Software, Geekery and other miscellany
I often say that developers should always attend local meetups and conferences. It's not for the knowledge. You can get knowledge anywhere - Internet, YouTube, blogs. Even most conferences themselves will release the talk videos.
The main point of attending a conference is to meet other developers. Developing connections in the …
The most annoying key on the keyboard is the Caps Lock. Does anyone actually use this key? It seems to get activated at the most inopportune moments (eg: when typing a password) without our knowledge.
But there are times when you want to type a small word in caps. Especially …
A recent news report says that Swedish schools are ditching tablets and back to books.
"Sweden’s Minister of Schools, Lotta Edholm, said children’s ability to read has deteriorated and their writing skills have weakened, and there are many reasons, the most important of which is their increased reliance …
Mindstorms is a book by Seymour Papert that was first published in 1980. Seymour Papert is the inventor of the LOGO programming language, and the book lays down the motivation for creating LOGO as a teaching aid for children.
When we talk about teaching aid, we probably conjure up something …
Even in quantum computers, many calculations are done using traditional circuits. What usually happens is that a bunch of calculations are done using traditional microprocessors and then there will be some hard algorithm that needs to run, things like prime factorisation or brute force search. There are the algorithms that …
"You can have a chocolate or ice cream. Which do you want?"
I posed this question to my son. To nobody's surprise, he rejected the choice and answered "Both". Repeating that he should only choose one of the options were in vain. What he knew very well was that the …
We have been talking the last few days about ChatGPT. One of the interesting things about a deep learning AI system is how it 'stores' knowledge.
In traditional computing systems, we can point to part on the storage device and say "these bytes are stored here" and "these other bytes …
On the topic of academia vs intuition of real people, Taleb has a funny, but illuminating story. It goes like this:
You toss a fair coin 99 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of heads on the next toss?
If you ask a normal …
Back to Taleb's tweet
Yesterday we discussed about probability space vs consequence space. Taleb says: What ChatGPT is missing that while academia is in probability space, life is in consequence space.
What does this mean?
Here is where we need to understand how ChatGPT works. When you ask a question …
Since I have been writing about unexpected statistical outcomes due to skews in the dataset, I thought I'd take a look at Nassim Taleb's twitter to see what he has been tweeting about. I came across this tweet
This is quite an interesting tweet. Taleb mentions two terms: Probability space …