Month: September 2014

Red Mars

the odds of this not sucking are very high. maybe we could get an establishing shot of

Vince Gerardis is moving from Westeros to Mars. The “Game of Thrones” co-executive producer is teaming with Spike TV to develop the scifi series “Red Mars,” an adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy novels.

Full duplex wifi

This paper presents the design and implementation of the first in-band full duplex WiFi radios that can simultaneously transmit and receive on the same channel using standard WiFi 802.11ac PHYs and achieves close to the theoretical doubling of throughput in all practical deployment scenarios. Full duplex, if possible, has tremendous implications for network design, not least of which is the fact that cellular networks could cut their spectrum needs by half. With an in-band full-duplex system we could use a single channel to get the same performance.

Superintelligence

this book is a welcome antidote to wildly optimistic views of the emergence of artificial intelligence which blithely assume it will be our dutiful servant rather than a fearful master. Some readers may assume that an artificial intelligence will be something like a present-day computer or search engine, and not be self-aware and have its own agenda and powerful wiles to advance it, based upon a knowledge of humans far beyond what any single human brain can encompass. Unless you believe there is some kind of intellectual élan vital inherent in biological substrates which is absent in their equivalents based on other hardware (which just seems silly to me—like arguing there’s something special about a horse which can’t be accomplished better by a truck), the mature artificial intelligence will be the superior in every way to its human creators, so in-depth ratiocination about how it will regard and treat us is in order before we find ourselves faced with the reality of dealing with our successor.

2018-04-26:

2019-08-30:

What if future AI looks a lot like current AI, but better? For example, take Google Translate. A future superintelligent Google Translate would be able to translate texts faster and better than any human translator, capturing subtleties of language beyond what even a native speaker could pick up. It might be able to understand 100s of languages, handle complicated multilingual puns with ease, do all sorts of amazing things. But in the end, it would just be a translation app. It wouldn’t want to take over the world. It wouldn’t even “want” to become better at translating than it was already. It would just translate stuff really well.

Mathematica for pure math

mr. wolfram is prone to hyperbole, but at least he’s not boring.

But could we systematically extend the Wolfram Language to cover the whole range of pure mathematics—and make a kind of “Mathematica Pura”? The answer is unquestionably yes. It’ll be fascinating to do, but it’ll take lots of difficult language design. One might think that somehow mathematical notation would already have solved the whole problem. But there’s actually only a quite small set of constructs and concepts that can be represented with any degree of standardization in mathematical notation—and indeed many of these are already in the Wolfram Language.

All The Comments on Every Recipe Blog

I just started Paleo yesterday, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to make this without the ingredients. Have you considered making a version of this margherita pizza for your readers who are trying to avoid gluten, dairy and nightshades? What if I shoved a roll of basil leaves in my mouth, do you think that would taste good?