JamilD

Not exclusively. There has been a lot of conversation about ending “chain migration”, which is legal migration based on family connections, as well as eliminating the diversity visa.

Today’s immigration talks do center around illegal immigration, but it’s wrong to say that occupies it “almost entirely”.

Exactly. The main downside to plastic bags is not the carbon emissions or landfill contributions, it’s just what the OP said: ocean plastic and street litter. Each factor isn’t equally weighted.

Ornamental features are not obsolete. Many animals are selected for their ornamental features, which may act as heuristics for fitness (both for the opposite sex in reproduction and for the same sex in combat/competitiveness). I know not all of the book is still considered wholly accurate, but Dawkins describes this at length in The Selfish Gene.

> Ever since Neolithic times, people have kept the average time spent per day for travel the same, even though the distance may increase due to the advancements in the means of transportation.

I wonder how they deduced this. There isn’t a citation, and it seems pretty extraordinary to be able to figure out the mean travel time of people in the Neolithic era.

Or the extinction of the California grizzly within 75 years of gold being discovered. It’s a common pattern — maybe the issue isn’t with the game…

When does the author claim this? He says the probability could potentially rise, and doesn’t make any claim as to the actual value of that probability. Just that it could increase instead of decrease due to some factors others haven’t considered. I think it’s one thing to say “the value x could increase instead of decrease” vs “I claim that x is y”

Brandolini's Law: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

In Waymo’s most recently reported month, November 2017, they reported over 30,000 miles driven with only a single disengagement. It’s hard to dispute that they’re years ahead of the competition at this point.

I get way more time in parks and nature in San Francisco than I did when living in suburban North San Jose or Sunnyvale. The suburbs were asphalt nightmares with few trees and no parks within walking distance. In SF I can easily get lost in green space and fresh ocean air.

MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM) YouTube channel is a gold mine of interesting videos at the intersection of ML, neuroscience, and cognitive science. It’s definitely worth checking out.

> It is an approach that has proven to be surprisingly effective. According to a study by researchers at the University of Tokyo published in the Journal of Affective Disorders in 2013, data analyzed over a 10-year period shows an 84 percent decline in the number of suicide attempts at stations where blue lights are installed.

It’s amazing how subtle nudges can have make such a difference.

The Milpitas and Berryessa stations are being built by VTA, not BART like Warm Springs. They're already ahead of schedule and under budget; the original timeline was for them to open in Spring 2018.

The challenges of "messy politics" and rigid habits of existing carbon emitters pale in comparison to reactive solutions.

For example, it'd be far, far cheaper to forcibly take over the world and shut down every carbon emitting machine than to find another planet and terraform it.

Surely we're collectively smart enough to find a global solution to this in the near future, given that our resources are appropriately allocated.

Patrick Winston is a great lecturer -- and it's worth it to do the whole 6.034 course if you have the time. A lot of the topics he goes over are considered "out of style" now, but sometimes old-school AI algorithms find their use in new places [0]…

[0] https://blog.openai.com/evolution-strategies/

The analogy is (of course) imperfect. There's an element of risk and stochasticity in climbing the hill; you might fail, or you might realize you're actually doing the wrong thing.

If you stay at the bank, or at a nice job, you're almost guaranteed to continue that gradient ascent. It's not the case with a startup; it's not as simple as deciding to do it, having to deal with a local minimum, and then continuing upwards.

Many want to be at the top of the hill. Few want to take the risk of actually climbing it.

Regardless of what you think of Uber, it seems like a no-brainer for small towns to subsidize distributed, on-demand shuttles rather than run a public transit system.

We need to see more suburbs do things like this for last-mile transit too.

“I couldn’t believe it,” recalls Peggy Udden, an executive secretary at MIT. “Not only because she was so young, but a girl.”

Hah, this comes across as incredibly patronizing.

Seriously though, whenever someone in a position of authority makes a prediction of "the next Uber", "the next Einstein", or "the next Silicon Valley", I am instantly extremely skeptical.

I find that in cities near the border, Canadian and US coins are interchangeable and usually accepted at par. In Toronto there are a fair amount of US coins in circulation, and I've never had an issue using them here.

Helps that each of our coins are almost exactly the same size and weight for all common denominations.

JetBlue codeshares with Emirates, who flies to Dubai. JetBlue is a relatively small, mostly domestic airline without any widebody planes.

American doesn't fly to any Middle Eastern cities but they partner with both Etihad and Qatar, who do.

That was my first thought too. After reading the document, it's pretty clear he acted with intent. He visited websites to figure out how to make images that trigger seizures, clearly created the gif for maximum impact and chance of a seizure, which he knows could be fatal. It was planned and well thought out.

I'd argue that criticizing a new President for taking bad policies even further isn't misguided.

I'm convinced this ban is motivated by a protectionist desire from the US-based airlines, to dissuade business travelers from flying on Middle Eastern airlines like Emirates and Qatar, which necessarily transit through countries like the UAE.

If you're someone who flies for work, there's no way you're going to take a flight where you can't use your laptop.

I couldn't see any info about the founders or their company on the website, but it looks like the company is Tizeti Network Services, founded by Kendall Ananyi and Ifeanyi Okonkwo: https://www.tizeti.com/

That's in line with the question that was asked: "The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?"

Which has an implicit assumption that happiness = living your "best possible life".

There are definitely people in Africa, Latin America, etc, who recognize they may have better prospects elsewhere, but if they're content with where they are… isn't that happiness too?

I hear a lot of complaints about SF being too tech-centric and monocultural. This is only true if you segregate yourself from the SF natives and the vibrant, diverse community that's existed before the tech booms and busts of the past two decades.

It's easy to feel like it's just a tech bubble -- there's not much interaction outside of it. But if you make an effort to step outside the tech-centric environment, it can be extremely rewarding.

Spotify has partnered with telecoms, newspapers, and others to provide bundled subscriptions -- inflating their "paid" subscriber amount.

A good chunk of those 50m aren't paying $10/mo; they've expanded their partnerships (in part) to inflate that number.

It's interesting that a lot of added constraints mirror "real-world" scenarios. We don't have an intrinsic global co-ordinate system, and brevity/laziness is generally rewarded (which results in Zipf's Law in natural language).

You don't need to focus on just one side or the other. AlphaGo wasn't made by just hacking together a couple neural nets, it built on heuristic search, MCTS, and the "old-school" AI.

I agree that basic statistics + Bishop's book is a great way to start getting into machine learning -- but AI is a much broader field than that.

Firstly, I don't think you can dive straight into coding without understanding the fundamentals. AI is such a broad and rich field, and there's a lot you need to know before you start.

It also depends on what you're going to focus on. Are you looking to implement a game-playing agent? An object recognition algorithm? More of a logic focus?

If you just want Deep Learning and statistical methods, then Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning is a good start. Otherwise, Russel and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence or Patrick Winston's similarly titled book are great starting points. For more big-picture stuff,

Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind is great, and Hofstader's Gödel, Escher, Bach is a classic too. Both are a lot less practical though, which seems to be what you're looking for.

And if your bot is sufficiently spammy, it could end up diluting your own authority!