Michael Nielsen (one of the creators of quantum.country, often cited as a feedback-giver on PG's essays) has a short blog post introducing and exploring Lisp here:
Most important realisation for me personally: keep emailing.
As an introverted dev trying to sell I often assume silence means they don't care and they hate me. I've learnt this is almost always wrong - the recipient is typically just busy or indecisive. Stay polite/respectful/human but keep at them and don't let the void kill you.
Still figuring out the details but getting over that was quite a profound feeling and has turned out pretty useful in life generally
Great interview! Rebecca Goldstein never fails to kindle my interests in philosophy. Science really needs people like her, she pulls the rug out from under us but does it from a place of love. Her ability to communicate makes a huge difference also.
David OReilly wrote a nice essay covering the 'less is more' philosophy in 3d art ('Basic Animation Aesthetics' -pdf can be found here: http://www.davidoreilly.com/downloads)
He's done a bunch of great animations (eg The External World, The Horse Raised by Spheres - youtube) and games (Mountain, EVERYTHING - steam/consoles) that epitomize it imo - very worth a watch/play
This[0] was posted up on here a while ago - has some good book recommendations for teaching yourself maths (assuming you remember some basics from school[1]).
I got a few of them and whilst they may have gathered some dust... They seem great! Also obliged to recommend Khan Academy and the 3Blue1Brown youtube channel - but they are probably best for fun/inspiration
The Doomsday clock idea has a lot of respectable people behind it but I've always been unclear how it isn't just a bias-o-meter.
Kahneman and others have done a lot of persuasive work examining how experts are often quite bad at judgement/prediction. How can we be sure the Doomsday Clock actually means anything substantive (as compared to data)?
Jonathan Blow recently streamed a talk called 'Video Games and the Future of Education'[0] that makes similar arguments.
He discusses various tools we have to transmit knowledge from teacher to student and argues that games really shine as away to trick people into 'learning by doing'. He's sharply critical of existing educational games and really lays into 'gamification' as a concept.
The talk certainly left me hearing that echo that the author alludes to.
Scrolled through to see if anyone mentioned video games before writing up my own comment, and pleasantly surprised to see Jonathan Blow explicitly mentioned!
As a counterpoint to the article which is arguing that Books and lectures don't have a theory of learning and assimilation of information, I think that Video Games as a medium often do. Most games have tutorials or instructions on how to play the game, often introducing novel or complex concepts to the audience that are required to be understood before the work can be enjoyed.
More specifically, I find that exploration and puzzle games tend to exemplify this more than most. They introduce one concept at a time, demonstrate it, allow exploration and 'play' of the concept and perhaps even test the understanding of it before progression is allowed. They also allow for more interesting corollaries and combinations of rules to be presented to the player which may be intriguing, surprising or, appropriately, puzzling.
And of all the puzzle games, it is Jonathan Blow's game 'The Witness' that I feel exemplifies this the best. Having also listened to his commentaries and watched his talks I know that this isn't an accident. In many ways the game itself is a contemplation on knowledge transfer, information assimilation and wordless communication of ideas. This early video [0] shows him talking through the first 10 minutes of the game and how these principles apply to the first two sets of puzzle and the first 'boss' puzzle.
His talk from your comment is also excellent, but I think it's worth highlighting that Blow very much says that video games are a complement to current resources rather than a replacement (as the title might suggest). Video Games allow for a different way to play with certain types of idea that allows for them to be understood on a deeper or more nuanced level. This doesn't necessarily apply to all types of knowledge.
I would also suggest the work of Bret Victor [1], who has some excellent essays and talks on the subject of learning, especially around Maths.
Also honorary mentions to Acko [2] and NCase [3] who create excellent explorables, which I think hint at what a fusion of classroom learning and video games might look like.
To me (neuro undergrad, comp sci masters), the demo seemed underwhelming but encouraging. As far as I can tell the tech was not doing anything particularly novel and the 'fitbit in your skull' analogy was personally uninspiring. [edit: the volume of reads /form factor is a step forward]
That said, the demo was mostly for attracting talent - lots of money and a great team will likely get them somewhere. In terms of their long term goals I expect the area that will give them the most trouble is reading/writing interesting stuff on the cortex. Neural coding is really hard and poorly understood.
1) short term. better BMIs to to treat serious brain diseases with more bandwidth and more and better electrodes. I can see this happening.
2) long term. Invasive BMI for something other than treating diseases. Better electronics is not going to make invasive brain implants safe for consumer use, they just reduce certain risks.
To solve (2) Neuralink must solve fundamental issues in medicine related to body implants and brain surgery. It would be groundbreaking and probably revolutionize medicine even outside brain implants. Neuralink researchers might get Nobel in Medicine.
