What I'm reading 4/18-4/25
2016-04-25
Against Blacklists - Andrea Shepard
- "Instead, we must fight for the establishment of norms which allow peaceful coexistence and free association – and thus, against the authoritarian, universalizing tendencies within every cultural-ideological tribe – and for the possibility of pluralistic technical spaces with norms that protect the purpose they serve for technologists regardless of tribal affiliation, and resist being transformed into a no man's land in between red and blue tribe trenches."
System Overload - James Surowiecki
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"This is the heart of our problem: infrastructure policy has become a matter of lurching from crisis to crisis, solving problems after the fact rather than preventing them from happening."
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"Today, the Metro is in such a state that fixing it may require shutting whole lines for months at a time. It's yet again an example for the nation, but now it's an example of how underinvestment and political dysfunction have left America with infrastructure that's failing and often downright dangerous."
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"As the economist Larry Summers has pointed out, once you adjust for depreciation, the U.S. makes no net investment in public infrastructure."
- "They evidently had no compunction about publicly accusing someone of a reputation-destroying transgression without first contacting the accused and, worse, without making any effort to gather the elementary facts."
A Protocol for Dying - Pieter Hintjens
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"In time it became the basis, and then the goal of my work: to go to strange places and meet new people."
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"I am so grateful not to have died suddenly. I'm so grateful I won't lose my mind."
What convolutional neural networks look at when they see nudity - Ryan Compton
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"However, since deep learning researchers don't specify exactly how the network should behave on a given input, a new problem arises: How can one understand what the convolutional networks are activating on?"
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"This highlights a fundamental difference between training rule-based classifiers and modern A.I. research. Rather than redesigning features by hand, we redesign our training data until the discovered features are improved."
Introduction to Scala Macros - Sturm Mabie
- "In Scala, as in Lisp, macros are not merely transformations that operate on a set of strings, but rather, are functions that map from a given AST to another AST."
Implementers, Solvers, and Finders - Randall Koutnik
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"How could this be? A group of people, granted the ability to do what they love for great pay & perks, all wanting to move on?"
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"If we're to escape this situation where fantastic fanatic programmers can't see themselves programming in three years, we need to couple our words to real world meaning."