Humans develop their full cognitive potential in an environment that is complex & challenging, without being overwhelming. Similarly, the big technological leaps of past civilizations have occurred in response to environmental constraints that were challenging, but not too harsh.
A lack of challenges and hardships is just as big an obstacle to the realization of one's potential as facing hardships so tough they cannot be overcome. This applies to individuals and cultures alike.
In the first few millennia of the history of civilization, natural environmental constraints were the main driver of (and limit to) human ingenuity. New technology arose from the need to survive in challenging environments.
Starting in the Antiquity, inter-cultural conflict & cooperation replaced nature as the main catalyser of progress. War, trade, competition started shaping the curriculum of civilization.
I would go as far as saying that the particular environmental and historical circumstances of a civilization program the direction and speed of its progress in an almost deterministic way
The need to rise up to the existential challenge of climate change will likely guide the next chapter of our progress over the next few centuries
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The way one uses language at home is extremely narrow compared to the range of ways one may use language in the outside world. Hence kids who grow up bilingual but don't use their parents' language outside tend to have a very limited command of it
Speaking a language is not a binary, it's a multidimensional spectrum. Not only that, but speaking, understanding speech, reading, and writing are all distinct skills, and while they're highly synergistic, they overlap a lot less than one may think
One may be able to read without being able to speak, or even without being able to understand speech. And inversely. It's also a lot easier to passively understand than to express oneself
This said "abstraction and reasoning in AI systems", but the alternative version is actually more interesting
The *Ice systems* is the name of an extensive network of galleries on the icy moon Europa, built eons ago by a long-gone culture. In the cavernous tunnels, a mere whisper can echo over incredible distances...
~277k dead from Covid in the US so far. Real number probably somewhat higher. Will be over 500k by the time it's over. It didn't have to turn out this way
This is obviously the biggest news story this year. The second biggest being the continued march of climate change and the devastation in its wake
The attacks on democracy and the rule of law only make it to third place, so it's kind of a bad year
One of the most difficult things to master in a foreign language: cases where the target language uses multiple words (subcategories) for a concept for which your previous languages only have one word. You're simply not used to parse reality into these new subcategories.
A simple example would be counters in Japanese. In European languages, a counter is just a number, so you would say, "three birds, three peanuts, three sheets of paper, three pens, three cars". In Japanese, a counter conveys not just quantity but also various object properties
So you would say, sanba (birds and bunnies), sanko (generic small thing), sanmai (flat thing), sanbon (cylindrical thing), sandai (large vehicle), etc. In fact there are more distinct counters than I can count. It takes a long time to get used to these distinctions
- The Keras mixed precision API moves to stable
- Multi-worker mirrored distribution support moves to stable
- Experimental support for parameter server distribution in Keras
- Full NumPy API implementation (tf.experimental.numpy)
The territory, the map, and the cartographer each belong in entirely different categories. Yet, we tend to confuse them with each other
The thing, the abstraction that captures an actionable aspect of the thing, and the intelligence that is capable of generating new abstractions
In particular, don't confuse a model and the ability to produce new models. Humans excel at operationalizing the abstractions they invent into highly effective machines, but so far our machines have close to zero ability to generate abstractions of their own
A road takes you from A to B, but a road-building company takes you from anywhere to anywhere else.
An operationalized abstraction solves the task for which it was designed, but intelligence -- the ability to produce abstractions -- can solve arbitrary tasks