Wolfram language looks interesting. I’m skeptical that it really handles data and code as similarly as the early buzz claims. And the claim that you can just program large chunks of your code in…
Can artificial intelligence discover the secret to world peace? Maybe video games can find an answer. People just really want to believe artificial minds magically converge on peaceful, cooperative behavior no matter how they’re…
My general advice for what smart drugs + supplements to try is remarkably similar to gwern’s: Modafinil/armodafinil Vitamin D Fish oil Creatine Caffeine+theanine Melatonin Piracetam+choline I’m a non-responder to the last two, but I…
Add Q-Learning to the list of activities where AIs are now at parity with the average human. The very best humans are still currently better than the very best AIs. But I think it’s reasonable…
This post presents a further development of the reduced impact AI approach, bringing in some novel ideas and setups that allow us to accomplish more. It still i New AI safety ideas. See on…
Medical Breakthrough: 100,000 patients a year were dying from hospital acquired infections. Then in 2008, infection rates started plummeting. What brought about the improvement? Technical innovation? Academic studies? New drugs? Better procedures? Improved training?…
Bitcoin’s emergence has brought a field of competitors. One payment system, Ripple, serves as a platform for currencies both digital and real. NY Times seems upbeat on Ripple: “As far as I’m concerned, bitcoin…
What do Newcomb’s Problem, Sierpiński Numbers, and Chaos Theory have in common? According to “The Math Book”, they are each one of history’s 250 major milestones in mathematics. The Math Book notes for Sierpiński…
Medical Breakthrough: After 200 years of use by millions of people around the world and 20 years of widespread adoption in Japan, two medical researchers in the US finally checked to see if bidet-style…
In just a few years the company’s product could be standard-issue gear for every member of the U.S. military. Medical Breakthrough: After a mere 400 years of experimentation and 40 years of proven medical…
“[W]hen your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring…
Specified as control theory, FAI is an ultra-high frequency, stable, low-sensitivity, high-response, robust, closed-loop, non-linear, self-optimizing controller with no overshoot, which performs a flawlessly reliable error-free policy of beneficial transitions that amplify (or at…
Markets are supposed to be anti-inductive: If a regularity develops that becomes public knowledge, rational economic actors are supposed to exploit this regularity until it vanishes — or until the regularity becomes so small that…
The California Film Institute, Smith Rafael Film Center, Mill Valley Film Festival, California Film Institute Education Want to check out a new movie featuring a broad range of perspectives on the coming age of…
Check out a new place some brands have started airing their commercials. You won’t be able to look away. Seriously. Now that Vicarious broke CAPTCHAs, I guess we have to watch ads to prove…
The citizen scientists over at DIYGenomics are recruiting volunteers for an opt-in genomics study on polyamorous participants. My friend Melanie Swan is coordinating the study so if you’re poly, have some 23andMe data, and…
If typing hurts your wrists, consider switching to a better keyboard layout. In 2005, I switched to Dvorak and completely eliminated painful, chronic RSI issues in a matter of weeks. The appeal of alternate keyboards is intuitive: Less…
Level Money is probably the best new personal finance app this year. It automatically downloads all your financial transactions and seamlessly realizes what your reoccurring income and expenses are. Then it shows you how much…
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago wanted to know how smart a top artificial intelligence system actually is. So they gave it an IQ test. This light-weight exploratory study actually describes the administration of…
What kinds of computational functions can evolution locate to make minds out of? A dense, but well-motivated paper by Harvard CS professor Leslie Valiant shows an interesting negative result: there are actually some basic functions…
