mathematicians. So the analytic community generally doesn't talk out of its arse about these things.
I'm from the other side of philosophy, the continental-philosophy area, which mostly talks about ethics and art and identity, so for me to talk about CTCs I would be talking out my arse.
Philosophy is, generally, very hard to read. So much so that reading Descartes' Meditations (considered an alright starting text) in my first philosophy course took me about 30 mins per page.
But, it seems to me that this is one of those areas where analytic philosophy seems to be breaching an area where actual experiments can be proposed and tested in a physical sense, and it leads me to think, what's the point? The logical (philosophical) consistency of light being a particle and a wave doesn't come in to the reality of it. Was it worth ancient Greeks wondering whether all matter was made of water?
I think similar questions can be asked about continental philosophy. I certainly read a lot of it as a lot of wank that could be answered by real-world surveys (what makes people happy? I dunno, how about we ask them). But I think questions like, how do we determine whether happiness is the thing we should optimize for in life, are still relevant, and philosophical, and more basic! I think the underlying basic question of CTCs might be, does something being a logical paradox actually prevent it from happening?
And, if CTCs are a physical phenomena that we can't observe (maybe, yet), what's the point of a philosopher wondering about them? Shouldn't that be a theoretical physicists job?
No brag, but I read meditations in a few lunch breaks when working a manual job power washing ride on lawn mowers at uni.
It's a simple read.
If you'd have said Kant, I might have agreed with you.
Most of the time complicated philosophy (or science) are hard to read because either they're talking crap (Hegel) or they can't write for shit (Kant). Descartes was pretty good in my book (although obviously the 2nd half complete failed).
I found Kant to be easier than Descartes and Heidegger to be by far the hardest to read of all. Hegel has for me been somewhere between Descartes and Heidegger, but I think its no surprise that Zizek was a Hegelian and also read a bunch of Lacan :D
I think Heidegger is actually deliberately obscure!
>But, it seems to me that this is one of those areas where analytic philosophy seems to be breaching an area where actual experiments can be proposed and tested in a physical sense, and it leads me to think, what's the point?
I think it would be fair to flip that around: if your philosophy doesn't result in testable predictions, then what's the point?
What I was talking about in that quote is that CTCs are definitely being seriously talked about and explored in relation to tested elements of our understanding of the universe by theoretical physicists, the experts in physics, and so I think its time for philosophers to give up that ground.
Similarly I feel like there are philosophy-of-politics discussions that can (through political change) become the realm of actual politicians, sociologists, etc.
I apologize, but I'd like to flip your question about again. I think philosophy is the realm of the untestable, so in my mind you're asking "what's the point of philosophy". I think philosophy is the place to explore the full ramifications and implications of untestable ideas. I'd also ask what's the point of your question? If its not testable, I think its a philosophical question, QED. If it does result in a testable prediction, what's the test?
If it's not testable, what's the point? If it is not testable you are literally saying it has no effect on the world.
Note that something can be political or sociological and still be testable. You can have a utilitarian moral philosophy where you assign utilities and sum them up, then do surveys or focus groups to to measure agreement with the results.
But if a theory literally has no testable predictions? That is the definition of useless.
>>If it is not testable you are literally saying it has no effect on the world.
It's provable that things that are true are not demonstrable(see Gödel's incompleteness theorem). It follows that things that are not testable are true, and for some d
definition of truth, it means they have an effect in the word. So we absolutely can, in a meaningful way, wonder about the posible consequences of something that while not testable may be true. Just because something it solely potentially meaningful does not mean it it's entirely meaningless.
Let me stop you right there. You can have a utilitarian moral philosophy, sure. But the question of if you ought to have such a philosophy is a philosophical one. To get to the point of having tests of optimized utility there is an underlying question that has no tests, which is are tests for utility really the best tests to run?
Its either turtles all the way down: tests testing the effectiveness of tests, or, you get into philosophy.
