cheatsheet

You don't have to become a woman unless you want to become a woman. I don't have to work for idiots, and neither do you.

I think any form of prejudice hinders your ability to think regardless. They can't see existence the same because they've already molded a language, a way of reasoning, and a way of thinking around an axiom of absolute certainty (that they pretend doesn't exist, because it's a bias they do not consciously act on, but it exists as an invariant in the mind regardless). It is ridiculous, counter intuitive, cognitively dissonant logic.

> in this industry, if you're not born in the right geographical location is a complete impossibility unless you are an autodidact.

Most of what is fundamentally mentally shaping and necessarily important for your ability to think as a human being is not dependent on education, but on everything, and I don't know whether I have control over it or not, but I don't begin with the premise assuming that I already know everything I am going to know.

It is sexism, and it's unfortunate. I'm a woman, and I pretend to be a man online so my comments and understandings of computer science, code, programming, and mathematics are treated with the same respect, and given the same kind of responses and feedback.

I've tried numerous times to out myself as female and it's clear that there is consistently a difference in the way I'm spoken to as a woman and as a man.

I will probably move onto another alias as I typically do, but I think it is necessary to point out that both genders suffer due to any kind of discrimination. I feel like people hold me back by judging my abilities by my gender. I get angry thinking about how much more I might have been able to learn if I was a man, and I resolve that with studying independently, and fighting in whatever way I can to make sure I can gain the same knowledge base as anyone else should be able to.

One of the few things I am proud of is that I have managed to cultivate an online personality image that is often mistaken for an older man. I don't know when I will stop believing that I am inferior at the things I've spent my entire life studying, but I hope I will soon, because it is extremely depressing. I don't know what my experiences are the definition of, because I know they are biased by an extremely limited set of data.

The point is, I guess - keep your eyes on what really matters to you, and always keep that goal in sight. It's very easy to turn a superficial cultural assumption that actually doesn't happen that often, into a self defeatist attitude, and all that attitude does is get in your way of achieving.

> “It goes beyond image classification — the most popular task in computer vision — and tries to answer one of the most fundamental questions in computer vision: What is the right representation of visual scenes?

Can someone knowledgeable in graphics research explain the context that this question comes from?

If I am reading the question correctly, I infer that the question suggests that there exists a right way to reproduce the visual experience of reality. To me, this sounds like a question that is equally valid to have no answer (or many answers) in aesthetics, art, and philosophy, etc.

Yes, I agree with you so much.

I used to beg my parents to order me various forms of an encyclopaedia, I used to devour bookshelves. I remember reading every breakfast food box and piece of junkmail, just because it was something new.

I remember my mom telling me how shocked she was when I was like 6 or something - she didn't believe me that I read one of these young adult books in a day, and so I then rambled the entire story out, and she was proud of that for a while. I told my mom recently that I was watching an anime, and she was surprised and happy that "I watch TV again", because I've pretty much stopped watching TV for the past 10 years or so. The contrast of these worlds is stark.

I remember this stuff and I feel like I've become dumber, because I feel like I can't hold as much information. What is really happening, is I can't hold as much information as a computer can. But then there's some kind of process that seems to run on top of the memorization, that feels more like it's something I'd call a sense of self. Sometimes it is tiny iterations of a swift selection mechanic operating on information that has already been indexed, sorted, qualified, quantified, translated and weighted countless times, other times, it is a way of being intelligent that I don't ever think I could ever program. It is the kind of thing that makes the comparison of AI to actual intelligence laughable and ridiculous to even begin to pose the question.

To me, it's more about being able to find a real signal in a world that is constantly producing enough noise to consume us all.

Also, people do use this stuff to think about their computer systems, so I'm a little confused at the author's point of instinct and intuition. Most engineers are trained in analysis of the infinite (calculus), which also includes rigorous analysis of 0 and 1.

Epistomology, psychology, and information theory tend to reflect them in an almost mirror way.

Then again, is it just me who sees the patterns in the words, or are the patterns actually there? I think it probably depends on how you mind constructs analogies and relations between it's map of cultural topics and dialogue, etc. It just bother me when I see flashes of pictures that I normally equate with programming and math, that model the relational structure of what I'm reading. The two have nothing to do with one another, and yet they persist in flashing across the visual processing part of my mind without me doing anything. I am occasionally fascinated by determining whether they mean anything, or where they come from.

People use terms though - black and white thinking, etc. Lots of analogies and metaphors have very simple abstract forms. It's memes, deeply validated patterns. They don't have to be true in reality as long as people keep talking about them and agreeing they exist.

I feel as though I have become a scientist scientist. Thanks for the kind words, but I'm just trying to get through a rough mental space. I prefer maintaining a zen beginner mind, because it is fairly easy to silence doubt.

Then read it like a 12 year old girl would read the statement.

