pjdorrell

This is a bit like the beat "quantization" options in music apps, where you tidy up the raw user input. The best result comes when you choose not 100% quantized.

The Pix app needs a slider so you can choose how much stabilisation you want on the target part of the image.

Some the examples given in the article are about creativity in relation to art forms intended for human consumption.

If I try to program a robot to create art that humans will appreciate, my robot has the disadvantage of not having immediate access to a human response to the art in question, because my robot isn't a human.

Whereas a human artist painting a picture can immediately and continuously judge the artistic quality of his or her efforts so far.

My own theory of language acquisition and music: http://whatismusic.info/blog/LanguageDisplacementAndTheState....

I don't assume any pre-existing "universal grammar".

What I do assume is a pre-existing classification of sounds into language and non-language. This hypothesis is somewhat confirmed by the recent results as described at http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273%2815%2901071-... (and see http://whatismusic.info/blog/IPredictedTheExistenceOfCompone...).

My own attempt to develop "manifestos" for the web is based on a concept of "Propositional Writing".

The major characteristic of Propositional Writing, vs "normal" writing, is that the headlines are the primary content, and the paragraphs are secondary.

In "normal" writing, the content is in the paragraphs, and the headlines are a secondary annotation.

http://thinkinghard.com/propositional/index.html.

The reason for this type of password security theatre is that it maintains the fantasy world of purely human password management:

1. Every password only ever exists inside the brain of the user, or inside the password entry field in the UI of the application at the time of login.

Unfortunately there are additional requirements, which make it impossible for anyone who is not superhuman to satisfy the first requirement:

2. All passwords should be unique across applications (or websites)

3. All passwords are long and random enough that they cannot be guessed by password-cracking software in a reasonable amount of time.

4. There is an ever-growing list of applications and websites that require passwords.

One hypothesis is that music has evolved to be "difficult" to compose, because too much really good music would be bad for us: http://whatismusic.info/blog/OnTheDifficultyOfMusic.html

Quote: "We don't want to bloat your apps with useless library code. However, there are exceptions to this."

(I think the second sentence was intended to refer to the sentence that appeared before the two sentences that I've quoted:

https://facebook.github.io/react/contributing/design-princip... )

Also, as a bearded programmer, can you please explain the benefits of going to GPLv3 instead of GPLv2?

I take this opportunity to re-advertise my own alternative approach to developing a scientific theory of music: http://whatismusic.info/.

Every now and then someone posts some humorous easily-digestible technical content to Hacker News and commenters say stuff like "All mathematics/science/software development textbooks should be written this way", and some commenters throw out a few similar links, and the story slowly drops down the HN front page, as stories do, and then it's mostly forgotten, until the next one comes along.

If education matters, and if human intelligence augmentation matters, then we should be researching how to make difficult technical material more easily digestible, for example by enhancing it with an appropriate level of humour.

Millions of dollars are being spent on making machines more intelligent (or is it billions?). Someone should be spending some time, money and effort on making people smarter.

Also, compared to other possible human intelligence augmentation technologies, writing textbooks in a more humorous style is less intrusive than taking "smart pills" or placing electrodes inside your brain.

I described a similar theory of neuronal agency in 2005: http://thinkinghard.com/blog/HowDoesANeuronKnowWhatToDo.html.

One group of people will always want to access the open web on a large screen via a web browser running on a general purpose computer: software developers.

If the web "dies", then the non-web will also die, or at least it won't be very healthy, because the developers won't have the infrastructure they need to efficiently develop the required non-web software.

FTSE 100 closes above pre-Brexit-referendum-result level

My own attempt to deal with this issue (2013): http://thinkinghard.com/blog/UniqueFactorisation.html

In Quantum Field Theory, the concept of "the same water molecule" is not a well-defined concept, because of wave-function symmetry. (The only water molecules that are fully distinguishable are those where the isotopes of hydrogen or oxygen are different.)

It's a _very_ particular environment, because it includes RNA replicase, which is a complex protein.

Yeah, items 1, 3, 8, 9 and 10 are somewhat nonsensical (3 might need geometry, but it would be more about physics).

This article is like someone went to the "List of Fallacies" page in Wikipedia and turned it into an essay about how the brain is not an information processing system.

A related question (I think), is what counts as "impossible"?

