So if I ask my ISP if they are selling my data do they have to admit it? Or can they now do it in secret?
Readit Newsgradi3nt commented on US Senate votes to undo FCC internet privacy rules washingtonpost.com/news/t... · Posted by u/daegloe
gradi3nt commented on Metamaterial based flat lens promises possible revolution in optics bbc.com/news/science-envi... · Posted by u/mdf
You have to love pop sci headlines with phrases like "...promises possible..."
I promise you, BBC's Roland Pease, that it's possible the sun won't rise tomorrow and Linus Torvalds with announce that he will be Microsoft's next CEO.
gradi3nt commented on Making UX Choices Based on What You Hate About the Internet thegood.com/insights/maki... · Posted by u/davidhoos
So CKs brilliant talent for comedy had not so much to do with his ticket sales, eh?
That sounds like a sales pitch. Oh wait, scroll to the bottom, this is a sales pitch. Classic tactic of making the incredible sound easy, just pay a small fee!
gradi3nt commented on University Title Generator universitytitlegenerator.... · Posted by u/ashitlerferad
Changing the zoom on this page is trippy.
Okay, after thinking about this a bit longer, I would like to critique his argument.
He asserts that we can prove that it is better for so-and-so to perceive according to "fitness" rather than according to "truth", and maintains this is true with mathematical rigor; fine.
This is observably true (allowing me the possibility of observation for the space of this conversation) - predators, for example, usually have forward-facing eyes and vertically-slitted pupils, which allows them to focus and react to motion of prey in front of them; prey often have widely-spaced eyes allowing a greater field of view. Fitness literally makes you see the world differently.
However, there is an important dimension that I think he missed (or several), which is that the fitness function governing a trait is a vast, multi-dimensional space.
For example, using color we may distinguish between unripe, hard-to-eat fruit (green) and ripe, healthy fruit (reddish-orange). According to his argument, we should therefore only need to see these two colors. Of course this is incorrect, because if our vision were so limited we'd just be running into trees all the time. Now our fitness function is spread across two, completely unrelated goals - suddenly, it becomes much more attractive (and simpler) to come close to apprehending reality accurately, thereby killing two birds with one stone. It only gets worse as the number of goals we add to our fitness function for perception increases.
Furthermore: the space of "goals" is itself a function of the genetic diversity in your population. A species with a lot of spare genetic diversity lying around will be able to refine traits with selection much more efficiently. This means we can develop all sorts of wonderful toys (like a face-matcher) that can augment our perception of reality.
Of course, in the end, we're just modeling reality, we can't Know it in some Buddhist sense; but there is good reason to believe that perception should lean heavily towards a simple objective representation of reality, and that fitness is not such a close rein on it all the time.
This is a very nice argument!
Our senses are still only tuned in to detect portions of "reality" that are relevant to life on earth. For example, our eyes detect the band of EM radiation most useful during daytime on Earth. But even though are eyes are narrow band and highly non-linear sensors, they (+our other equally flawed senses) have served us pretty well as far as understanding the true nature of EM waves.
I guess my point is that our senses still aren't evolving to detect reality in some sort of true pure mathematical sense.
Quite happy with my own web page/blog. Pages hover at around 10kb, 30kb if I include some images. I think the page size can be attributed a lot to there being no JS except for GA.
I have taken a lot of inspiration from http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
Of course the size will differ depending on the site's purpose, but I feel like most web pages could stand to loose a lot of weight.
EDIT: I have a guide to setup a similar blog/site here[0]
"You're a fucking moron if you use default browser styles."
- Eleanor Roosevelt
gradi3nt commented on Machine Learning Meets Economics, Part 2 blog.mldb.ai/blog/posts/2... · Posted by u/nicolaskruchten
So the Sell/Check/Recycle model only requires 33% of the labor compared to the Check only model. The author suggests that this means tripling production would be possible, but that depends on QA being the factories bottleneck. If QA isn't the bottleneck, than you might as well fire 2/3 of Quinn's QA workers. Hooray, the computer didn't take my job, but it took the jobs of the guy to my right and the gal to my left.
gradi3nt commented on Google says self-driving car hits municipal bus in minor crash reuters.com/article/googl... · Posted by u/sajal83
gradi3nt commented on A number that fascinates physicists cosmosmagazine.com/mathem... · Posted by u/Hooke
The most fascinating part about alpha to me is the implication that it isn't actually constant, and varies over time and/or distance. I once read a suggestion that perhaps the observed universe is simply the portion of the greater universe where alpha has a value that lets things like stars, planets, and life exist.
Physics experiments have ruled theories like this out. They can put a very very small upper bound on how much the constants can change over a volume the size of the universe, and over the lifetime of the universe.
gradi3nt commented on A number that fascinates physicists cosmosmagazine.com/mathem... · Posted by u/Hooke