If you could take back the coronavirus pandemic or the Trump presidency, but not both, which would you choose?
5 year old folded her laundry, kept count of each type of clothing, made me write down the final inventory, got excited about the word “inventory,” double checked the inventory, reported it back to us, and is now reciting it in bed after lights out.
“5 shirts…16 socks…4 skirts…7 underwear…”
I know it’s a mug’s game to guess what your little kid will do when they grow up, but I’ll be damned if she’s not an accountant in 20 years. 🤷♂️
“Humanity is still driving towards hell, but we have taken our foot off the accelerator.”
Key clarification: this is only energy emissions, which historically make up just half of total CO2e emissions. (EPA, C2ES, Our World in Data.) Regardless, good news, and desperately needed.
Context on the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak:
- H5N1: 375 deaths
- SARS: ~800 deaths
- MERS: 858 deaths
- H1N1: 151-579k deaths
- “normal” flu: 290-650k deaths each year
Coronavirus is absolutely still a tragedy, and worth every effort to contain, but fortunately doesn’t seem to warrant all the panic or fear-mongering.
Blank wall after removing a decal mural.
Bonus points: find the snail, squirrel, and butterflies.
AI vs ML
Are there any common forms of AI now that aren’t machine learning?
Historically we had expert systems, formal logic, hand-authored decision trees (eg old school machine translation), domain-specific algorithms (eg A* pathfinding), and more.
Nowadays it seems like everything is some form of ML trained on real world data.
(I’m broadly lumping everything generated automatically from data into the “ML” bucket, including HMMs, Bayesian networks, stochastic modeling, etc.)
Maybe this is a good thing? The results definitely speak for themselves. I might buy that the scale of most modern problems simply overwhelms hand-authored approaches. Are we losing anything by putting all our eggs in the big-data-and-opaque-emergent-models basket, though? Are there any other forms of AI that we’re neglecting? Or am I just being old fashioned and naive?
Fascinating: distributed systems techniques now also apply to performance sensitive applications on high end multi-core computers, eg AAA game engines on modern consoles, as well as to actual distributed systems.
Using the holidays for a 2-week coding session. Writing a new transactional memory manager that’s O(1) for all operations, completely non-blocking and progress-guaranteeing, and uses atomics only for writes.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) December 26, 2019
Notably, serializing distributed transactions algorithmically, offline.
The “trick” is to store a 10-bit transaction id inside variables and use that to resolve conflicts. Any transaction can undo any earlier one, and can be undone by any later one, at any time, with detection at read and write points.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) December 26, 2019