denimalpaca

The author makes a decent point about what drove membership to Facebook in the first place - the "cool" aspect via exclusivity and cool kids leading the charge to make the switch. But he completely misses why having a personal webpage is completely different from Facebook or Myspace or even Tumblr and Reddit - the aspect of community. It's not just about sharing, it's about the "strong connections" vs "weak connections" of finding content within a community; this is simply not something that would exist if everyone had their own page. Almost by definition it wouldn't be a community - in a weird way it's as if the internet alone is too big to allow all these individuals to have a balance of strong and weak connections. What's needed are these pages that establish community rules, and not just "in group" and "out group" dynamics. Myspace had the bulletin board and a Top 8 which gave it some sort of culture; Facebook has the standardized news feed and Apple-esque one-size-fits-all profile structure. A rag-tag libertarian group of individual websites, no matter how many there are (and there are already plenty), are not going to establish the same sense of community because they won't foster a community culture.

Yes, I agree we should move away from Facebook, but the answer has to be a better culture. So far from my prowling of alternatives, my only conclusion is that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution because that's exactly what Facebook is trying to do by catering to lowest-common-denominator of culture in the most powerful (psychologically) way: allowing content that gets the most clicks. It's tautological. What we need isn't to break up Facebook or wait for a disruptive alternative, what we need is a better sense of the internet as groups of communities, of which you should be a member of several.

I haven't seen anyone post this here: Consider seeing a therapist. If you think you might be on the spectrum, having a professional diagnose you can go a long way towards understanding how you specifically are having a hard time with social interactions.

Ask someone to repeat back what you said so you know they actually understood what you were saying.

> "A natural answer might suggest itself: “I must have been unconsciously working away on these images—and solved or partially solved the mystery without even knowing it. Then the answer ‘broke through’ into consciousness, when I saw the image again.” Yet this would be quite wrong—the same sudden “pop out” occurs when we continuously contemplate the image, and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering. The phenomenon of sudden insight stems not from unconscious thought, but from the nature of the problem: Searching for a meaningful interpretation with few helpful and unambiguous clues."

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Just because we have an instance of conscious thought leading to the conclusion, and a scenario where it is possible that the unconscious is playing a role, the conclusion that in the second scenario the unconscious does not play a role based on the ability to come to the conclusion consciously does not follow. The nature of the problem here is not given enough of a definition for one to conclude that there is only one way to get to the answer, either.

>"The brain’s networks of neurons are highly interconnected, so there seems little scope for assigning different problems to different brain networks."

Except we know very well that the brain solves different kinds of problems in different areas... the Occipital lobe, Wernicke's area vs Broca's area, are different "sub problems" the brain is working on which the conscious part gets information about. Maybe different creative problems use the whole frontal cortex differently, but the "computational machine" that is our brain is definitely divided up into sub-problems; some are very, very obviously unconscious, like the "problem" of keeping our hearts beating.

>" If it is indeed possible to search for foods or countries simultaneously (even though we can consciously report the results of only one search at a time), then the rate at which we generate answers in both categories should be substantially greater than the rate at which we can generate answers from either category alone."

I think this is a bad experiment and a bad conclusion. It's a bad experiment because in the "control case" (only listing foods or only listing countries), the unconscious, if helping, would still be helping in these cases, trying to generate a list while the conscious mind is also trying to generate a list. So it's not really a controlled experiment, because the unconscious mind is never "stopped" - it is assumed to not be used. It's a bad conclusion then because the premise is faulty; we wouldn't expect someone to list two separate lists more quickly if the same unconscious mechanism is a poor assistant when making the lists alone, too.

A good way to fight this is to cryptographically sign videos/audio. Might be a bit computationally expensive compared to a text message, but for very high-profile people, having a copy of the video/audio and it's cryptographic signature will be absolute proof against fakes. We don't even need AI algorithms to learn how to detect fakes in this case, it just becomes a matter of comparing hashes.

Pro-tip if you use your phone too much: Carry a book or Kindle around, and when you look idly at your phone, put it in your pocket and read instead.

I chose this example because, in practice, sometimes changing a single feature does ruin the prediction, especially in computer vision. Often, the systems are somewhat resilient to these kinds of errors, but often not also.

The fact that a computer can label an object missing many features does not imply that it cannot also make a mistake doing so. Like the Tesla that couldn't recognize a truck right in front of it.

Then there's Google's Deep Dream, which did silly things like think that all hammers had arms attached to them.

Then there's also this: http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling

and many other examples like it. I chose a simple example that would be maximally relatable and still accurate even with respect to state of the art algorithms and datasets with billions of samples.

I would say it's making a prediction because to me the phrase "drawing conclusions" implies a conscious mental model of information from which a result is established. Making a prediction is not necessarily reliant on these mental models - especially conscious ones - it's about making an inference based on available information.

Another way to put it is a person would look at a person and notice fur, eyes, paws, ears, and the specific shapes and colors of these things and conclude it's a cat. Take away a leg, or an ear, or have it half out of frame, and most likely a person would still recognize it as a cat. The idea of "cat" exists in the mind of the agent in this case, but a computer may predict cat only if the animal is fully in frame and not missing any parts. The machine is entirely reliant on features whereas a person is reliant on a mental model that has more elasticity in what it defines.

I took a grad-level quantum computing class which I didn't quite have the physics background for, and the lecture that lost me, about 3 weeks in, was on the different kinds of physical gates quantum computers use.

My recollection is that there were 3 necessary gates for a quantum functionally complete set: One gate was classically functionally complete, the other two are where I got lost. Can you explain like I'm 5 (or explain like I'm an undergrad with minimal QM knowledge) what these other gates are doing?

Thanks!