A three year old draft blog post I just found. Feels worth publishing - the improvements in AI since then if anything make it clearer, and all the “right now” caveats justified.
It’s better to start by thinking of us as pattern matching devices first.
Not simple ones - such as modern deep learning AI that essentially does layered functions to measure correlation. Complex ones, that model causality in a sophisticated way we don’t remotely understand yet.
It was a rushing, a burning, an all-things-are-change, a compulsion.
I was torn up for three days or was it two weeks, except the long moments when I just forgot. Intertially, suddenly remembering, half weeping, half positively reconstructing my own construction of who I am and why.
Everyone I talked to I would grill - wait, what do the sheep look like when you try to go to sleep by counting them? And when you read a book, how good quality are the faces of the people you imagine?
This is a recipe from Phil the Dhal, a friend who has been experimenting with pressure cooking Indian food. I’m posting it here so it doesn’t get lost. Ask if you want this just to be the first of a series!
First pressure cook of split urad dhal was a success.
Needs some understanding and refinement of what you can put in with the dhal in the pressure cooker. i.e. salt and turmeric are uncontroversial, but stuff like chilli powder or garlic and ginger paste or chopped chillies I don’t fully understand.
This year, the public narrative around Facebook has switched - the company feels on the defensive in lots of ways. I think it deserves to be - with billions of users, it is long past time for them to spend their energy on reducing harm, rather than on more growth.
There’s a bit less talk about YouTube (owned by Google), and the problems with its recommendation algorithm.
The problems
Here are an article and a video which show the span of problems - from causing political radicalisation in every direction, to creating vast farms of weird, abusive videos targetted at children:
A tasty early morning breakfast with friends in town, and time to cycle home. A sunny day, so take the route along the river!
Crossing the road by the docks. The sky impeccable. Delicious light of being away from the tropics, strong and clear, but not overly harsh.
The dome of one of the three graces is just visible, and at the right hand edge the tower which has sucked car pollution out of the tunnel under the river for over 100 years.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve:
I’m not really sure why, but there it is, I have. I think over the last five years in excitement at the good user experience and high user adoption, I forgot why I was negative about such centralised, out of control services in the first place.
Culture is important.
Particularly, it’s important for technology which is about how we as humans talk to one another.
Telephones, computers, mobile phones, internet… They’re all about how our particular species of primate communicates. And now they’re becoming one powerful industry newly reformed.
We’re each a neural network, thrown abruptly into a chaotic world, which by sheer force and pain and amazement has cohered into the awareness that we are.
He listened.
The speaker started with a natural forest.
A gorgeous, maddening, complex, survived-of-the-fittest, multi-species, layered, organic feedback pathways, mycella-ridden delightful speckled sunlight happy, violent/eating/parasiting/singing insects/birds/people, robust kind of a forest.
They followed with a timber forest.
A straight-laced, single specied, splatted down, polygonally-bounded-tree-age-contoured, money spinning, automation hugging, zen simple, database-like, timber-producing, silent, vulnerable all-lined-up-in-rows kind of a forest.
The for loop iterated.
I avoided statistics at school like a rash - filled myself up with super powered double A-levels in Maths And Mechanics instead. I’m not sure why, as it turns out statistics is vital to the good functioning of our world in 2017.
We have plenty of computers and plenty of data, and plenty of willingness to make evidence based decisions. Alas it is easy to fool yourself into thinking you know something you don’t. For your confirmation bias to convince yourself you’ve found evidence, so you don’t feel guilty when you report up your management chain.
I’m personally still frustrated with the email services I know about. I’m going to start by reviewing what I use now, which is FastMail.
This is for my personal email, which I use for identity on many web services, for notifications and for writing letters to people. I’m working for myself at the moment too, so I use it for business in that context.
As background, be aware that I don’t think the email protocols (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) cut it any more. So I’m not splitting my email up by rating apps separately from service. I think the two are integrated together. This is because the user experience is better - setup is simpler, and unfortunately basic features like search, spam and filtering have to have a proprietary interface as the standards aren’t good enough. I’d love better protocols to be adopted on a wide scale, but realistically they’re not yet.