Recent content by aa

Sorry for bumping this old post and it's not mine, but I have a comment above about my plans for a grand career change 3 years ago and wanted to provide an update. I have been naive - everyone in this thread knew more about career changes than me. I didn't know how much time it takes to make...

Good of you to follow up. That's great to hear! You are displaying resilience. You also sound more self-confident. You are learning about yourself.

In college, about 20 years ago, I majored in computer science. You speak of apathy; I didn't even have a theoretical subject I was 'passionate' about. I spent a lot of my undergraduate playing counter-strike, starcraft, and wrestling with depression. I went in and out of academic probation...

It's good that you are aiming high. Some people say of this successful person or that "Oh, but they were lucky because of X." Consider a worm that evolved to have a sensor and primitive brain network for perceiving and computing how to approach the best sources of sugar crystals to eat. Over...

HAYAO, Re-reading my post, I might be giving the impression that I am saying your posts in this thread are too wordy. Not at all! For example, your first post in this thread is a model of conciseness and clarity, i.e. perfect writing (as Borek basically said)

HAYAO, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White is a short book that encapsulates the most important tenets of good writing. The main rule is to minimize the number of words. That makes the writing pleasant to read. One should write as they speak. That is, pretend you were speaking to your...

If a nuclear war occurred, tens of millions of people at least would survive. Technological progress would salvage itself back from the wreckage and continue on again. (Michael Crichton in Jurassic Park) There is no archaeological evidence that people have been blasted back to the Stone Age...

I also am faced with the task of learning from basics. I've enjoyed Alberts et al.'s Molecular Biology of the Cell and Mark F.Bear et al.'s Neuroscience. Since you are young, some "extra gloss" on math or physics will not hurt you, as it will always apply in some way, or your brain will be...

I have just started looking (in-depth) into this myself, and Theodore Berger's hippocampus prosthetic (he is now the chief science officer of a startup called Kernel) is interesting. Theodore Berger has some publicly available papers.

I agree with much of what you said about unconscious computing. In your definition of intelligence, why extraction from images specifically?

Why should they?

"Is suffering and sacrifice necessary for progress?" You bring up a good point. I said Silicon Valley is to the U.S. as the U.S. is to the rest of the world, but the U.S. had the benefit of geographic and legal blank slates. Knowledge is replacing the importance of actual physical objects in...

SW VandeCarr, You're correct that real estate, like the stock market, is necessary and useful. In place of "real estate" I should have said unnecessary real estate transferring and gaming. I apologize for denigrating some people, who are not doing anything wrong, when I made use of a...

"Do we need so many lawyers?" There are inefficiencies in every branch of industry. Capitalism let's people choose their vocation and encourages people to work hard by dangling the carrot of money. (It was supposed to dangle the carrot of all the things you could buy with the coupons you got...

The U.S., like a real-time learning brain, also allows itself to self-modify in a short time span. Due to things like cycling of presidents and lawful encouragement of modifications to the governmental system itself, the U.S. embarked on a rate of evolution order of magnitude bigger than...