Breakthrough in brain surgery. To get FDA to approve brain surgery (making holes in the dura mater) even brain surgery to open and close the brain for no good medical reason would be insanely hard. Any form of brain surgery has lots of risks. Bleeding in the brain, seizure, scarring of the brain, immediate infection risk and late infection risk. Inserting lace with thousands of electrodes is huge operation even if you could do with with endoscope.
Breakthrough with implants. With the BMI ther are issues with coagulation and constant low level inflammation. It's both health risk and gradually degrades the effectiveness of electrodes. Electrode must be in contact with tissue and interact with it. There is risks even with teeth implants, artificial knees and hips. They collect bacteria around them and they are just inert objects.
The device stimulates cochlear nerve it's not brain surgery.
Just like with any other implant, the risk must justify the benefit. Cochlear implants have 3% rate for major complications, like life threatening meningitis or facial paralysis (caused by nerve damage). Potential benefit justifies the risk.
To expand a bit here: Cochlear Implants are inserted into the cochlea, the curly organ in the ear that is responsible for hearing.
The other organs in the ear are the vestubular organs which give you a sense of balance.
The little wire in the implant has electrodes along it's length that shock the 'damaged' cells in the cochlea, bypassing how those cells sense sound, and just directly stimulating them.
The reason that it's a bit 'crude', is that the shocking is not specific to the nerves, it just shocks a bunch of those sensing cells. The reason for this is a bit involved and is due to the tonotopy (sound-map) of the cochlea.
The implantation is relatively simple for a trained surgeon. It can be done on small children.
Well articulated points - pushign back slightly regarding your breakthroughs on implants, there's good data to suggest that the size scale that Neuralink is now operating at does not elicit the same gliosis (reactive tissue growth) that electrodes larger than 15-20 µm do. The infection risk is heavily mitigated by the device being fully implantable, but you're absolutely right that there is some risk there.
Smaller size reduces the penetration trauma. I wonder how they are going to reduce chronic tissue response?
Even if the surgery does not result bacterial infection, insertion injury and the pretense of a foreign object often leads to persistent low level inflammation.
There is so much basic research questions that simple engineering is not going to solve.
How useful are interviews in general? I've been led to believe that an interview is a very poor indicator of future performance[0], and that an interview biases the hiring decision in typically negative ways.
My thought is the purpose of a job interview is to weed out people who are an obvious poor fit for the job temperamentally, and to verify that the interviewee has a working understanding of the relevant skills that they listed in their resume. Beyond that, actual job performance depends on a lot of factors that are very difficult to assess in an interview.
I think a lot of companies have deluded themselves into thinking they've designed some sort of unique interviewing system that can guarantee good job performance (instead of reducing the incidence of catastrophically bad performance), but honestly, job performance itself is very hard to measure in any objective way once you disregard the extremes.
Just because a misused tool is bad at doing the thing you're misusing it for doesn't mean that it doesn't have utility when used for its actual purpose.
You can just get on the phone with them. Talk shop for an hour. Tell them about problems your company is having. Ask them how they would solve them. An experienced engineer can determine a person's relative skill level this way.
Algorithm quizzes aren't the only way to reduce false positives. Can we say definitively that they are the best?
I agree with you - the best way to do the things I talked about is to spend time talking with the person to ensure that they actually understand and can reasonably communicate about the skills they claim to have.
There's probably a place for practical programming tests, too, but whiteboarding algorithms and such seems to be more of a fraternity hazing/secret handshake ritual than anything else. Good if the skill you need to hire for is "Read and memorized 'Cracking the Coding Interview'", not really indicative of anything else.
This is true. This is the advice I've been following: do your best, but never forget that it's basically random chance. Also consider a career change to a field without hilariously ridiculous interview practices.
I've recently started doing interviews for my company, and while there are definitely candidates that we have been on the fence about accepting that would probably have been a great fit, in the end, the false positive rate is more important to us than the false negative rate. Maybe we missed out on some great candidates but the criteria we used to evaluate them also allowed us to avoid a lot of very bad candidates. The perfect interview process doesn't exist, we have to make do with the fact that whatever the interview process is, we will miss out on great candidates and end up making an offer to candidates that will not work out. But indeed: for candidates, this means that you shouldn't take rejections to heart too much: you might have been a great fit for the role and a bad fit for the interview process. If you're consistently getting rejected for positions for which you believe you are qualified, maybe you need to get better at interviews, or maybe you're not as qualified as you may think.
> If you're consistently getting rejected for positions for which you believe you are qualified, maybe you need to get better at interviews, or maybe you're not as qualified as you may think.
This comment represents everything that is wrong with your technical interview process. Big yikes.
The lack of self-awareness displayed by that comment is kind of impressive. Especially the bit about being so keen on identifying "bad" candidates, not realizing that the entire point is that interviewers are actively bad at determining good vs bad candidates.
I think they’re great for analyzing communication skills if nothing else. Depends on the role, but for some positions that’s all or a big part of the job.
https://michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells-equation...
Its on the more academic side and focuses on the Scheme dialect, but is well-written