amiramir's comments

Yes. You can still visit the area, in what is now mostly Chinatown, though one of the main feature of Five Points, The Collect Pond is now gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points,_Manhattan

Canada seem to have imported the tipping culture and default tipping amounts (a la Square Register) from the US.

The explanation for tipping in the US has been the lack of national healthcare and a social safety net.

I live in the NYC and grew up in London and Paris. In Paris tipping was culturally seen as optional and generally reserved for instances of great service. London was similar way back when with 50p or a quid being a tip.

When I got to the US tipping was a much bigger deal and has only grown over time. The explanation was that service workers don't get paid enough and unlike in the UK, France, and Canada there is no universal healthcare or safety net so we need to subsidize the employers to make the workers whole and safe which seems like a weird concept all around, unless you are an employer.

Thanks for links. I had no idea. I tried flying an RC copter some time ago (piston engine) and getting it to hover was a nerve-wracking triumph. These folks and electric motors have taken it into another dimension.

S3X DRIVE could be a cheeky pun along the lines of The Boring Company.

Apparently climate change is hard to reason about due to our cognitive biases. I know that Kaheman has lost a little luster of late I still buy this:

"Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychological biases that distort rational decision- making. One of these is “loss aversion”, which means that people are far more sensitive to losses than gains. He regards climate change as a perfect trigger: a distant problem that requires sacrifices now to avoid uncertain losses far in the future. This combination is exceptionally hard for us to accept, he told me."[0]

That said, I think that the thing that will make people change their behavior is not so much how bad it gets but the economics. If it's cheaper to use renewables than burning fuels then people will switch. Thinking about one's short-term economic choices ($1 < $2) is mostly simpler than thinking about global issues that are at odds with one's cognitive biases, and one's choices to ignore scientists.

[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329820-200-understa...

I suspect you are being slightly tongue in cheek about the bandwidth for ads (yay 5G ;-).) With that said, I think a key benefit of on-device learning is the privacy angle. The Pixel 2's always-on song identification is said to be done on the phone without your audio data being sent to Google. Similarly the Google Clips camera apparently does its magic without sending image data to Google. With devices having less to differentiate on privacy is increasingly visible in the marketing arena particularly for devices that seem to be watching or listening at all times.

>How long until the next big idea? The last "AI winter", after expert systems, was 15 years.

Oddly enough neural nets languished in the frozen tundra for 50+ years if you take it back to perceptrons (mid 60's)[1]. Misnky and Papert's take down of perceptrons set the field back years. If you want to be more strict then it's been 31 years since Rummelhart and McClelland published their book[2], based on their earlier work that Hinton co-authored. They laid out multilayer NN with back-propagation. I got hold of the book in the UK in '87 and used it to code a multi-layer back-propagation network. It was a machine that would read out aloud given some text, even for words it had not seen before (good luck with through, though, and trough.) The problems were data and processing speed. I had to hand code features and wait for overnight training runs on VAXen and later a Sun-3 clocked at 16.67MHz[3]. It took big data an brute force to get the glimpses or magic that we see now. The fundamentals have been around for a long time.

It may be the case that one of the many approaches that fell by the wayside will make a comeback a al NN. NN added more layers and tweaked backprop, plus data and speed. It may be the expert systems will rejuvenate as something "new" with machines writing their own rules and somehow getting over showstoppers like the unmanageability of a large rule bases. It's probably going to be some combination of things that we already know about, along with yet more data, and processing power that will get us to the next level. The odds are that whatever that beast is will be self-training and regulating in an analogous way to back-prop but with logic thrown in. Good luck to us all for inventing such things, and for trying to understand what they are really doing.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron [2]https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-distributed-processi... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-3

This phenomenon is known as Risk Compensation[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

Rugby has also included head injury assessments (HIA) into its laws. They sports governing body introduced HIAs in 2012 and they have been getting more stringent over the years.

At he elite level a player who is suspected of having taken a significant knock to the head can be substituted off the field for 10 minutes to be assessed by a doctor. The referee, assistant referees, sideline medics or the television match official can make the get the player off the field and to the medic. Players almost always want to play on after a knock so the decision is left to officials who may have seen or heard a head impact. If a player fails the assessment then they do not return to the field and further tests will be performed after the match. If the player passes then the substitution is reversed. If an incident is missed during a game then an assessment can be ordered after reviewing a recording of the game.

The laws of rugby also include clauses about contact with the head, tipping a player onto their head, or knocking a jumping player in such a way as to make them land on their head.

Rugby players are getting bigger and faster and the hits are getting commensurately more energetic. Rugby is trying to keep players safe. Whether these measures help remains to be seen but I think the governing bodies take player safety pretty seriously.

