I've used NEAT a few for a few different things. The main upside of it is that it requires a lot less hyper-parameter tuning than modern reinforcement learning options. But that's really the only advantage. It really only works on a subset of reinforcement learning tasks (online episodic). Also, it is a very inefficient search of the solution space as compared to modern options like PPO. It also only works on problems with fairly low dimensional inputs/outputs.
That being said, it's elegant and easy to reason about. And it's a nice intro into reinforcement learning. So definitely worth learning.
This criticism is all the more poignant given that it comes from Nabokov. He is one of the few authors for whose works the Russian and English versions are almost equivalent; he was bilingual and did the translation himself.
I guess that's objectively worse since it results in false negatives as opposed to false positives. But personally I think it stings a bit more to get tricked into procedures you don't actually need.
It's genuinely hard to identify dishonest practitioners. I think the best solution might be to convince the insurance companies to pay for second opinions. And then only to pay for the procedure if the two diagnoses agree. But I guess that's a tall ask.
Or separate diagnosis from treatment. I'd like to go to one dentist who gets paid a flat fee to look at my mouth and identify problems, and then choose another dentist who can fix the problem. That way no dentist has the incentive to lie.
I think one of the most valuable lessons I have learned in software engineering is that you can write entire projects with the express plan of rewriting them if they actually gain traction. If I want to prototype something these days, I will often write code that, while not quite spaghetti, would definitely not pass a proper code review. It's actually kind of fun. Almost like a cheat day on a diet or something.
Unfortunately, that rewrite step often doesn't happen. I can't count the number of times a prototype that was meant to be thrown away was actually put into production because "it's cheaper and faster than rewriting."
>I can't count the number of times a prototype that was meant to be thrown away was actually put into production because "it's cheaper and faster than rewriting."
Did the business make money, though? I think that's the law of the jungle
I’m working on a prototype now but I deliberately made it run entirely in the browser (indexeddb) to avoid the problem that I might be asked to put it in production!
I agree that such mockery isn't very charitable, but there is an underlying line logic to their thinking. We know that a system like North Korea's is possible. We know a system like ours is possible. We don't have any evidence that any other system is actually possible.
Sure you could imagine something better. But such a system could very easily have fatal flaws you didn't imagine. In fact, North Korea started as just such a utopian ideal.
You could also argue that we used to have a system that was better than this. But if that system ultimately became this one, than reverting to the previous state would likely at some point result in the current state occurring again.
So in a sense "Do you want to live in North Korea?" is the only valid question.
I think North Korea was always an authoritarian state from the get go, it was built by the soviets over the ruins of the Korean war. It's just coated in a socialist paintjob just like many other dictatorships.
You're right in that reverting to a previous system will always be a temporary solution, but I don't believe there is any perfect system able to endure until the end of times.
"Do you want to live in North Korea?" should never be used as an argument against any kind of reforms deemed "socialist" by the Right.
As a start, would it be so bad to implement a carbon tax? Tighter control of human rights on foreign imports? Stronger social nets? The list goes on...
Sure. I agree Many of those things would be a net benefit. So why don't we have them?
It seems to me, the main reason is that representatives won't vote for them. Why not? Mainly because their financial and political incentives are structured in such a way that they can't. Why are these incentives like this? You can keep peeling back layers of the onion like this forever, but as some point you realize it's just due to structures of the system that will recreate themselves in any similar system. Like how wings evolved separately in different evolutionary branches but all conform to a similar structure. Any capitalist economic system will have methods for vested interests to inhibit many types of positive change.
I want to believe we can have a better economic system, not necessarily capitalistic, maybe one where resource allocation is achieved more democratically.
Capitalism, with all its flaws, was still an improvement over feudalism. I refuse to believe it can't get any better.
I ran YaCy for a while, but not as a node on their distributed search index. I just ran it as a search engine for all my own bookmarks. Unfortunately I never found a particularly good way of getting bookmarks into the system. So eventually I shut it down. Cool idea in theory though.
I have plan that I haven’t implemented yet, but I want to route all my outbound internet traffic through a Squid reverse proxy, which will in turn add every visited URL to YaCy (except for domains I choose to exempt).
That way I’ll have a fully searchable index of every website I ever visit, which will hopefully solve the “Oh shit, what was that one website I found about X two months ago?”
A potentially easier thing to do would be create a bookmarklet that adds the current page to YaCy.
Yeah. Bookmark indexing was my original goal. But yacy doesn't have a great interface for that. Doable with some work, but not something i wanted to sink too much time into.
Ah, you're right. The video chat was definitely p2p though, I remember reading about it when it came out. I just tried to check what p2p video chat implementations were available back then, but no luck. Maybe a java plugin?
That being said, it's elegant and easy to reason about. And it's a nice intro into reinforcement learning. So definitely worth learning.