Hi, I'm just some dude, but wouldn't it be best for everyone to work on the problem until the problem is solved? Also, what about philosophers who are also physicists? I had a physics professor in college who had a degree in philosophy, and she didn't seem to mind talking with non-physics philosophers about physics-related topics.
Well, yeah, in my initial comment I said that there are a lot of analytical philosophers that have an understanding of physics. But, I think that CTCs are better suited as an undergraduate physics topic than an undergraduate philosophy one. We did talk at length on them in one of my undergrad philosophy classes.
I think its a fair question if everyone should work on the problem, but I'm wondering if that same question could be applied to every problem?
I don't think many would agree that a mathematics degree should be made entirely of pottery electives. I'm not saying we shouldn't encourage mathematicians to dabble in pottery, I'm just saying pottery is not mathematics, like CTCs don't seem to me to be philosophy.
Oh, it's definitely not cool to force people to do things. I didn't know it was like that. Someone probably thought that it's a really important problem, though. Like, if it were up to me, I'd be okay with forcing students to take a course on global warming, since I think global warming is a really important problem. But that's just me though. Anyway, I'm sorry you had to spend time doing stuff you weren't all that interested in.
> I think it would be fair to flip that around: if your philosophy doesn't result in testable predictions, then what's the point?
"Untestable philosophies are pointless" is an untestable philosophy, and therefore pointless by its own standards. This is a well-known problem with logical positivism, which is roughly the position you are advocating.
@KenoFischer already did a great job explaining the paragraph, but the audience is professional philosophers, philosophy graduate students, and some philosophy undergrads. I parsed this SEP entry for one of my undergraduate courses (Philosophy of Space & Time).
If you're interested in the topic, I suggest reading Time and Space by Barry Dainton[1]. It was suggested reading for our class and primed me for anything from time time travel to general relativity.
In mathematical physics, a closed timelike curve (CTC) is a world line of a material particle in spacetime that is "closed", returning to its starting point.
So it's essentially like in the movie Groundhog Day I guess.
In Groundhog Day, there is no material particle that returns to its starting point, only information (Phil's memory in particular.)
Although, intuitively it seems that a time machine for information should be easier to build than one for matter, because information is so much easier to teleport.
If you had a tiny wormhole and put one end of it into a high-speed centrifuge for a while, until there was a meaningful time differential between the two ends, you might not be able to send even an entire photon through it, but you might be able to do something like bounce a laser off each end such that if you modulate the input polarization at one end, the polarization of light reflected from the other end changes at the appropriate time. No mass or energy travels through the hole itself, but information is transmitted.
Suppose electrons would naturally time travel occasionally. But, we could gain no knowledge about the future from those electrons. It's not interesting.
CTC means time-travel with structure. If you can send say a book back in time then our ideas of paradox ect have meaning.
Next suppose you could time travel, but only far from your own past that light can't reach you. Further you block other time travelers so you can't send messages back to your self. Again not interesting, you need to be able to influence your past (self intersect) to be fun otherwise it's just like moving quickly.
If electrons sometimes time traveled on a human time scale we could exploit that, eg. by building a huge assembly of electron guns, phosphors and photomultipliers. We could gain knowledge of the future signal sent to the electron guns by watching when the phosphors lit up while the electron guns were switched off.
Depends on scale. Suppose they are rare and show up in random locations with random velocity's random amounts of time in the past etc. As in 1 electron in the observable universe per day.
If all their properties are randomized then I don't see how they can be said to "travel". That would be indistinguishable from electrons spontaneously appearing and unrelated electrons spontaneously disappearing.
This is one of the major reasons I said time travel without information transfer is not interesting. Even if it actually happens, it's not distinguishable from something else.
PS: Quantum entanglement is also less interesting than you might think for similar reasons.
In the case of entanglement though it is actually distinguishable from other, less "interesting" phenomena though, right? That's what the loophole-free Bell tests are about.
How is LambdaConf "destroyed"? That seems like pure hyperbole. The conference will go on, and most people won't remember this Moldbug business longer than 15 minutes.
