Please don't take this the wrong way, but I'm somewhat knowledgeable about AI and machine learning, and when I heard the phrase "two tower embedding" the first thing I thought of was the tragedy on 9/11. So I'm not sure how good a slogan it is, if that was your aim at all.
Again, I agree entirely with you (yet still feel the need to respond) :-)
To some extent, who can say what exact mix of seedlings would arise if nature were left entirely to it's own devices. But one can imagine the basin of attraction for arriving at such a stable state is somewhat large (perhaps this is the crux of your point - such a basin cannot be mapped, and therefore one never knows if one is in it or not). Nevertheless - I feel able to draw a distinction between something that plausibly may have happened naturally, and, say, a vast grid of identically aged, undifferentiated pine trees. Though who knows, perhaps there is no distinction to be made - other than that of intention.
"No, in the sense that humans are actually part of these ecosystems and it is possible for us to understand these processes and work with them. And this is the point of the research posted here: planting native seedlings is superior for restoration than 'just leaving things to nature'."
I agree with what you're saying - but I think this point is slightly misleading. Planting native seedlings is exactly what nature would do - we are just accelerating nature's own process - not changing it for another process.
"but that time scale can be millennia. In the meantime, nature can wreak tons of havoc."
For sure - I suppose I'm questioning humans' ability to mitigate such havoc without causing a load of unintended consequences.
"Nature (and by that I mean ecosystems because nature is a vague) also doesn’t behave in necessarily intuitive or easily observable ways either. What might seem “obvious” at first can be very wrong."
I think I was saying a very similar thing, actually. I certainly agree with you on that.
No offense meant at all to your brother, it sounds like an interesting investigation. That said, the answer to these sorts of eco-questions always seems to be that the way nature has worked for millions of years is actually the best way (for loads of reasons we didn't know) - and if we mess with it too much, there will be some problems. This just seems kind of inevitable though. If nature's way didn't work, it wouldn't be happening. I suppose finding the reasons behind it being optimal are where the "meat" of such an investigation is. Interesting stuff.
The primary interests of business are primarily making money. When capitalism works at it's best, the innovation and exploring of new territory is the mechanism by which companies gain an edge in the market. Unfortunately there are other, less useful ways of gaining market advantage (monopolies, cartels, regulatory capture etc). It's a problem of corruption. To quote Bill Burr - "The president makes 400 grand a year. He's supposed to keep billionaires in line?"
Germany relies on so much natural gas for manufacturing (not just for energy, but as a raw material for chemical processing). At the very least though, they should build a few state of the art nuclear power plants. Their obsession with renewable energy is crippling them in this age of high natural gas prices.
1. Luckily this page isn't titled "Seven Sins of Webpage Design".
2. The sins are highly variable in their specificity and scope. They range from low level grammar problems (incorrect apostrophes) to "wordiness", which is far more abstract, and "in the eye of the beholder"
3. The last sin is a pointer to a list of other sins. In what sense is this "Seven Sins"? Feels shoehorned into a listicle (see point 1).
Yeah, the whole idea was a bit nebulous tbh. I remember the main guy I was speaking to at Acorn talking about creating an ASIC. I believe it was aimed at being some sort of early GPU. But the project never really went anywhere, anyway.
Yeah, I wrote a set of 3D demos for Acorn, to showcase the new RiscPC at Acorn World '94. There was a landscape flyover and a virtual textured talking head. All rendering was done entirely in software of course, using integer maths. I developed a type of Bresenham's Algorithm to trace the hyperbolic curves in texture UV space that translate to scanlines, when one is doing perspective correct texture mapping.
Subsequently I wrote a sample implementation of the Xerox Rooms paradigm for Acorn. It was a 3D office environment, with clickable destinations that would "teleport you" into new spaces. I'm not sure what became of this though tbh.
Next they wanted me to write a version of SGI's GL API for RiscOS, however - for whatever reason that project never really got started, so I had to go and get a proper job! :-(
I was doing 3d graphics contract work for Acorn in the mid nineties, for their RiscPC. I was given an early version of Taos to try - it was so early in development as to be essentially unusable, but it definitely existed!
“But every person has their own encyclopedia written, which grows out from each soul, composed from birth onward, hundreds of thousands of pages pressing into each other and yet there’s air between them! Like trembling leaves in a forest. A book of contradictions. What’s in there is revised by the moment; the images touch themselves up, the words flicker. A wave washes through the entire text, followed by the next wave, and the next . . .” - Tomas Transtromer.
At least the world's great religions have a track record of acting as a code of conduct that helps to build and grow societies and nations. Astrology - not so much.
Oh I like that one. Inferring personality traits based on where someone was born - "Racism". Inferring personality traits based on when someone was born - "Astrology".
Very true! Though the dividing line between purely directional, and something against something else is unclear. Every price is against something else, in some sense.
A small disagreement with the article. Statistical arbitrage is a more general principle than "reliance on mean reversion" (though that is certainly a common example of statarb). It really encompasses any useful statistical prediction that can be used to trade with.
It's interesting. I live in London UK, which some might think of as a megacity - though when I look at the biggest cities in the orient (Singapore, Shenzhen etc) London feels like Hobbiton in comparison. I suppose what you're used to becomes your "zero line", and one inevitably assesses other places relative to that.