1. When you are poor, school feels like you are trading pleasing an adult for the slim chance of getting out of poverty. It feels less like you are working in a real system with an honest chance and more like you are playing in someone's half psychotic maze. The adult world seems like a careless game where no one cares about anyone besides themselves once they've made it.

2. Many of those kids in poor schools are smarter than you think, and have a more realistic understanding of the real world than their wealthy counterparts. It's just the side no one likes talking about, because honestly, it's something society in general is ashamed of. We can build all this great stuff but we can't scale equality.

Look at the lives the parents have. Who do you think the kid is going to listen to and learn from the most? What someone says, or how reality is?

This is the most ironically stupid thing about hacker culture. It's just as 'follow the leader' as directly following the leader, and it makes the culture and the people in it definably predictable.

Actually reasoning about stuff when stuff can be reasoned about, and considering most opinions to be superfluous nonsense is the right direction. Opinions follow abstract models. You can pretty much find a computational or mathematical model, throw some nouns and verbs on it, and bam, you've got an opinion that has nothing to do with reality.

I understand your perspective and in the rational, everyday setting I agree with you. Thank you for your considerate reply.

But how do I know that I want my mind to be the way X wants my mind to be, without shaping it like that and biasing my assessment afterwards? How do I know whether I wanted my mind to be this way? How did my mind get this way?

I know it's paranoia but sometimes I think ideas are more like viruses in more than the colloquial internet memetic sense. Like the brain literally has difficulty letting go of ideas because of the ways various ideas may alter brain structure and consequently influence perception.

It has been a paranoid hypothesis of mine that the best programmers wind up programming people instead.

I'm disgusted by your disgust. I wanted a PhD more than anything, but I didn't understand my disorder at the time, and I didn't have the care nor coping skills I needed to get through life on top of achieving what I wanted to in the PhD program. That was three years ago and I still cry almost every other night or so over it, but I am living a much healthier and more understood life, instead of every day being almost constant confusion and stress (on top of difficult school work, being a teaching assistant and a research assistant).

It helps when the work environment understands explicitly. I experience heightened stress and chaotic thought patterns in overtly social situations that ripple across months when the situations only last days or hours, and I need to learn to engage in them very slowly at my own pace and be comfortable.

If my former school understood this instead of having my professors call me 'aspie', maybe I would have a PhD by now. The one thing I learned from this is that I should not be forced into any situation that makes me experience distress, and I do not care if you think it's ridiculous. I have spent far too much of my life in difficult mental places, and I do not want to live like that anymore, and I won't. I don't force people around me to do graduate level math simply so they can talk to me in a language I understand.

We are not always clever and eccentric, 100% of the time. It would help if people stopped looking at us like computers and started remembering we are human too.

I think your path selecting algorithm can wind up in a state of deadlock, but it is very clever in a socially passive assertive way. There has to be a way of handling paths crossing simultaneously, non-aggressively, and this can not be resolved without additional signaling semantics.

I like my desk and being socially awkward.

I've had severe social anxiety for the bulk of my life. I've gone through periods of replacing it with a fundamentally dissociative awareness. The best I can describe it is being fully submerged in the belief that life is a dream, and nothing that happens actually matters.

It's tough, but what actually works for me now, is giving other people the respect and privacy they need, by not thinking about how they think. You'd be surprised how much extra thinking time you have for everything else just by cutting your thoughts off at that line.

Still, there are no rules yet for empathy, and my mind can still get panicky in crowds, and there is the belief that I will be perpetually socially naive and subject to social manipulation. But I think it's better than hiding in the corner of a room, staring at the floor, maybe.

I do not really like social media. I like interesting conversations that stimulate me intellectually.

I don't think you can prove that neither is true, but I rarely agree with myself to begin with.

I will not rely on the summary explanation, I can assure you of that.

Thing I'm building | IDE,code,ssh | Documentation / Debugging

Email and messages will always interrupt me, whether I have one monitor or three.

Honestly, the internet is boring. Facebook is boring, here is boring, reddit is boring, it is all boring. It is so much more fun to make stuff. But it's a good place to go to when I want to start my day up, shut it down, and reboot my brain when I'm working on something difficult.

The concept of multitasking and single tasking is oversimplified. People define what tasks are and what organized is. If I see mathematical similarity through the 30 or so random topics I switch up and progress through, there is something that is single tasked in there because it unifies all the information selections, and it builds as I progress through each one.

In some regards I can certainly see Jayne's theory as correct with regards to the arising of consciousness as a mechanical function between the self and the environment in which the self exists, which results in a symbolic translation that expresses varying degrees of dissonance and harmony.

But there is also a clearly defined conceptual boundary which humans have surpassed, which is the capacity to not merely react to their environment, but to act as an equally dominating force of it. The nature of the reflective mind contained in it's environment; reacting and translating what is observed into what is perceived: it is one of dissonance and harmony, and results in uncontrollable chaos. Man is a function of his environment, instead of defining the environment.