One interesting stat that I heard is that one of the things that seems to be inversely correlated with head injury is neck strength so we may see more players training their already powerful necks.

Morgan Stanley has a history of languages in the vein. MS was a big APL shop in the 80s. Arthur Whitney[1] worked at MS and developed the languages A, and A+. He later wrote J, and K.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_(computer_scien...

Blade Runner's production design is beautiful and almost prefectly timeless in its depiction of a future. The only thing that dates the film for me is the cathode ray tubes. They are even in the flying cars I think.

Directors and designers could start using flat blue devices so that interfaces can be re-imagined, in 2-D, or 3-D, and composited in future re-masterings. I like the non-desript tri-fold devices in Westworld. Kudos to the 2001 team for getting imagining tablet interfaces although that did not sway the jury Samsung vs Apple iPad case[1][2].

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/23/samsung_cites_scie...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron....

I love the teamwork and mutual understanding. I'd have a hard time making a circular object like that out of clay, yet these guys collaborate to make this massive thing with very little drama (or explicit communication). As a software person I love me a bit of metal bashing :-)

I'm guessing it won't be long until someone uses this technique to computer and apply perturbation masks to pornographic imagery and make NN-based porn detectors/filters (like the one Yahoo recently open-sourced) a lot less effective.

I'm not sure if this is "correct" but "Eats, shoots & leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation"[1] is a fun read on an adjacent topic. It too gets berated by some but I enjoyed it and learned a thing or two.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-Punctuat...

With respect to Iran it's worth reflecting on the fact that the US engineered a coup in Iran to depose Mosaddegh in 1953[1]. At that time the UK and US did not like the winner of a largely democratic process that installed Mosaddegh as Prime Minister and that had forced the Shah to flee Iran. Operation AJAX got rid of Mosaddegh as Prime Minister and brought the Shah back. The US then supported him as he weakened the democratic process and angered the population leading to the Iranian Revlolution. One could argue that the 1953 coup sowed the seeds of the 1979 Iranian revolution[2] that created the Islamic Republic of Iran who then went on to start the nuclear program that you mention. The US also supported Saddam Hussain in Iraq's war against Iran in which 500,000 or more people died. Who knows where the region would be if it were not for the 1953 coup.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

Reminds me a little of Doug Lenat's Eurisko [1] fleets for Traveler TCS in 1981: lots of cheap, defenseless, and heavily armed boats.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko

I programed in Smalltalk-80 from 1990-1995. I used it at Morgan Stanley to build a derivative trading system that was distributed between London and NYC. It was running on networed Sun Sparcstations. Traders would collaborate on the same trading "book" across different machines. One of the big battles of getting the system installed was persuading traders to make room and to use a mouse to control the system.

St-80 was a great system and by way my favorite programming experience. I remember visiting Jim Gosling to hear about Oak (which subsequently became Java) and thinking that it was neat but a pale imitation of Smalltalk.

What "killed" Smalltak were a thousand cuts. A huge problem was the fact that hardware in those days was slow. Our production machines had a 25 Megahertz processor which had problems with the interpreted language that was also painting a GUI.

For a long time St-80 would just take 100% of the puny cpu even when there was nothing going on. Eventually there was 4-line event driven patch that cleared that up but that did not help when the program actually did some work.

For finance double-dispatch arithmetic made things worse since even a simple addition would result in a bunch of message sending that was cute and pure but slow.

The monolithic image was an issue too since shipping and delivering production code was hard. There were source control system but ultimately the image was a hug blob that had to be shipped around. Another issue was the windowing system. Smalltalk was its own universe and basically grew out of being the whole environment for a machine (e.g. Xerox Star).

There were no namespaces so it was hard to segments certain kinds of code and you'd end up fiddling with the innards of St which may have unintended consequences.

It did not integrate with the window managers of the day (e.g. Motif) and could not use native widgets so we had to try to style our widgets to look like the window manager.

I think the folks at ParcPlace were great inventors and engineers (Peter Deutsch is a god) but they were not fast enough to respond to the pressures of the market.

I wonder what would happen if Gigahertz machines were avaible for Smalltalk and if ParcPlace had managed to make their system have a decent package manager and to call native widgets.

It was also hard to find engineers since C/C++ was there flavor de jour. At Morgan Stanley there was also APL/A+/J but ultimately Java took the world over and now then Javascript which started off as an interpreted language with a lot less that St-80 but some times timing is everything. Moore's law helps too.

With all that said St-80 is still the gold standard of my programming life which included other fun systems such as Interlisp-D and NextStep.

I am pleasantly surprised to hear that him speaking in terms of the metric system.

Are there any translations of Borges that our local aficionados would recommend over others?

Lisp was defined in the 50s and implemented in the 60s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)