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[Trekkin]

T might have a 30% chance of being followed by H in all cases of T, but if the T immediately comes after 'bandwid' then the chances of it being followed by H shoots up considerably. And that's information that a Markov Chain can't consider without greatly increasing the size of the current state and thus the memory and calculations needed to form the Chain.

That's not strictly true; it's possible to build an HMM with transition states separate from symbol emission states, as is normally done when using the Viterbi algorithm for sequence analysis, and in so doing offload some of the state memory to the topology of the graph by making sets of states position-specific.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Isn't that just going to increase the size/memory-requirements of the graph though? Especially if you're considering language and the like? I was trying to mention that at the end of that paragraph. This subject is hardly my area of expertise so I apologize for not being clearer or simply talking out of my ass. I just can't imagine a way of constructing a Markov Chain to sensibly generate highly context-specific data, like with language, without structuring it such that each state is so large in terms of data/input/whatever that it defeats the purpose of using a Markov Chain. It's not really meant to be applied in those situations.

[Trekkin]

Isn't that just going to increase the size/memory-requirements of the graph though? Especially if you're considering language and the like? I was trying to mention that at the end of that paragraph. This subject is hardly my area of expertise so I apologize for not being clearer or simply talking out of my ass. I just can't imagine a way of constructing a Markov Chain to sensibly generate highly context-specific data, like with language, without structuring it such that each state is so large in terms of data/input/whatever that it defeats the purpose of using a Markov Chain. It's not really meant to be applied in those situations.

Oh, it does, but you can see how, if you want to run many trajectories, it's more efficient to load one big graph once and run a bunch of tiny states running through it rather than the other way around.

One of the strengths of Markov chains is precisely what DNNs don't do: they're a way to build a graph such that subsets of transition probabilities remain meaningful regardless of scale, so you can extract useful information from the trellis directly. That can be used to detect parts of the graph in need of reweighting, especially since Viterbi can work on a section of the graph at a time; it can also be used to look at some random sequence and quantify how much it looks like the training set and in what ways.

You are right, though: generating symbol strings isn't what Markov chains are good at. The particular strengths of the Markov tool set are analytical, even though you could theoretically stochastically traverse the graph and get strings out. They're a fine way to sort through generated strings, though, and assign them a probability of being equivalent to the set the model was built from, which can help weed out things like "bandwidh" from "bandwidth."

So instead of using the HMM to generate text, you can generate random text and then filter it -- and in a way that breaks down why a given string scores how it does, symbol by symbol.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Thanks, Trekkin. I found that all really interesting and helpful. I don't have any more to add though. Again. Not really my field of study. Doesn't make it any less neat though.

[Reelya]

1000 article on cyber warfare? you need specialized search engines. Google Scholar is probably the best bet:

https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=cyberwarfare&btnG=&oq=cyberw

[Jopax]

PARKOUR!

[bloop_bleep]

PARKOUR!

Yeah, Atlas is the most representative example of the cutting edge of bipedal robot engineering, and has been for a while.

It's almost scary. Not so long ago getting robots to walk up stairs without falling immediately was the Next Big Thing.

[Reelya]

It seems Silicon Valley start-ups are claiming to have invented a radical new form of how to manage your life.

It's called "co"-"living".

Let me break that down for you because it's such a radical concept that most of us have no way to parse this concept. "Living" is where you live, i.e. in a house or apartment. "Co" is doing it with someone else. So you put that together and you have "co-living" - it means that you live in a house and someone else does too. Or at least it should mean that. Read on to reveal the slightly creepy Orwellian tones behind that simple sounding thing.

It's apparently the latest buzzword in Silicon Valley. There are at least three different Silicon Valley start-ups based on the term.

http://www.businessinsider.com/coliving-startup-hubhaus-silicon-valley-mansions-2017-6/?r=AU&IR=T

"HubHaus" sounds good on paper. Actually no it doesn't. Instead of being just a "connect" social app for finding co-renters, e.g. similar to Uber, you pay rent to HubHaus for just your room . HubHaus become your rental overlords, and you lose all control over who you share with. Seriously, who wants coporate rental overlords? They're trying to sell this as a cool and innovative thing, hence neologisms like "co-living" instead of "glorified boarding house". Imagine if everyone moved into these sorts of things and Google or Facebook bought them up?

https://qz.com/990247/co-living-startups-like-welive-and-common-are-selling-millennials-the-hippie-dream-minus-the-hard-work-and-revolution/

And this other one charges you $2000 a month to live in a house with ... 10 people that you have no say in. Fucking great. It's got mini bar fridges like a hotel and shit and maids etc. Great, they've invented up-market hotels for young professionals.

Much of the language these start-ups use to describe themselves is ripe for parody. Krash calls itself a “particle accelerator for people.” A company called Ollie is developing North America’s largest co-living development in Long Island City, Queens, and has created an app called Bedvetter to match roommates. Yes, they named it that on purpose.