It's also not clear to me what is the "intolerance" that they are tolerating. Can you provide textual evidence for Moldbug being intolerant? In the post, he comes across as tolerant, albeit with a narrative outside the political mainstream.
> most people won't remember this Moldbug business longer than 15 minutes
People attending? Maybe they'll forget. But many of the regular speakers or sponsors from FP conferences will not.
On the Scala side I know of at least the Typelevel Summit in Boulder being canceled (http://goo.gl/2HAVca) and along with sponsors like 47 degrees pulling their sponsorship for LambdaConf (http://goo.gl/h9WucI). Note that the Typelevel members are community leaders that have contributed to many projects, including Scalaz, Cats, Algebra, Shapeless, Simulacrum, Machinist, Ensime, Spire, etc. And on the Clojure side you've got people like David Nolen of ClojureScript and Om fame saying that LambdaConf is now on the list of conferences he'll never attend.
People follow leaders and if you think this won't have repercussions for LambdaConf, think again.
> In the post, he comes across as tolerant, albeit with a narrative outside the political mainstream.
Related to this article, I'm not interested in arguing the fine nuances of his argument or the English language, but when you don't consider other people as being your equal, that's racist by definition. A fact made clear by Moldbug's writing. And the fact that there are people that jump in defense of his narrative highlights the importance of speaking and acting against such beliefs.
The point is not about him being a racist or not.
As long as he doesn't bring his personal views to a professional setting I don't care about them.
I also don't mind if people don't attend his talks as a form of protest. Heck I probably wouldn't go to them myself.
But demanding somebody be cancelled from a conference because you don't agree with them on something that has nothing to do with the topics of said conference seems to set a bad precedence.
After all that might give others the right to demand people not be permitted to speak because they are communists, gay, hippies, or what else.
As for tolerant people being tricked into allowing intolerance.
I'm pretty sure everybody there has a limit on intolerance that they won't tolerate anymore. I firmly believe that everybody has the absolute right for physical protection, so if he had a history of violence there would have been a clear cut line.
However, I don't think that anybody has the right to not be offended, or to be protected from "emotional harm". I expect adults to be able to control themselves enough that this shouldn't be an issue.
If all he's done is being an ass, that doesn't justify him being kicked out.
> The point is not about him being a racist or not. As long as he doesn't bring his personal views to a professional setting I don't care about them.
You're free to have that belief, but like it or not, being included as a speaker at an important conference gives a person prestige and credence for his ideas and others might not like it.
> demanding somebody be cancelled from a conference ... because they are communists, gay, hippies ...
Right here is the mistake that I think the organizers of LambdaConf did.
You cannot compare gays and hippies with white supremacists, because being gay or hippie does not rob others of their humanity. Communism, in the theoretical sense, wouldn't be guilty of that either.
Now, I've heard somebody making a valid point: another speaker happens to work on military drones, that ultimately have been used to target women and children. Why aren't people outraged about that one?
Well, maybe we should be outraged about that one as well, though the context is different, as military drones, like science in general, can be used for both good and evil. For example the same science that gave us a process for producing nitrogen and synthetic fertilizer is also responsible for gas warfare in WWI. So context matters, I'm not ready yet to condemn the work on military drones as being evil (though it probably is), but I sure am ready to condemn racism, because personally I believe that racism represents the worst of humanity, being the justification given to most wars that ever happened.
> I don't think that anybody has the right to not be offended, or to be protected from "emotional harm"
First of all we aren't talking about what is legal. If we are, then having a belief that somebody shouldn't speak at a conference is perfectly within our right for freedom of expression. And this isn't censorship, but Ostracism, an act which again, is perfectly within our right for freedom of association. People are always free to organize events that accept this person (with LambdaConf choosing this path) and the author can even start his own conferences and communities.
That said, in my country at least, the freedom of speech does not hold for hate speech and you can be prosecuted for causing emotional harm due to hate speech targeting groups based on religion, ethnicity, race or sex. Note that whether the author would escape guilt, that's for a court to decide and I'm not a lawyer, but to me his writings sure sound like hate speech.
