dschiptsov

Why people are so stupid? No one would say that "Russians" wrote this or that shitpost. What they did - they developed and successfully used "innovative" techniques of producing and spreading catchy memes along with trolling and shitposting into any meaningful discussion on popular public forums. These methods nowadays are used on a "factory scale". The famous "Troll factories" were a great success.

Basically, it is a next level of jamming techniques used against western radio stations in old times - active trolling instead of passive jamming, using paid people instead of dumb noise generators.

What Russians developed is very efficient (optimized, if you wish) set of methods to manipulate the minds of idiots, to implant naive, unverified (and unquestioned by wast majority of idiots) assumptions and false premises, in forms of emotionally charged but primitive memes (textual or graphical) - "Shillary will start WW3". Fucking degenerates.

In the same way all the Russian media propaganda is organized nowadays - meme-like framed "news", tailored to the vocabulary and mentality of uneducated, primitive majority, along with marketing-like targeting. You do not have to have a PhD to do that.

What happened is that almost everyone else nowadays are re-using these simple ready-made methods. All this is nothing but virus-like meme contagion, plus applied manipulative psychology of advertising on internet scale. That's all. No KGB agents or anything like that.

How a third-world, corruption-ridden country with stagnant economy could be so powerful? It obviously wasn't. The cause is these "information viruses" (memes) spreading through human stupidity. Russians didn't invent them, of course, only used on a large scale.

wouldn't symbolic links be more appropriate?

It does. It emphasizes that this particular guide encourages use of Python3, instead of holding onto legacy, which means that the author understands programming languages basics or at lest knows which semantic unification has been done to make the language less inconsistent, hence more beautiful.

What exactly is wrong with this particular comment?)

Brexit, Trump, 86% popularity of Putin, mass media, TV shows, Javascript - what other evidences are needed?

Python3 as default dialect!

To make it positive and to amplify it (as a side-effect).

BTW, "error" is a misleading term - it communicates some fault, at least in the common sense. Distance would be much better term.

So, "squared distance" makes much more sense, because negative distance is nonsense.

In theory, one should take a look at web.py and flask first.. It will teach essentialism and minimalism (web.py) and doing the right thing in a right way (all of them and Python in general).

They should also try to find evidence of grapes is crappy wines to which a cork is too expensive.

Where on Google Maps are these vast aloe vera plantations which are required to produce these millions of liters of products? There must be hectares and hectares, visible from the outer space.

The hypothesis that natural language acquisition "restructures our memories" is promising one. We cannot recall what has been stored using a different "encoding". There are no associated labels (which is what words are) attached to earlier experiences, so "search" returns nothing, or something we mistakenly attributed to the prior-language experiences.

Well, I just got tired of hipster bullshit and memes.

There is the only one way to prove something - it is to show that there are logical truth of all the statements and implication all the way back to the starting assumptions. Students learn this in an undergrads AI class, leave alone the basics of mathematical logic.

This shit is full of gaps in logic, just a pile of memes upon memes (dark energy, my ass!) and bullshit all the way down. Just a single flaw in logic anywhere in the chain of statements is enough to throw away all the crap. A single failed assertion.

Things which are not confirmed by independently replicated experiments are beliefs not facts. Socially constructed memes. The people who speculate about unproven sets of beliefs are sectarians, not scientists.

This and similar bullshit is no different from the cosmology on the walls of Egyptian pyramids or the stories about angels pushing the planets to keep them moving on its orbits.

Life is indistinguishable from physics.

Thanks! I was too enthusiastic to emphasize that the Abelson and Sussman lectures are out of the context of Physics. Nevertheless these are no less classic than Feynman's.

While this is a true 80th level hipsterism and snowflackery, it is also a beautiful case to realize that there was reasons behind choosing Common Lisp as the primary language for AI.

The Common Lisp code is almost as easy to read as the pseudocode of the book and it is absolutely unnecessary to go through all that type clutter and fancy compositions to satisfy the type-checker. There is zero advantage in doing all this static typing acrobatics.

The AIMA supplementary Common Lisp code is definitely worth looking and it is the case study for demonstrating the advantages of dynamic typing.

BTW, AIMA python code is also very nice, short and clear but order of magnitude slower compared to the compiled native code state-of-the-art implementations of Common Lisp produce.

BBTW, Swift3 port would be really cool.

Hindus and Theravada Buddhists would laugh at this.)

Feynman gave a whole lecture on this subject - the second or third lecture of the Messenger Lectures (much better timepass than night time TV show, second only to the Wizards Lectures and the five three seasons of The X-Files).

It seems that this is an ideal case for the Less Is More principle.

That is what I failed to emphasize - it must be "just right" - not too much and not too little - optimal - slightly better than good-enough.)

Are they trying to say that exercises are good to us, until it is too much? What does not kill us makes us stronger.

Sure. Time is a mere environmentaly conditioned mental conception. No such phenomena exist. Only environmental and social conditioning. It could only be derived by an intelligent observer. No observer - no time. For a photon there is no time.

BTW, conversation laws are hinting to an illusory nature of time. Change of compound structures do exist and it is in everything we are able to observe. But the whole is unchanged, no matter what fancy theories or simulations would say.

Because most of the models are flawed or wrong.

there is 4chan for that.

> an Asperger profession

could you, please, elaborate on this meme?

