2023-05-01 Vadim Kravcenko
But it is important to capture how long something could take if things go poorly.
Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology
Visualizations of low dimension artificial neural networks transforming the input into a representation that can be separated by a line with the different classes of data on each side.
Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology
2014-04-06 Christopher Olah
https://colah.github.io/posts/2014-03-NN-Manifolds-Topology/
One common behavior seen in “mature” software engineers
2023-02-06 Steven Luu
“mature” engineers … go beyond “just” patching these problems. They take the extra step to make sure the next person won’t have to spend the same level of energy fixing the same issue, or eliminate the problem class altogether for their team.
Password advice
There have been news stories about how the Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of the Interior found weak passwords in the Department of Interior’s Active Directory accounts:
- Passwords Are Terrible (Surprising No One)
- A fifth of passwords used by federal agency cracked in security audit
- A government watchdog spent $15,000 to crack a federal agency’s passwords in minutes/
The OIG report:
P@s$w0rds at the U.S. Department of the Interior: Easily Cracked Passwords, Lack of Multifactor Authentication, and Other Failures Put Critical DOI Systems at Risk
It has password advice on page 8:
NIST SP 800–63 recommends using passphrases instead of passwords …
Password vs. Passphrase Examples
Password = 5pr1ng*Ish3re
Passphrase = DinosaurLetterTrailChance
I believe the passphase words have to be chosen randomly from a large word list to be effective, but it is easier to remember than a complex password.
Geoffrey Hinton’s Forward-Forward Algorithm Charts a New Path for Neural Networks
2022-12-08 by Synced
there is increasing interest in whether the biological brain follows backpropagation or, as Hinton asks, whether it has some other way of getting the gradients needed to adjust the weights on its connections. In this regard, Hinton proposes the FF [Forward-Forward] algorithm as an alternative to backpropagation for neural network learning.
…
It aims to replace the forward and backward passes of backpropagation with two forward passes: a positive pass that operates on real data and adjusts weights “to improve the goodness in every hidden layer,” and a negative pass that operates on externally supplied or model-generated “negative data” and adjusts weights to deteriorate the goodness.
The Forward-Forward Algorithm: Some Preliminary
Investigations by Geoffrey Hinton
https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/FFA13.pdf
Using the Forward-Forward Algorithm for Image Classification
Includes sample Python code using the Keras Python library.
https://keras.io/examples/vision/forwardforward/
Ryan Reynolds reveals the No. 1 skill that’s helped him succeed: ‘It really changed my life’
2022-10-13 Morgan Smith
“We live in a world that’s increasingly gamified, and I think we have an instinct to win, crush and kill,” he said. “But if you can disengage or disarm that instinct for a second and replace it with seeking to learn about somebody instead, that, as a leadership quality, for me, has quite literally changed every aspect of my life.”
A Thought on the Lovelace Test
The Lovelace test demands of a computing machine that it not only produce an artifact that is by conventional standards amazing, but it leaves everyone looking at it
stupefied as to how it does what it does: including in this stupefaction the creators and designers of the machine.
– Selmer Bingsjord [1]
An artificial agent, designed by a human, passes the [Lovelace] test only if it originates a “program” that it was not engineered to produce. The outputting of the new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can’t be a hardware fluke, and it must be the result of processes the artificial agent can reproduce. Now here’s the kicker: The agent’s designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program. [2]
My thought is if God made humans, can a human use creativity to make an artifact, so that God can’t explain how it was made?
[1]
Artificial Intelligence: Will Machines Take Over? (Science Uprising, Ep. 10)
2022-09-21 YouTube channel: “Discovery Science”
https://youtu.be/suuxAZbDCYE?t=362
[2]
Forget Turing, the Lovelace Test Has a Better Shot at Spotting AI
2014-07-08 Jordan Pearson
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgaany/forget-turing-the-lovelace-test-has-a-better-shot-at-spotting-ai
How to pack a stereo signal in one record groove
2012-06-10 Ulrich Sourisseau
Enlightening animations of how phonographs play back stereo sound.
https://www.vinylrecorder.com/stereo.html
Discovered from https://kottke.org/14/11/microscopic-photo-of-vinyl-record-grooves
DEEP DIVE: The Covid “Fudge Factor”
2022-08-30 Maxim Lott
Instead of trusting governments to correctly classify and report Covid deaths, take total deaths (all deaths from all causes, not just from Covid) in 2020/2021 and compare that to total death pre-Covid, in 2018/2019.1
The difference is the “excess mortality.”
https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/the-covid-fudge-factor
Discovered from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32649350
Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened
2022-07-26 liam_on_linux
because Microsoft was threatening to sue all the Linux vendors shipping Windows 95-like desktops