And don't get me wrong, if he would be found innocent of hate speech by a court, then I expect for people to uphold his right for freedom of speech, but again, that doesn't mean people can't exercise their own freedom of speech or freedom of association.
> included as a speaker at an important conference gives a person prestige and credence for his ideas
The question is does it give credence to the ideas presented at the conference or does it give credence to all of his ideas?
On a somewhat unrelated note, I find that we place people that give talks at conferences, on a way to high pedestal. It feels like presenting oneself has become more important than writing code.
> Communism, in the theoretical sense, wouldn't be guilty of that either.
Neither does racism "in the theoretical sense" as the author of the article argues. And I'm not buying his argument either, so you simply can't ignore the the fact that communism produced the biggest genocides.
>Why aren't people outraged about that one?
To be honest I actually would be all in to ban a person developing military drones that can be used for "offensive" attacks from the conference.
A person directly developing tools for murder has crossed the line of non-violence I talked about earlier.
> racism ... being the justification ... to most wars ...
So would you ban all religious people because religion has been used as a justification for war over and over again?
To me there is a difference between believing something bad and having the intention to act on it.
I don't care about the author as long as he doesn't go out the next day to spit on a black person. And from what I've read the author has this weird "different but equally worth" racism that is somewhat "benign" (as in tumor).
The person developing the drones however is directly ruining peoples lives. Of course he doesn't pull the trigger, but he willingly gives a gun to a psychopath.
> First of all we aren't talking about what is legal.
Why would we? If he had planned on doing something illegal at a conference and then got banned for it there would be zero discussion.
> in my country at least
UK? And I'm pretty sure that you won't be persecuted for causing "emotional harm" but for "disturbing the peace" or "inciting violence" or something similar.
Note that in this case people claim that the emotional harm isn't caused by him giving a racist talk (which would be hate speech and which he's not going to give), but _his mere presence_.
And I think as an adult one should be able to tolerate the presence of another person no matter how much one hates their views.
> people are always free to organize events that accept this person (with LambdaConf choosing this path) and the author can even start his own conferences and communities.
>that doesn't mean people can't exercise their own freedom of speech or freedom of association.
Of course people are free to not attend. But then they should accept the vote people cast and stop the brigading.
I am very sure that the people most vocal about this right now would try to stop and ruin any "racist" conference by putting pressure on sponsors and speakers.
I really hope that the mob is proud of its actions when the conference is canceled. "Hey, everybody is worse off now, but at least me made our point!"
If the conference isn't canceled, I really hope the organizers make a list of people and companies who tried to kill the conference and never sell them a ticket to a future conference again. (No bad blood, just helping them remember their big words.)
> How is LambdaConf "destroyed"? That seems like pure hyperbole. The conference will go on
I don't think that's a given; all but one of their corporate sponsors have pulled out, so it might not be feasible. I don't know how many of their sponsors were providing money vs. sponsoring events, though.
I'm really impressed with how quickly the Typescript team is adding new features - it feels like every time I check in on them they have something new in the works that I really care about. Great work!
Great tutorial - Well written and good patterns for TensorFlow usage, e.g. checkpointing, name scopes for cleaning up the graph visualization, and using summaries/TensorBoard, and also nice explanations of the concepts.
Though I'm curious why you used VALID padding not SAME for the conv layers? It seems like it would be simpler to use SAME.
Also, minor nit: TensorFlow and TensorBoard should both have two letters capitalized
Thanks! I think VALID and SAME are probably giving the same results. The reason I used VALID is only because the original paper seems to be doing that as well.
"Two large YC companies (both with machine learning teams) have told us that they consider interest in ML a negative signal."
I wonder why this is?
Since ML/AI are currently "hot" those programmers may be trend followers? Or maybe interest in ML is correlated with being a junior programmer (those that are more senior specialized when ML/AI were not so cool and consequently are in different domains)?