And that pyramid, well, it definitely is the way how a corporate and enterprise Java software has been and still being made. Java itself is an ecosystem for creating coding factories - to parallelize the process of coding (one cannot honestly call this programming) among teams of easily replaceable, uniform (in terms of abilities) cheap workers. Every manager will tell about this ideal.

For programming look at PAIP or the lisp code supplement to AIMA - this is programming. Take a look at Plan9 - this is programming. People who have created Erlang were engaged in programming. Code that runs Google's AI is programming. This is an art, same as writing poetry, composition of music, writing symphonies or complex novels.

But there are very few slots available, because demand for programming is very low - it is still difficult and very expensive. Conveyor belt coding, on the other hand, is indeed fits the Kay's pyramid metaphor. And the result of such process is crap - everyone have seen "enterprise code" made by such sweat shops..

The crucial difference between an art and merely piling up more crap is that art means an attempts to approach an ideal, an optimum, perfection - it is, ideally, a reduction process with eventually converges to the closest possible approximation to an ideal. Something like this:

   []     ++ ys  =  ys
   (x:xs) ++ ys  =  x : xs ++ ys

While in the in the second case is just a process of production. Not in the sense of Japanese perfection of every move and detail, but in the sense a hipster produces yet another narcissistic blog post.

BTW, Asperger is this. And it is not that bad.)

Already did.

I have switched to be a guide for Tibet tours (Lhasa, Kailash-Manasarovar) and high altitude trekking and motorcycle tours in Nepal, Sikkim and Ladakh. Customers enjoyed my guided tours in Jokhang and Potala.

Better demand and much more tolerable life than in a coding sweatshop. For everything else there is literally no demand for anything except Joomla websites and Android apps outside the valley, which is already saturated.

And, of course, I have zero interest in things like React or Node.

The sad truth is that indie and small shop IT is already dead. Unless you are a young CS major in US there is no demand for programming jobs. Otherwise there will be a market, not just a few brokers like Toptal.

Perhaps, this is the case when an observer affects the observation. It appears to the instrument, created according to a model, that electrons are "like grands of sand" when they should be "fields".

But how could these "fields" in principle be observed with an instrument made out of atoms?

Yes, I am wrong here. The professor of marketing has been mentioned in the text as a collaborator in some "study".

Is that "Ayurvedic Health Coach" stuff qualifies as the substitute for majoring from MIT or Yale in Psychology or Biology?

There is no known contradiction of original Buddha's doctrine with modern evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The modern notions of Cognitive Dissonance, cognitive biases, framing effects and modern western philosophy of mind only supports Buddha's views.

The only applicable critique is that original Buddhist doctrine is too general and allows flexible interpretations, nevertheless lots of scholars would maintain that Buddha's approach is one of the earliest attempts of systematic study of the mind using an imperfect method of introspection (famous Upanishadic neti neti doctrine is, perhaps, the earliest known to us), leaving validation of the insights to everyone who wished to follow the same path.

Buddha's investigation into the nature of reality and mind, which obscures it, is qualified for philosophy - precursor of modern sciences, not a religion (there is literally nothing to be saved). Theology has been developed by various competing sects hundreds of years later.

That's gross oversimplification for western amateur audiences. His Holiness is trying to speak the language of common western consumer.

Behind our anxiety is ignorance. Period. Ignorance is described as a veil that obscures the view of what is from so-called primordial awareness or Atman, if you wish - the aspect of the whole (Brahman) in us. (The Buddha explicitly rejected the notion of Atman, but numerous later Indian (tantric) writers messed everything up). It is like continuous day-dreaming. The meaning of Awakening is literal awakening from this habitual delusional day-dreaming to what is.

Most of our fears are due to misapprehension of reality, like classic mistaking of a rope for a snake, and our attaching to (and hence the fear of losing) that illusory my self, which is nothing, but an appearance to ignorant and confused introspection.

This crude formulation is as old as Upanishads.

To be honest, the very first books - The Structure of Magic - are much better than later "practical" and manipulative stuff. The notions of "patching reality" - what we call today the Confirmation and Self-serving biases (deletion, distribution) and "framing effects" are correct in general.

Programming, or what they call "re-framing" works to some extent, by "unlearning" some wrong concepts acquired through social conditioning and biased perceptions, by re-framing (transforming) them into more closely related to actual reality. Anchoring is already crap (but use of amulets and "things of power" is exactly this). So are the supposed correlations between looking patterns and modes of thinking (while naive people (children) some times show such correlations).

The core ideas of early NLP, including re-framing, were nothing new. The prophets of old times seemingly did exactly this - they succeeded in re-framing of traditional views and beliefs.

The later "technique" stuff, is nonsense. It apparently worked because hypocrisy, manipulations, reading and use of so-called body language are as old as humanity. Again, priests of any kind are famous practitioners of such manipulative techniques. Nowadays businessmen and politicians are using similar tricks, as if we are still in ignorant middle ages.)

And meditation is? Sitting in a public place in yoga pants holding fingers in a mudra? Vacation defined as? Does vacation include visiting Buddhist countries and Indian meditation retreats? How long a vacation should be?

Hint: meditation requires a profound changes in ones assumptions about his own nature and conditioning. That's why the teaching of the Buddha has been a philosophy, not a book of asanas. Meditation is the tool to realize accuracy and correctness of Buddha's insights. To test and validate his hypothesis by yourself.

there is a good place to start: https://www.coursera.org/learn/science-of-meditation