Shit man, these two companies weren't in the intro. There are at least 5 such Silicon Valley companies trying to define "co-living" to mean living in a sterile corporate managed room in a big company-owned share house. Man, if this takes off in Silicon Valley then gets rolled out for the rest of us, it won't be so "up market", it would be more like "WalMart Micro-Apartment Complex - coming soon to a deserted stretch of highway near you - right next to WalMart".

[bloop_bleep]

How does "particle accelerator for people" even remotely make sense? Is it because "co-living" is supposed to accelerate your productivity or something? I'm in confusion here.

But honestly Silicon Valley does often go through these phases where some completely un-novel and probably infeasible concept becomes the Next Big Thing for investors. It'll pass, hopefully.

[Reelya]

Actually I've given this a little more thought and something worrying came to me.

NYU professor Johnothan Haidt in his videos (well worth the time even if you disagree with his ideas) talks about how after a few highly publicized child murders in the 1980s - around when they started doing the "milk carton" thing, parents started doing serious levels of "helicopter parenting" and stopped letting kids e.g. go outside and play unsupervised. At least they did in the middle class urban areas of the USA, don't know about the rural South etc. But in the places where they generally have the money to send you to college to get a professional degree, they mostly did this. Wealthy people have less kids, each one is a higher investment, gets more attention. Too much attention.

Then when the first generations of kids raised like that hit colleges they started demanding "official" responses to anything and everything that could possible offend them (notably, 2013+ on campuses). Basically, if someone calls you a name on campus now and you can plausibly link that to your identity in any way, the normal response is now to submit a formal complaint to Title IX or some diversity tribunal, or call the Dean of the school directly, even before you talk to the person to tell them you were offended. The norm is now to get someone else to deal with it. e.g. these kids had 18 years of their parents sticking up for them any time anything remotely challenging happens, e.g. if someone calls you a name, they have few coping skills. Even consensual sexual encounters are now codified with complex sets of rules that both parties are supposed to memorize at campuses. Basically, quite a few modern college kids have almost zero of the normal life skills in negotiating with other people - there has always been someone else who does that for you, and clearly delineated rulebooks for how to interact. e.g. their life is like a school-run Junior Disco, writ large, right up to when you leave college.

Then suddenly, they have to find a house, get along with flatmates, negotiate life's complexities. But the system inherently shields them from having to learn any of that at college. The kids themselves are the driving force now in implementing these campus "speech laws" and "relationship laws", not the college administrators.

So think about it, modern post-2010 college graduates, born in the helicopter-parenting 1990s, they graduate from a college dorm never having had to manage a house or apartment of their own, or really deal with meaningful interactions with anyone else, then a company comes along and promises them an instant house full of Friends^tm, no cleaning, no bills, just add money. To someone who's had 22 years of other people picking up for them, that might sound much more attractive, than it would to use who've basically been out of home since 18.

[martinuzz]

Future of Life Institute published this video at the UN autonomous weapons convention in Geneva today.

https://youtu.be/HipTO_7mUOw

Perhaps I should have put it in the 'what made you terrified today' thread

[martinuzz]

German scientists developed new material properties using 3D printing techniques.
Their material tranforms pressure into rotation, a material property that does not exist in nature.
They designed an ingenious little cube of less that 1/10th of a millimeter that can be printed using a laser 3D printer.
It uses rings and diagonal connections to guide pressure forces sideways.
These cubes can be used as 'cells' to build larger objects.

compressing the material by 1% results in a rotation of 2 degrees perpendicular to the angle of compression.
The scientist write in their article in Science that, for example, the material would be very suitable as a shock absorber.

Since a few years, 3D printing has spurred interest amongst scientists worldwide to create metamaterials with programmable mechanical properties that do not exist in 'natural' materials.
Transforming pressure into rotation was once such property that had not been realised until now.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/tech/duitsers-ontwerpen-nieuwe-gedrag-in-3d-geprint-metamateriaal~a4541459/

[Starver]

This reminds me of a foam (I think), many years ago ('80s?), that was designed to react differently to compression.

Normally it might look a bit like:

Code: [Select]

   Press
     |
     v
    ---
   /   \ -> Bulges
<- \   /
    ---
     ^
     |
   Press
...it was engineered to instead do something like:

Code: [Select]

   Press
     |
     v
    ---
    \ /  <- Thins
->  / \
    ---
     ^
     |
   Press

I don't know if it ever became anything interesting, commercially, but it was a new development at the research level of material design, certainly. May have taken quite a bit of complex processing ('template' building, foam around it, washing out the template blocks, as per some kinds of open-cell foam construction). With enough microstructure control, it sounds like all kinds of interesting 'wierdness' (it probably happens a lot in biology!) can be instituted, optimising both function and strength.

[TalonisWolf]

Just heard about this thread, PTW because learning random tidbits has proven useful in ways that help me keep limbs when people have bad ideas. Keep it up!

[SalmonGod]

Future of Life Institute published this video at the UN autonomous weapons convention in Geneva today.

https://youtu.be/HipTO_7mUOw

Perhaps I should have put it in the 'what made you terrified today' thread

The future is terrifying.  I do honestly believe something of this nature is inevitable, unless we find some way to break the correlation between sociopathic greed and positions of power.