Scotland, 56 degrees north - I was able to see the aurora through occasional gaps in fast moving clouds around 0400hrs. Red, easily visible to the naked eye.
2,869 karma · joined August 4, 2015
As music recommendation was already being done, I developed MORSE, short for MOvie Recommendation SystEm, shortly after Ringo appeared. Like Ringo and Firefly, it was a collaborative filtering system, i.e. it worked by comparing how similar your tastes were to the tastes of other users, and took no account of other information (e.g. genre, director, cast). As it was a purely statistical algorithm, I didn't call it, or other collaborative filtering systems, AI. It was different to symbolic AI (which I was previously working on, in Prolog and Common Lisp), didn't use neural networks, and wasn't Nouvelle AI (actually the oldest approach to AI) either. I wrote it in C (it had to run fast and was just processing numbers) and used CGI (Common Gateway Interface) to collect data and give recommendations on the WWW.
In a nutshell, to predict the rating for a film a user hasn't seen yet, it plotted the ratings given by other users for that film against how their ratings correlated with the the user, found the best-fitting straight like through them and extrapolated it, estimating the rating of a hypothetical user whose tastes exactly matched the user for the film. It also calculated the error on this, which it took into account when giving recommendations. Other collaborative filtering systems used simpler algorithms which ignored the ratings of users whose tastes were different. When I used those simpler algorithms on the same data, recommendation accuracy got worse.
MORSE was released on the BT Labs' web site in 1995. It survived a few years there, but was later taken off the server. As BT Weren't going further with it, I asked if the source code could be released, This was agreed, but it wasn't on any machine, and they couldn't find the backup tape. The algorithm is described in detail here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/morse/morse.pdf and more general information is here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/morse/MORSE.html
Where do you get that information from? According to the CIA, it's 100% (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/archives/2023/f...). North Korea Info (https://www.northkoreainfo.com/why-does-north-korea-have-a-h...) gives a slightly lower estimate of 97%-99%.
That's why I wrote, "A publisher had to ensure that the material in the magazines was legal to print." Web sites should also follow the laws of the countries where they are based, but not be required to follow other countries' laws. In the specific case here, a UK body is trying to collect daily fines from a US based web site (4chan.org) with no physical UK presence.
> An ISP doesn't do that.
For over a decade, they have been blocking traffic to/from web sites deemed unsuitable for children, by default. Which should make people wonder what this adult verification is actually for.
On the internet, people don't get porn videos directly from pornographic web sites, just as in the past they didn't buy porn directly from the publishers. The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops. So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs. And British ISPs are within the UK's jurisdiction.
And before anyone points out that there are workarounds that children could use to bypass controls, this was also the case with printed magazines.
On his web page, he writes: > Lisp's cons forces programer (sic) to think of list in a low-level nested of 2-item construction, with explicit functions like “cddr”, “cadaar” etc, and even a special notation “(A . B)”.
Except, most of the time, it doesn't. For example, I think (a b c) is a list of three elements. If I want c, I call (third '(a b c)), not (caddr '(a b c)). I know it's stored as (a . (b . (c . NIL))) and that third is just an alias for caddr, but I'm not forced to think that way.
So why not just think in terms of lists, which can be nested, rather than cons-cells, which are only rarely used for anything other than to construct lists? The cons function itself would still be needed, as adding a value to a list without modifying the original list is extremely useful. Or you could think in terms of the more abstract data structures (parse trees, Lisp functions, etc.) you construct from lists.
When learning and using a language, it's important to think in that language.
Saying that they're a fundamental problem in Lisp is like saying that objects are a fundamental problem in Smalltalk or that arrays are a fundamental problem in APL.
If Xah doesn't like cons cells, there are other languages he can use instead. Lisp (as well as Prolog, Haskell, ML, etc.) programmers won't be persuaded to abandon cons cells or lists as they find them extremely useful.
I'm not familiar with SBERT, or with modern statistical NLP in general, but SBERT works on sentences, and there are no obvious sentence delimiters in the Voynich Manuscript (only word and paragraph delimiters). One concern I have is "Strips common suffixes from Voynich words". Words in the Voynich Manuscript appear to be prefix + suffix, so as prefixes are quite short, you've lost roughly half the information before commencing your analysis.
You might want to verify that your method works for meaningful text in a natural language, and also for meaningless gibberish (encrypted text is somewhere in between, with simpler encryption methods closer to natural language and more complex ones to meaningless gibberish). Gordon Rugg, Torsten Timm, and myself have produced text which closely resembles the Voynich Manuscript by different methods. Mine is here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/generated-voynich-manuscript.h... and the equivalent EVA is here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/generated-voynich-manuscript.t...
It also applies to a range of natural phenomena, e.g. lunar craters and earthquakes: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6241/2019sp/readings/Ne...
So the fact that word frequencies in the Voynich Manuscript follow Zipf's law doesn't prove it's written in a natural language.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_British , "In the 2021 Census, the White British group numbered 44,355,044 or 74.4% of the population of England and Wales." In Scotland the percentage is 87.1%.
You might be referring to the percentage of recent births to non White British parents, which is a different thing. (And, if someone's parents are, say, Polish, but they're born in the UK, surely that makes them White British.)
> It's a staggering, utterly unprecedented rate of demographic change that historians will look back on with the same or greater significance as the Anglo-Saxon or Norman invasions.
Well, we mostly speak English with a lot of vocabulary from Norman French, rather than Welsh or a close relative of it as we would have done had those invasions never happened. And I don't see that changing as a result of recent immigration.
By a strict definition of writing (e.g. what we're doing now), people have only been able to write for a few thousand years, and much of the adult population was illiterate until recently. Define it widely enough (visual communication of information), and some other animals (e.g. tigers) also "write": https://animalresearcher.com/why-do-tigers-scrape-trees-at-s...
You could reasonably argue though, that we have passed on information over long periods of time orally, e.g. in epic poems, and that (as far as we know) no other animal does that.
Source code for AM: https://github.com/white-flame/am
Then it isn't UBI. By definition, you get exactly the same amount as everybody else, regardless of their income from whatever source. This means that you're always better off if you take a job.
They should be informed. There are various proposals (this one is new to me), and issues with it which are still unclear. And there's a lot of misinformation from people ideologically opposed to UBI.
For some people, UBI would replace existing benefits (examples of which might include child benefit, unemployment benefit, student grant, the non-contributory part of old age pension). That doesn't cost anything. Reduction of bureaucracy (no further need for means-testing the benefits UBI would replace) actually saves money. People already earning an income would of course pay extra taxes to fund UBI, but they would also receive it, so that would just be redistribution with no net cost. That leaves only people not seeking work, e.g. those looking after their children but not claiming any benefits.
There have been numerous pilot studies, e.g. those listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income . The problem is that opponents of UBI invariably point out that as only some people received it, and only for a limited time, that it wasn't universal, or that it took place in in some other country, or decades ago, so it doesn't apply in their country, or today.
> Show me how much UBI saves police departments, social welfare services, the health-care system,etc.
Its purpose is to ensure that everyone has their basic financial needs met, not to provide those particular government services.
No, we're not. Back in the 1950s our grandparents were eating Gros Michel bananas. Now, we're eating (by all accounts) inferior Cavendish bananas.
https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/history-of-the-gros-m...
The words for bridge split neatly into language subfamilies. The only exception appears to be Welsh.
Nor does it prove cultural learning, as various physical phenomema also follow Zipf's law: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6241/2019sp/readings/Ne...