I view modern AI as a combination of things that are too early and too late - data science hasn't changed much since the 1990s, but people have a misconception that there is still a lot more to do in data science because of the undeserved excitement around deep learning.
Readit Newsjakecrouch commented on Desperate for Data Scientists spectrum.ieee.org/view-fr... · Posted by u/charlysl
Overal taxation in the U.S. is low compared to other OECD countries [1]. We, as a nation, decided that low taxes was the goal. As a result infrastructure is poor, toll roads are increasing, privatization of prisons, intelligence gathering, war, etc. are rising too. Yet Americans falsely believe they are overtaxed. The situation is easy to fix in economic terms but not in political terms. The road to an Ayn Randian paradise in which everyone fends for themselves will lead us to ruin.
Corporations have largely shunted the responsibility for retirement savings onto individual workers. Now said workers have no pensions and have uncertain retirements. Instead of asking why they have no pensions they seek to equalize status by falsely believing we can't afford any sort of pension.
As a nation we need to seriously rethink the role and purpose of government and how taxation is a part of the proper functioning of government.
[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxe...
Raising taxes is not the only way to improve public infrastructure. One can also lower the trade deficits, improve the technology the government uses, and legislate away some of the problems (jails would be less full if drug offenses didn't carry such harsh penalties). Taxation should only be tried when nothing else has worked. With 50% marginal income tax rates in many states, the US leans much more towards the communist than Randian side of the spectrum as it is.
jakecrouch commented on The Theory of Interstellar Trade fermatslibrary.com/s/the-... · Posted by u/alokrai
Interstellar travel will consist of information travelling at the speed of light. Pretty much nothing else is practical.
The real problem is bootstrapping it. Because weight is so incredibly expensive to send interstellar, the only thing that could work is sending a nanorobot with an ability to self-replicate and build a receiver and a factory once it arrives.
Then information is sent to the factory, which proceeds to bootstrap a civilization.
> Interstellar travel will consist of information travelling at the speed of light. Pretty much nothing else is practical.
What's your reasoning for this? You would only have to accelerate at 1g for 3 years to hit 99.5% of the speed of light. You can use an electromagnetic shield for dust. It seems conceivable that this will be possible eventually, even if warp drives are not possible.
> But having good social skills confers life-long benefits. So, don't write them off. Get good at making a good first impression, being funny (if possible... this author still working on it...), speaking publicly.
I would be careful with this point. Young people who don't have great social skills already tend to feel that they are somehow missing out on something important. But those who have good social skills in our culture will have a hard time forming new and unique ideas, and will often get talked into believing big, fundamental ideas that are wrong or crazy. I'd compare it to being a smoker in the 1960s. In exchange for being cooler, you suffer irreducible risk, that is made more dangerous by the fact that few people realize it's there. Until our culture changes, it's probably better to encourage people to learn about human nature than about "social skills".
While this is a cool result, I wonder if the focus on games rather than real-world tasks is a mistake. It was a sign of past AI hype cycles when researchers focused their attention on artificial worlds - SHRLDU in 1970, Deep Blue for chess in the late 1990s. We may look back in retrospect and say that the attention Deepmind got for winning Go signaled a similar peak. The problem is that it's too hard to measure progress when your results don't have economic importance. It's more clear that the progress in image processing was important because it resulted in self-driving cars.
jakecrouch commented on ‘A Powerful Signal of Recessions’ Has Wall Street’s Attention nytimes.com/2018/06/25/bu... · Posted by u/digital55
One explanation of the inflation of the public and private markets in the US is that the Chinese are in the middle of a massive debt bubble, anyone with cash there has nothing good to do with it, so they've been willing to invest in the US at almost any price.
jakecrouch commented on Dealing with Hard Problems (2015) artofproblemsolving.com/a... · Posted by u/mkagenius
How do you deal with being the company's Cassandra (I am in that predicament at the moment) ?
It's nowhere near as bad or pervasive as the competition to get into student debt. But I'm not really sure what psychotherapy would work. Maybe convince people to read about mimetic theory.
jakecrouch commented on Dealing with Hard Problems (2015) artofproblemsolving.com/a... · Posted by u/mkagenius
It's worth noting that this basically gives you competitive tips - how to be more effective at solving a problem after it's been given to you. I think it's much more valuable to be good at recognizing important problems that others don't believe are important.
jakecrouch commented on Ctrl-labs’ armband lets you control computer cursors with your mind venturebeat.com/2018/06/1... · Posted by u/sahin
I believe that their problem will be finding the small group of users that derive enormous value from it. When you really dig into all the applications they've suggested, they don't quite make sense.
jakecrouch commented on Tesla short sellers $2B in the red for June as shares soar reuters.com/article/us-te... · Posted by u/antman
I shorted (a very small amount) from about $320 down to about $270. That's when Elon had his very standoffish and defiant earnings call. After that I exited at a profit because I didn't think the downward reaction was severe enough.
People were asking legitimate questions about orders and finances and he told them to shut up, while directly insulting their intelligence. That was an extremely bad sign to me. When I saw that even after that, there was still support in the $270s, I declared the market too bullish for my liking and was no longer comfortable being short.
As far as I'm concerned TSLA has to turn a profit in the next couple of quarters or they're just not going to be able to be competitive enough with the additional financing they're going to require. Elon promises they won't need to raise capital. If he's right, great. But I'm not betting on it one way or the other.
The book "The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse" tells the stories of companies that suddenly collapsed due to hidden issues, like Enron and Worldcom. Tesla fits every sign: larger-than-life CEO with massive executive turnover, board of directors very deferential to the CEO, conflicts of interest (Solarcity acquistion), "innovation like no other", attempts to silence criticism, pressure to maintain numbers (Model 3 production and resulting problems with factory workers, firing employees and contractors to reach profitability).
I find the fact that they have an executive departure rate on par with what Enron and Valeant had most concerning - when large numbers of senior people don't vest their stock grants, it's normally because they know there's very something wrong that's not yet public.
It's especially suggestive that the VP of finance and chief accounting officer left in March, at the same time as the Fremont factory was put up for collateral and a "special purpose entity" was created to hold $546m in car sales, presumably to make the company appear more creditworthy.