My worry is that the next one we see won’t operate within the confines of a political campaign. This uptick in insults directed at minorities blamed on Trump, may be the tinder for setting off this next insurgency. Social media amplifies every incident, spreading the anger it evokes like contagion across the country. Just watch. This suggests that the next open source protest we are likely to see will form to force Donald Trump from the Presidency before the next election — a Tahrir square moment in cities all across the US. A massive and diverse open source protest that has one simple goal: the immediate removal of Donald Trump from office. Unfortunately, an open source insurgency that forces a sitting President from office without the benefit of an election could result in the same outcome as Egypt (or worse Syria).
Month: November 2016
Valerian
luc besson! this looks fantastic. he’s one gifted world builder, unlike that amateur jj abrahams.
Valerian and Laureline are special operatives for the government of the human territories charged with maintaining order throughout the universe. Valerian has more in mind than a professional relationship with his partner – blatantly chasing after her with propositions of romance. But his extensive history with women, and her traditional values, drive Laureline to continuously rebuff him. Under directive from their Commander, Valerian and Laureline embark on a mission to the breathtaking intergalactic city of Alpha, an ever-expanding metropolis comprised of 1000s of different species from all 4 corners of the universe. Alpha’s 17m inhabitants have converged over time – uniting their talents, technology and resources for the betterment of all. Unfortunately, not everyone on Alpha shares in these same objectives; in fact, unseen forces are at work, placing our race in great danger.
Avatars will say anything
In 4 years, we’ll be able to fully manipulate photorealistic avatars of candidates to say, well… anything.
this was already the first machine-learned election (in the sense that ~all of media is now clickbait, and trollbots played a huge role). but, of course we’ve seen nothing yet. time for some memetic vaccines.
NVIDIA Moore’s Law
For the past 7 years, it has not been Intel but NVIDIA that has pushed the frontier of Moore’s processor performance/price curve. For a 2016 data point, consider the NVIDIA Titan GTX. It offers 10^13 FLOPS per $1K (11 trillion calculations per second for $1200 list price), and is the workhorse for deep learning and scientific supercomputing today. And they are sampling much more powerful systems that should be shipping soon. The fine-grained parallel compute architecture of a GPU maps better to the needs of deep learning than a CPU. There is a poetic beauty to the computational similarity of a processor optimized for graphics processing and the computational needs of a sensory cortex, as commonly seen in neural networks today.
Born to lose
the democrats should ask themselves why they’ve been losing elections & political battles for the last 30 years. even after all these years, they seem surprised that the other side is playing dirty, but they keep bringing sticks and stones to a gun battle. keep up the ineffective techniques and you’ll keep losing.
Remember, no one cares about policy, and politics isn’t about policy.
Humans can’t tell from the pixels
In a 2016 paper, Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth, along with some colleagues, found that “observers have considerable difficulty” telling computer-generated and real images apart—“more difficulty than we observed 5 years ago.” On the bright side, though, when the researchers provided 250 Mechanical Turk participants with a brief “training session”—by showing them 10 labeled computer-generated images and 10 original photographs—their ability to distinguish between the 2 types of images improved significantly.
China international high speed rail
China signed a deal for a high speed rail line between Belgrade and Budapest that could cut travel time from 8h to 2.5h.
Zeptosecond measurement
Physicists have measured photoionization, in which an electron exits a helium atom after excitation by light – for the first time with zeptosecond (10^-21 seconds) precision. This is the greatest accuracy of time determination of an event in the microcosm ever achieved, as well as the first absolute determination of the timescale of photoionization.
Against timezones
while you are at it, dump the dumb am/pm as well.
Let us all — wherever and whenever — live on what the world’s timekeepers call Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C. (though “earth time” might be less presumptuous). When it’s noon in Greenwich, Britain, let it be 12 everywhere. No more resetting the clocks. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. Our biological clocks can stay with the sun, as they have from the dawn of history. Only the numerals will change, and they have always been arbitrary.
Mental Models
A mental model is just a concept you can use to help try to explain things (e.g. Hanlon’s Razor — “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.”). There are 10k of mental models, and every discipline has their own set that you can learn through coursework, mentorship, or first-hand experience.
There is a much smaller set of concepts, however, that come up repeatedly in day-to-day decision making, problem solving, and truth seeking. As Munger says, “80 or 90 important models will carry 90% of the freight in making you a worldly‑wise person.”
This post is my attempt to enumerate the mental models that are repeatedly useful to me. This set is clearly biased from my own experience and surely incomplete. I hope to continue to revise it as I remember and learn more.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 