SophosQ's comments

SophosQ | 7 years ago | on: Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward a Chrome-only Web

I'd like to know how heavy your browsing is in terms of the number of tabs and windows that are open. In my experience chrome blazes it's competition when it doesn't have as many tabs open since it inhales the RAM unlike Firefox whose default behaviour is lazy loading.

This also frees up my RAM for other memory intensive operations leading me to use Firefox more often.

SophosQ | 7 years ago | on: Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked to Try

One satisfactory solution that had existed in the early days of Firefox was the use of group tabs that you could access at a click of a button. They were an excellent solution that I wish could be reimplemented.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: Learning to program is getting harder

Perhaps it's more to do with the stock of people who learnt CS.

In the older generation, CS was a relatively obscure and difficult skill with little to no easy-guides that it filtered the set of students to only those who were insatiably curious and were fuelled by learning new things.

In contrast, CS has become so ubiquitous that nearly everything has a "how do it" guide that eases the entry of nearly anyone, with little or not interest or whose motivation might be less than ideal. Thereby, possibly leaving room for more anecdotal evidence for this perceives shift in skill.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: E Pur Si Muove

Thanks for the link

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: Creating a Modern OCR Pipeline Using Computer Vision and Deep Learning

Interestingly, When you think about it, the filters in a Convolutional neural net aren't too different from your setup and they provide similar, if not better, performance.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: A New Twist on Neural Networks

The only thing is that, when this presentation was given, it seems they hadn't worked much more than MNIST (so the new thing now would be the toys-recognition net).

The paper however details their experiments on Cifar-10 and other datasets in the discussion section.

They don't produce good enough results but the paper proposes certain hypotheses for the poorer performance and that it could be overcome in the future.

Arxiv-link: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09829

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: Do you need a VPN?

If you roll your own VPN on AWS or the like, don't you lose the benefit of sharing the VPN with thousands of users

I believe there is the alternate option of setting up your own VPN .

Instead of using AWS, you could set it up on an additional router or on your PC/pi wherein you'd lose the advantage of anonymity amongst other users but your information is still encrypted to be acceptably safe.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: Video Games Are Destroying the People Who Make Them

As a layman, I'd be grateful if you could enumerate on this line:

It is still just exiting the "computer scientist" stage, not at that "Crappy AI College" level yet

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

The question is where must the solution be applied ?

Is it at the companies where they taken in under-representes groups ? Or Is it at the grassroots level such as by teaching parenting to students in college to be more aware of the bias they may've whilst upbringing their child. ( Similar to Diversity-training)

My point is that instead of giving them a relatively easier seat at the workplace, we must strive to make their paths easier thereby ensuring that the most talent people end up where they want to.

I'm actually quite surprised that the councillor didn't encourage your sister for they're usually trained to be aware of such biases and be neutral in their disposition towards every student albeit it's difficult , they're usually better at it.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

Agreed, bias would and does plague us in every field. We can however strive to reduce its influence by being conscious of the bias in our decisions specific to the task. However to completely give up the evaluation on the candidate's aptitude for performance and resort to hiring the remaining women candidates to fill up a quota simply cause the recruiters might've missed some excellent women candidates cause of some sexist bias is analogous to pouring oil on the bonfire. The resulting overall performance of the hired candidates 'may' be worse than if bias was allowed to operate unchecked. Instead one slightly better solution (within the quota system) would be to address this at the grassroots, instantiate more programs/workshops that cater to women candidates during their academic time-period allowing them to showcase their skills and learn how the company wants them to be. At least this way you've the option of choosing from a much larger pool of women candidates thereby increasing the probability of not missing out the better women candidates. The results would also speak for themselves for other future employers who're looking to recruit women candidates for a similar job profile.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: There Have Always Existed People Who’ve Simply Wanted to Be Alone

Albeit I can't disagree with your point. There seems to be significant evidence to support the hypothesis that a minimal degree of socialising helps prevent mental decline.

For instance consider the different things you need to consider whilst holding a simple conversation. It's not the same as talking to a wall. It's a game with constraints and a game that our DNA would rather have us do in order to better our chances of survival through cooperation with other members.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: Launch HN: 70MillionJobs (YC S17) – Job board for people with criminal records

Yes, thanks to shorter distances and the horse-cart. I assure you it's more expensive to own a horse in an urban environment.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

As for what might explain the near-extinction humanity apparently once experienced, perhaps another kind of catastrophe, such as disease, hit the species. It may also be possible that such a disaster never happened in the first place — genetic research suggests modern humans descend from a single population of a few thousand survivors of a calamity, but another possible explanation is that modern humans descend from a few groups that left Africa at different times.

-It's unlikely that the Toba catastrophe was the root cause of the bottleneck as reasoned in this investigation:

https://www.livescience.com/29130-toba-supervolcano-effects....

- I wonder if the hypothesis of leaving Africa in small groups could be effectively tested.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

Our genetic homogeneity implies that anatomically modern humans arose relatively recently (perhaps 200,000 years ago) and that our population size was quite small at one time (perhaps 10,000 breeding individuals).

-Another strongly supported hypothesis is that there was an near-extinction event that wiped out all but a pocket of human settlements from which we descended. - The diversity in other species that are about as old as ours is significantly far greater than ours suggesting that it is more likely an event like an unusually strong ice-age period that could've worsened our genetic diversity.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: Why isn't everything normally distributed?

I came across this CMU presentation on why the purported ubiquity of power laws must be taken with a grain of salt:

https://goo.gl/23PP7v

Check from slide 32.

As someone who doesn't have significant experience in statistics, I'd be grateful for an expert's opinion on the arguments presented in this presentation.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: Apple Machine Learning Journal

I cannot disagree with you but the fact is and remains that the field is a budding one and this is but a building block towards better understanding the nature of using sets of geometric transformations for pattern recognition in A.I.

If this was to be directly implemented in the real world your arguments would need to be addressed, however I'm certain this research paper wouldn't be abused in that manner.

Disclaimer: I'm a graduate student studying Computer Vision.

SophosQ | 8 years ago | on: India, Once a Coal Goliath, Is Fast Turning Green

I believe carbon capture is a newer innovation whose development had been stalled due to its prohibitive costs. The first carbon capture experiments were scheduled to be conducted in 2016. Albeit I'm not aware of their results.

SophosQ | 9 years ago | on: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

Given the level of economic and educational disparity that persists in the population it's an obvious consequence that you'd have a country that can send an unmanned mission to Mars while still suffering from illiteracy.

It'd be unwise to generalise the capabilities of a country where such a large variance exists in the population's technical aptitude especially when it's of nearly a billion people.

SophosQ | 9 years ago | on: Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

Such individuals are often chosen to be on the board for their experience and networking prowess.

It's quite true that testing their mental faculty would be a challenge. Therefore the decision could simply lie with other board members based on their observations of his behaviour and the direct contributions he makes to the company.

SophosQ | 9 years ago | on: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

We could try and replicate the degradation processs or find a similar one in the lab. Nature has often been an inspiration for new inventions such as burrs for Velcro.