elsehow

is everything logged these days?

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 20:37:09 -0600

Check back throughout the day for the latests developments in Bitcoin.

Tuesday, Apr 26th, 2011

Security alert: Liberty Reserve
Transactions made using Liberty Reserve causes information, including IP address, to be shared with Amazon AWS and visits are tracked using Google Analytics. LR…

augmented reality for safer driving.

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 13:18:51 -0600

augmented reality for safer driving.

"Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion..."

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:03:00 -0600

“Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

- Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950

http://nice, but "plus"/"plussed" is more likely to catch on

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:17:00 -0600

http://nice, but "plus"/"plussed" is more likely to catch on

i’ll devote my life to developing software that can solve the original Myst game with (1) no...

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:23:43 -0600

i’ll devote my life to developing software that can solve the original Myst game with (1) no human interference (2) no using the little hints from the CD-ROM booklet.

newsflick: Nuclear Reactors in California: BY ANDY SINGER

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 09:51:57 -0600

newsflick:

Nuclear Reactors in California: BY ANDY SINGER

“It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint...

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:58:59 -0600

“It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though.” —satoshi nakamoto

esperiments

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 17:36:40 -0600

put a bag of green tea over a cup and filter espresso through it. resulting product has a nice flavor and some theanine.

"Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was..."

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 02:32:00 -0600

“

Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends’ dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage. Sometimes he would actually manage to get it running and then he would take us for a spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild youthful exhiliration on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and backfiring around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust of rusty Gremlins and Pintos, but in his own mind he was Dustin Hoffman tooling across the Bay Bridge with the wind in his hair.

In retrospect, this was telling me two things about people’s relationship to technology. One was that romance and image go a long way towards shaping their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have a lot of spare time on your hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on those grounds, imagines him- or herself to be a member of an oppressed minority group.

The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver’s hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere—about as interesting as peering over someone’s shoulder while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience. For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn’t do unassisted.

[…]

The introduction of the Mac triggered a sort of holy war in the computer world. Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made computers more human-centered and therefore accessible to the masses, leading us toward an unprecedented revolution in human society, or an insulting bit of audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay Area hacker types that stripped computers of their power and flexibility and turned the noble and serious work of computing into a childish video game?

”

- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning, There Was the Command Line, 1999.

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot..."

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:04:39 -0600

““The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.””

- Alvin Toffler, Rethinking the 21st Century.

by my buddy soundsofsilvazws. somewhere in between math rock and...

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:16:39 -0600

by my buddy soundsofsilvazws. somewhere in between math rock and dirty folk.

way to go, silva.

List of lists of lists - Wikipedia

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:41:41 -0600

List of lists of lists - Wikipedia:

draxiom:

This is exactly what it sounds like, and yes it does actually contain itself.

"Everyone has a right to be proud of where they’re from …. and Angelenos are no exception. The real..."

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 01:28:12 -0600

“Everyone has a right to be proud of where they’re from …. and Angelenos are no exception. The real daily life and complex history of Los Angeles has so little to do with crotch-flashing starlets and freeway rage shootings. It’s more about canyon hikes, chili cheese fries, outdoor movies, crazy museums, and all sorts of unique and interesting things you’d never expect to find.”

- Taken from Hidden LA. (via dwol)

this is article is very misinformed all up in the nytimes

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 02:27:00 -0600

this is article is very misinformed all up in the nytimes:

so, the opening several grafs on rule-following vs. rule-breaking are a pretty tiresome rhetorical handwave. but what the rhetorical hand ends up settling on a “confused idea”:

(1) humans are able to break rules by analyzing their importance in context!
(2) computers are not able to break rules because they are unable to process context the way we are!

THE OBVIOUS CONCLUSION
(3) humans, with context as an input, may generate rules that govern other rules, abstracting outward until they can achieve output that is “non-obvious” given an input due to being passed through multiple levels of abstraction!

FISH’S CONCLUSION
(3) humans are therefore better than machines; machines will never be able to simulate this ability!

i’m not sure where fish is getting this idea from.* perhaps he believes that humans are “analog”? that we have an infinite informational density? and that this infinity makes us superior to the digital machines, for which all data are on some level discrete?

but humans are not analog. there are a finite number of action potentials in my brain; the computation must be based on finite state changes. we are digital like the machines.

there is this point:

”Watson’s builders know this; when they are interviewed they are careful to stay away from claims that their creation simulates human mental processes”

—and this is true! but that is not to say “Watson did not think.”

the thoughts Watson had were not thoughts that Fish’s brain had. or that any human brain might have. but they were still thoughts; Watson was still thinking. anything that uses abstracted rule-systems is thinking.

which ties back to Fish’s ridiculous original point: that humans break rules therefore we contain none within us. we have abstracted rules such that we can break certain ones using various heuristics.

computers can abstract rules too. they can make rules out of new rules, just like we do when we think. that’s how we play chess; that’s why the game is greater than the rules of its components; that’s why it’s so fucking hard. but it’s all still just rulesets defined by rulesets.

someday they will learn to break rules. someday they will be better at it than we are.

from april 7th, 2003. theatlantic: What It’s Like To Work For...

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:50:00 -0600

from april 7th, 2003.

theatlantic:

What It’s Like To Work For Donald Rumsfeld

if you ask Stephen Wolfram how wolfram|alpha and watson are...

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 14:38:00 -0600

if you ask Stephen Wolfram how wolfram|alpha and watson are different, he’d give you the picture above & explain why the former is the future and the latter is the workaround.

confessions of a prep school college counsellor.

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:07:00 -0600

confessions of a prep school college counsellor. :

“Part of my problem in getting on board the college frenzy was that I genuinely believed that any one of the colleges on our approved list of a hundred or so was capable of providing students with a good, even a great, education. The funny thing about teenagers is that very often the best of them, the most interesting and curious, are rather lousy high school students. They have other things on their minds than geeking out every single point on the AP U.S. history exam. They are very often readers, and preparation for elite-college admission does not allow one to be a reader; it’s far too time consuming. These “lousy” students were often among my favorites, and I never feared that they were going to lose a chance at a great education because they didn’t have the stuff of an “elite” admission. They themselves were smart. They didn’t need some Ferrari of a college nudging them along the path to a great education; they were going to get one wherever they went.”

"The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled..."

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 12:45:15 -0600

“The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.‎”

- Howard Rheingold, The virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier (1993), p. 63.

theatlantic: inothernews: Today’s Google Doodle commemorates...

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 10:14:46 -0600

theatlantic:

inothernews:

Today’s Google Doodle commemorates the 183rd birthday of sci-fi author Jules Verne… by letting you go Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.

One of our favorite paleofuturists!

"I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We’re..."

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 11:31:20 -0600

“I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.’ For ten thousand years they’ve said that. We want our Utopia now….”

- Sinclair Lewis, an American satiric novelist and social critic, became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930), and was born on this date (Feb 7) in 1885. (via canisfamiliaris)