Not at a YC company, but yeah my guess would be that it's hard to get the trend followers on board with other stuff. I've anecdotally seen myself a lot of candidates (esp at the recent-university/recent-MS level) who've taken some ML courses cause it's trendy and sounds interesting but (a) don't have a serious enough interest in it or knowledge of how to apply it well enough to be a good fit on our ML teams and (b) aren't open to other roles because they sound less cool or have a perception that the day to day work will be more tedious.
Author of the post. I think that this is exactly right. I don't know what motivated the companies to put that policy in place (they just told us that they had this preference). But I can speculate. There is an epidemic of interest in ML. Four out of 5 college grads we speak to list it as an interest. I think that interest has grown to the point where it's no longer any kind of signal about technical strength, and perhaps a signal that the candidates will not be flexible about what they work on.
What about we academic programmers who have real experience and knowledge about ML. Is that still a negative sign? Or does the academic part make it worse :)
Many candidates I see that have a "strong interest" in machine learning have no idea wtf machine learning really entails; they are listing it as an interest because it is a buzzword and "sounds hard". Most of them have just used scikit-learn once or twice, and have no idea about statistics.
Most likely because if you are doing ML and do not have a PhD (or previous experience), you are just looking at calling a library function that you do not understand. The majority of 'machine learning meetups' (not in the Bay Area), are attended by programmers that are looking to figure out how to call an R package to give them recommendations or similar items in a list (clustering).
edit I just read the other replies to this post. I believe that most startups with Machine Learning teams are doing more than just calling R-libraries; most development work that I've done for myself and teams has been for tooling and operationalizing data infrastructure (i.e. data engineering, not data science). However if you need a simple recommendation for an app then calling the library methods without 100% understanding may be enough (but calling library methods without underlying understanding is a bad trait in a programmer (e.g. calling the sort() function without understanding quicksort)).
I am a statistician working in the data sciences. I see lots of programmers show interest but do not have the depth of knowledge in mathematics and statistics. They can apply libraries and do 80% fine but do not have the educational background to side step assumptions and pitfalls.
>Most likely because if you are doing ML and do not have a PhD (or previous experience), you are just looking at calling a library function that you do not understand.
I'm assuming that's your interpretation of the industry mindset, and not a view you personally hold.
IMO it's a naive assumption, and it would be trivial to test for it in an interview.
I have an interest in ML for a specific domain, no PhD, and it wouldn't cross my mind to try to use it as a set of shrink-wrapped library functions.
I can't speak on their behalf, but I can see how this would be interpreted as a negative signal. If someone is really excited about ML stuff, and you aren't going to hire him for your ML team, then I would be afraid that the person will be disappointed that the work we give him/her is less about solving complex problems and more about getting stuff done. There's also the issue that this person is probably going to jump ship the second he gets an offer to work on ML stuff.
As someone having a strong interest in math and theoretical computer science, I think their bias is fair. I think I'm a pretty good programmer, better than most I've met with similar experience, but I'll admit that I don't care as much as people who are really passionate about building stuff. They will write sloppy code sometimes, but they'll also focus on getting stuff shipped, whereas I naturally want to focus on solving interesting issues like that bug which only seems to happen 1/20 unit tests but no customer has reported.
It took me some time to learn how industry differs from university programming, and if I were recruiting, I don't know if I would want to deal with the hassle. Obviously now that I know I accept industry for what it is and make sure I do my best, even when it doesn't align with my own interests necessarily, but that takes some maturity (not that I am particularly mature), and I can see why hiring managers would rather avoid the risk when hiring and firing is very expensive and annoying.
Because ML/AI are feature enablers. They make a good product better, but they won't make a product successful. It's a signal that people are more interested in solving technical problems than solving business/product problems.
Also, a large percentage of ML/AI projects are scams. And even the people who aren't scammers tend to massively underestimate the amount of work required to make something good. It doesn't surprise me at all that interest in these technologies could be a red flag on multiple levels.
Sure there are plenty of great startups built with these technologies, but both also tend to be the 'and then a miracle occurs' of the tech industry.
