Open thread, May 8 - May 14, 2017

You might find this interesting.

The Strange Loop in Deep Learning

https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/the-strange-loop-in-deep-learning-38aa7caf6d7d

"The crux of the approach is the use of a ‘cycle-consistency loss’. This loss ensures that the network can perform the forward translation and followed by the reverse translations with minimal loss. That is, the network must learn how to not only translate the original image, in needs to also learn the inverse (or reverse) translation."

I used to be very active in the Quantified Self community in the past but currently I still follow the Facebook group. As far as I know there's no app that does a good job at this task.

For background research you might check out: https://gyrosco.pe/ http://www.inputbox.co/#/start http://www.reporter-app.com/ http://brainaid.com/

Gleeo Time Tracker lets you define categories, and then use one click to start or stop tracking the category. You can edit the records and include more specific descriptions in them. You can export all data to spreadsheet. I use it to track my daily time, on very general level -- how much I sleep, meditate, etc.

(Note: When you start integrating with other apps, there are almost unlimited options. You may want to make some kind of plugin system, write a few plugins yourself, and let other users write their own. Otherwise people will bother you endlessly to integrate with their favorite app.)

Looks like a database with some input forms.

Your post reads as if you read my mind. :)

I currently use a mix between TapLog (for Android) and google forms (with an icon on my home screen so that it mimics a locally installed app).

Neither feels as if they really solve my needs, though. E.g. both lack a reminder feature.

You could probably cobble something together with google forms.

https://docs.google.com/forms/u/0/

This can record the time and date of when the form was filled in. And it can go into a spreadsheet for easy analysis

Not radical enough!

You not need to see a seagull, it is better to hear a seagull. Especially for the reason your vision angle is not all around and behind the tree.

Your hearing is.

And when you hear a seagull, your phone hears it too, and there is no need for "a popup insert record into the database Android/Apple gesture widget" shit. It can be done automatically every time!

You don't want me to continue, do you?

When we get into discussions about security, the best tools I've found are:

1. Attack Trees: If someone wants to add a new security feature they have to justify it by pointing at an attack that is not covered by other mitigations.
2. Cost/Risk analysis: Decide if it worth worrying about state-level actors/professionals criminals/script kiddies.

no one can ever argue against 'security', so you always win if you bring it up

Doesn't work for me. I am the guy saying "we should not be doing X, because when you google for X, the first three results are all telling you that you definitely shouldn't be doing X", and everyone else is "dude, you already spent the whole day trying to solve this issue, just do it the easy way and move on to the other urgent high-priority tasks".

Probably depends on the type of a company, i.e. what is the trade-off between "doing the project faster" and "covering your ass" for your superiors. If they have little to lose by being late, but can potentially get sued for ignoring a security issue, then yes, this is really scary.

A possible solution is to tell the developer to just do it as fast as possible, but still in a perfectly secure way. Have daily meetups asking him ironically whether he is still working on that one simple task. But also make him sign a document that you can deduct his yearly salary if he knowingly ignores a security issue. -- Now he has an incentive to shut up about the security issues (to avoid giving a proof that he knew about them).

a weird cold war in software design

Which particular corner of software do you have in mind?

Why do you think a piece of software has the same goals as it's creator? My conscious planning mind doesn't have the same goals as evolution.

Current software doesn't even have goals, it has behaviors. Ascribing desires and decision-making to it leads to incorrect beliefs. AIs will have goals, but they'll be influenced and shaped by their creators rather than being fully specified.

My impression is that this wouldn't as useful as the outside view might suggest because TAP's tend to be pretty individualized.

Also, I think that you'd get more value out of learning the general schema of rationality techniques (EX: what TAPs are vs what TAPs people use).

That said, I have a few of them in this post here that you may like to check out.

It works similarly for me with programming. I love programming, except when I have a programming task assigned, and must provide reports of how long it took me to solve it, and must debate whether what I am doing now is the highest priority or whether I should be doing something else instead (such as googling for existing solutions for this or similar problems)...

What you need to feel good at deep work) is:

• a task that optimally fits your abilities (not boringly simple, not scarily difficult);
• a meaningful context (even if the meaning is: I am playing / exploring);
• a clear goal (so you have a feedback whether you are approaching it);
• a working environment without distractions.

Okay... so this draws on a couple of things which can be confusing. 1) perspective projections 2) mapping spheres onto 2D planes.

Usually when we think of a field of vision we imagine some projection that maps the 3D world in front of us to some 2D rectangle image. And that's all fine and well. We don't expect the lines in the image to conserve the angles they had in 3D.

I think what the author of the post is saying is that if you use a cylindrical projection that wraps around 360 degrees horizontally, then the lines will appear parallel when you unwrap it. But there's nothing wrong with this. If it seems like it would be a contradiction, because the lines cross each other at right angles in 3D - it's because in a z-aligned cylindrical projection, the point where the lines cross will be on one of the singularities that sit on each pole. And if the cylindrical projection is not z-aligned, the lines won't be parallel, and will cross each other at some angle.

I guess you can also think of this as two projections. There is the two lines on the floor, which are projected up onto the bird's panoramic view (a sphere), and then the sphere is projected onto a z-aligned cylinder, and then the cylinder is unwrapped to give us our 2D image with the two lines parallel.

Like how if you projected two perpendicular lines up onto the bottom of this globe they might align with say, 0"/180" and 90"/270", but they would appear parallel on the output cylindrical projection

This is assuming that by "perspective" we mean something like "projection onto a sphere". Then the lines become great semicircles and it's true that they are parallel at the horizon, at least in the sense that the great circle representing the horizon meets them each at a right angle.

If you surround the bird B with a ten-meter-radius sphere and map each point A on the ground to the intersection between the line segment AB and the sphere, the x and y axis map to a total of four curves along the lower half of the sphere, all of which are, in fact, parallel at the equator.

Short enough to just post here rater than linking:

Imagine, that you are an intelligent bird with a 360 degrees, panoramic view, flying over a plane equipped with orthogonal x and y axis, clearly visible and – what a coincidence – intersecting just 10 meters beneath you.

I argue, that due to the well known phenomenon of the geometrical perspective, you see in a distance the line which goes North, parallel to the line which goes West. In fact, every direction seems parallel to all other three directions.

Is that right, and why it’s right? How could this be?

Is there an unstated assumption that the panoramic view is accomplished by mapping to a human-evolved ~135 degree field of view? I don't think this would happen in a brain evolved and trained on panoramic eyes/sensors. It doesn't happen in reality, where panoramic views exist everywhere and are generally accessed by turning our heads.

Parallel lines appear to intersect according to perspective. But, the more distant parts of the lines are the parts that appear to intersect. Here, where the lines actually do intersect, the more distant parts are away from the intersection. If these are ideal lines such that one could not gauge distance, and one is only looking downward, such as a projection onto a plane, then they are visually indistinguishable from parallel lines. Whether that's the same thing as them appearing to be parallel may be ... a matter of perspective. But, since this is a bird with 360 degree view, it can see that the lines do not also extend above the bird as parallel lines would, so they do not appear parallel to it.