It is the will to exceed one's own expectations, as an creature of nature, and as a consciousness. When we have crafted an entire networked world that begins on a completely conceptual level, I think the question of what we are, and what we have become, and the control we have over that, deserves more than a cursory thought.

It's that looping around the argument that causes it to collapse. I use my mind to explain my mind. The model doesn't fit the current data, only all the data leading up to it.

It's not intimidation, it's just determining which path you want to take. The people who constructed the ground of the popular frameworks had to start somewhere too.

Software development helps me understand 'kinds' of information, and that the applicability of mathematics is dependent on the kind.

But mathematics is not a sense, and neither is a program. These are the best conceptual constructions we have to represent our senses as humans collectively. They are both meant to be representations, models. This is something I continue to find difficult to understand, from both mathematical and computational perspectives, because computational and mathematical concepts are intuituve to me. However, I have the awareness that they shape how I naturally parse the raw data I get from my senses. That means it's important to let go of either model when it ceases to accurately represent reality.

I found this very relatable: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

> My own understanding of loneliness relied on a belief in solid, separate selves that he saw as hopelessly outmoded. In his worldview, everyone was perpetually slipping into each other, passing through ceaseless cycles of transformation; no longer separate, but interspersed.

Social groups, cultures, parents and children, friends. All of these concepts rely on the concept of a connection between solid selves, that allow for the passage of data/information from self to self. The resulting construction is called a culture, a social group, a relationship. It only exists because there exists other conceptual constructs that serve as comparative references.

> Perhaps he was right. We aren’t as solid as we once thought. We are embodied but we are also networks, living on inside machines and in other people’s heads; memories and data streams. We are being watched and we do not have control.

People's memories and imaginations, these are subject to play and replay, and can result in both (il)logical and (ir)rational inference, independently or socially established. These have been philosophical questions long before they became digital.

> I do think I would have been worse off without the social aspects of my university years

What aspect of face to face interaction makes it worth seeking?

When enough people are aware of the meme, and the meme is ingrained in culture enough to have a statistically significant effect on perceived ability. Or when people decide it is meaningless, out of desire to control their expectations of their performance.

> Computer generated art tends to lack this trait, and this, I think, is why it feels less valid than human-made art.

I could not disagree with you more.

Most of traditional contemporary art for the past 100 years have been art pieces and products that are meta-critiques and meta-dialogues of the current understanding of Art, conversations between artists... These things attempt to explore what Art truly is. Some aspects of post modernism have taken it to the point where everything is absolutely meaningless, others as a caricature or commentary on post capitalist society.

Yves Klein painted things blue and this is art. Rothko painted squares, except more notable (to me, at least) were the namings of his paintings, most called "no. #" and such. Dali put drawers and pom poms on the breasts of classical Grecian figures, and let us not forget about Dada - whose chief goal was to destroy Art, only to become included under the category of artistic movements.

Aesthetics has been discussed for centuries, and at core, is a philosophical question. It shares many characteristics similar to computer code and classical logic, once you've abstracted layer on top of meta layer, until you really are scratching your head, wondering what the symbols you've generated actually mean.

As a painter for 20 years, and as software developer / computer scientist for 15, I rarely see anything besides an image of a thing when I walk into a museum. In computer code and mathematics, I see much, much more, and whatever it is that code communicates to me is infinite and entangled completely in my being and my nature.

Real innovation doesn't lead with absolute certainty, it does not know whether it will lead to a reward. I really don't understand the mentality here where everyone thinks they know what they are doing before they do it. I can understand the need to have confidence and the desire to measure out a metric of predictive possibilities, but they are only predictions. For some things, you really don't know what will happen until it happens - especially when it involves chaotic systems such as people and their wants/needs/desires.

I don't think specific problems are the issue. Even assembling furniture given instructions is not too difficult to ask a machine to solve, given the right programming language. It's the jump from one specific problem to another, without a heuristic used to leap between problem types. That would be a machine learning the ability to generalize and infer like a human.

The Turing test is simple because it is easy to add complexity to something that is simple. As a human, I can convince myself that an idiot is a genius and a genius is an idiot because of introspection. Humans have imagination, and we very often don't see how that warps our perception of intelligence. We still think we can be the distant, disconnected, scientific, observer - carefully constructing a pristine and universally objective technology. But computers, out of all kinds of technology, show us how much of our humanity goes into our creations.

That's your definition of intelligence. You could solve problems quickly with a failure rate of 2%, but that 2% error actually kills off, deforms, or ostracizes 10% of your population, and that 10% contains 100% of what you need to solve your next set of problems. You destroy yourself by creating a definition of intelligence in the first place.

This is internet and hacker culture; Google just happens to have a disproportionate amount of people who fit into those categories there.

My apologies for the lack of clarity: I was following the thought path that was concerned with the validity of the four color theorem proof because of the Coq bug.

Yes, the four color theorem was proven by Appel and Haken on an IBM 370-168 at the University of Illinois in June 1976. Coq was released in May 1989.