Use cases with ML out front are rare. I would argue that "self-driving" is just a feature of an automobile; the expensive part is building and delivering a half-ton hunk of precision-engineered metal. People were buying cars long before they were self-driving; and I doubt that self-driving will add a whole lot to the cost of a vehicle. Even then, the hard part of building a business around autonomous cars is obtaining safety certification and improving public perception of autonomous driving. All the major self-driving algorithms will be largely public domain before that happens.
Likewise with Google; there were search engines long before Google. Hell, Google first appeared as the search technology powering Yahoo! long before they had their own presence. Granted; in this case ML enabled the "killer app" of generating relevant results and allowing ad targeting, but use cases where ML is as critical to the product as Google are rare. More typical are things like Netflix's recommendation engine - the value of the service is in the video library, the recommendation engine is just another avenue for content discovery. It is also being increasingly curated as opposed to automated for promotional reasons.
All of this matters. ML is great, but ML results are often so narrowly scoped that you need to identify your product scope first, then find an ML solution that helps. And even then, at small scale you can often "fake" the impact of ML via manual labor or "doing things that don't scale" (i.e. operating the service via manual labor at a loss with the hopes of adding an AI component to handle that function later in a scalable fashion). If the product doesn't resonate with the market, all the ML in the world won't help it succeed.
My experience is that programmers I've worked with who strongly identified as being interested in ML tended to be prone to wanting to build very complex ML-based systems when much simpler (albeit less sexy) solutions would suffice. Certainly this is a generalization, but I've seen it enough times to be wary.
I don't identify as an ML person and fight this type of complexity all the time. Start simple and then move complex. Starting complex is simply overkill for so many problems.
A lot of ML work is currently ad hoc. Not what you want in most software design and development. Accomplishment in ML and interest in ML are very different. With the hype these days an interest in ML is almost like an interest in making the computer magic.
Harj, is it people with ML/AI interests without experience? Does this also include PHDs? On that note, are Academic Programmers Comp Sci PHDs or from other fields?
Author of the post. We did not distinguish by experience level in the question that we asked about tech / product. But experience is VERY helpful in a job search, so an experienced ML/AI person would almost certainly have more interest than a product person fresh out of school. We've not seen much weight given to CS PhDs. Someone fresh out of a CS PhD program is viewed much like someone out of a BS program. Industry experience is a big help.
Hmm, I think you may find different responses based on experience level with something like ML in particular. I'm a product focused engineer (former PM) with a master's degree and an unfinished PhD in machine learning. I've also been a mentor at a 12-week boot camp where students did machine learning projects, so I totally get the "it's sexy but nobody actually bothers to understand it" argument. But with my experience level (several years real world experience and a Big Name) I think I've had more interest due to my specific background, not less.
They think ML people aren't interested in infrastructure. That's not entirely true. Many people with actual production ML experience understand and want to work on the data infrastructure because it's all to easy for someone that's not going to build products on top of it to fuck it up.
probably because ML is the hot new thing. People that are interested in a hot new method (especially if there "excited to learn!") instead of the results that that method can product (a better product) are prone to running down technical rabbit holes over shipping.
Plottable.js (http://plottablejs.org/examples/) is another library that takes a similar approach: reusable components written in D3, and a table-based composable layout system.
I've been using Plottable recently and it's great. Hope it gets more widely used so there's more material out there about it - it's SUPER powerful but the documentation is hard to understand if you're really trying to extend it.
My thoughts: I've met dozens of people while playing Pokemon Go in the past few days. Seen many clumps of strangers trading tips about where different Pokemon are and comparing the ones they caught. The gameplay is not particularly polished or deep, and the servers are constantly being overwhelmed by the game's success-disaster, but overall, I see a lot of promise. If they add more mechanics that encourage people to form groups and play together, it can drive a lot more positive, serendipitous connections in the world - a rebuttal to those who think that smartphones will necessarily make us more introverted and asocial.
I don't fault Niantic at all for the bugs, crashes, or capacity issues. Most apps have bugs and issues on their first release. Almost never do they surpass Twitter's DAU within their first week of launch. They should be lauded for such a great success and for keeping the lights on with so much usage.