According to quantum mechanics, anything that is not prohibited by a conservation law is possible, with some non-zero probability.

So we have to pragmatically redefine "impossible" to mean "the probability is so small that it won't happen".

But then where do we draw the line between "too small" and "not too small"?

(We can also qualify "won't happen" by saying "cannot have happened in the history of the observable universe", and take into account an upper bound on the number of "events" that can ever happen in the history of the observable universe, eg ~ 2^380. So, for example, an event with probability 2^-500 on one occasion has probability < 2^-120 of ever having happened that we could know about.)

One thing I learned from watching the transit on a YouTube livestream of someone else's telescope view (because New Zealand was in the no-see zone) is that YouTube livestreams have live commenting that works just as good or better than Periscope, and I was chatting with the owner of the telescope.

The only downside is the lack of easy discovery for current livestreams (if there's no special event to search for that people would be livestreaming), which I guess is what YouTube Connect will be all about.

Much of the charm of Periscope is the ability to watch different people doing and saying random stuff.

I haven't yet watched a Facebook live video. Possibly this is because none of my Facebook "friends" has ever made a live video, or perhaps I don't sit on my Facebook news feed enough to notice if one of them did. Periscope, by contrast, shows you live videos on its default screen, and _nothing else_.

A lot of Periscope content is very disposable. The value lies in the live-ness of the videos. Replays can be interesting, but they are secondary. Live video is more "real", because it can't be edited or faked (at least not very easily, and it's impossible to fake live responses to viewers' comments).

If I could choose just one improvement to make to Periscope, it would be to give the user some control over the parameters of the algorithm that determines visibility of new videos on the main list, for example to give priority to specified hashtags. The current algorithm, whatever it is, tends to favour youth over age, probably as a function of the normal human reaction to physical attractiveness (many viewers will continue to watch a new video simply because they like looking at the broadcaster's face, and this will affect the algorithm's decision to highlight that video in the main list for other users of the app).

He estimates f_l, the probability of life arising in a habitable planet, as 0.1.

Abiogenesis has never been observed to occur independently of its presumed occurrence when life started on Earth.

Given the current state of scientific knowledge on this topic, the only certain lower bound on this number is the probability of molecules in a suitable "organic soup" arranging themselves into a self-contained bacterium. And that probability is a _very_ small number.

If f_l is _very_ small, then there is no need to be pessimistic about our own long-term survival. We see no advanced alien civilisations, because there is no other life out there of any kind - the rest of the observable universe is sterile.

When human composers attempt to compose original music, they have immediate access to their own subjective judgement of the quality of the music.

Until such time as we discover an algorithm that replicates human taste in music, any AI-based approach to composing music will fail because it will not have any feedback about the quality of the music.

In the context of Many Worlds, a "universe" is an approximately classical wave function, where the degree of approximation is limited by the uncertainty principle.

Even if you start with an approximately classical wave function, it may evolve into a state where it is no longer approximately classical. However, it might now be equal to the sum of _two_ approximately classical wave functions. Ie, two "universes".

So, the universal wave function hasn't split, but the attempt to represent that wave function by approximately classical wave functions _has_ split.

This story takes place in the USA, one of the world's most litigous countries. Surely someone can be sued for this.

One question I would like to ask, for each project, is:

Will all journal publications from the project be published as Open Access Science?

For every project, this question should be answered up-front.

Trying to read this article from the web page reminds me of the time I was at school, and we had a speech competition, and one guy gave a speech about how to give a speech, which unfortunately was not a very good speech.

There is a story within the story here: this article was not "fact-checked" by any person who has ever actually used SQL while developing software.

To quote: 'This is because the word “null” is often inserted into database fields to indicate that there is no data there.'

The story is that companies can't be bothered to hire programmers who are clever enough to know that null and "null" are not the same thing.

The story within the story is that news websites can't be bothered to get their technical stories proof-read by people who actually know the technicalities.

People should refuse to take part in studies that will not be published as open science.

Plan A: The material is difficult, so present it very slowly and carefully.

Plan B: To avoid boredom, present the material as quickly and densely as possible, with lots of constantly changing detail, with simultaneous visual, audio and even some light background music.

These videos are a bit like "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" meets "Khan Academy".

Some people will like them, and some won't. I like them.