, 3 min read
Scientists found a human gene which, when inserted into mice, makes their brain grow larger. David Brin has a series of classical sci-fi books where we “uplift” animals so that they become as smart as we are. Coincidence? I think not. Should we be more willing to accept new medical therapies?…
, 2 min read
Suppose that you are working on a business problem where you have multiple attributes… maybe you have a table with multiple columns such as “age, gender, income, location, occupation”. You might be interested in determining whether there are relations between some of these attributes. Maybe…
, 3 min read
I sometimes consult with bright colleagues from other departments who do advanced statistical models or simulations. They are from economics, psychology, and so forth. Quite often, their code is slow. As in “it takes weeks to run”. That’s not good. Given the glacial pace of academic research,…
, 7 min read
Facebook’s leading artificial-intelligence researcher Yan Lecun wrote: In the history of science and technology, the engineering artifacts have almost always preceded the theoretical understanding: the lens and the telescope preceded optics theory, the steam engine preceded thermodynamics, the…
, 3 min read
I was a nerdy kid who liked to spend a lot of time reading. Back then, we did not have the Internet, we could not even imagine it… so I ended up reading the dictionary, reading my encyclopedia. I had a weird vocabulary. I could easily string sentences that nobody around me could understand.…
, 7 min read
Chollet has a piece on the impossibility of intelligence explosion. He is responding to the theory that smart machines will build even smarter machines, and that soon, human beings will become obsolete. He convincingly tears apart this theory. Human brains might be obsolete one day, but it is not…
, 3 min read
In compression techniques like Stream VByte or Google’s varint-GB, we use control bytes to indicate how blocks of data are compressed. Without getting into the details (see the paper), it is important to map these control bytes to the corresponding number of compressed bytes very quickly. The…
, 1 min read
Many of us rely on a Qwerty keyboard, at least when we are typing at a laptop. It is often said that the Qwerty keyboard is inferior to clearly better alternatives like the Dvorak keyboard. However, this appears to be largely a myth backed by dubious science. There is the similarly often repeated…
, 3 min read
Women earned majority of doctoral degrees in 2016 for 8th straight year and outnumber men in grad school 135 to 100. Materialists use Facebook more frequently, because they compare themselves to others, they objectify and instrumentalize others, and they accumulate friends. The modern office chair,…
, 3 min read
I believe that there are no miracle people. When others get the same work done as you do, only much faster, they are almost surely using better tools. Tools are not always physical objects. In fact, most tools are not physical per se. For example, mathematics is a great tool. Word processors are…
, 1 min read
Do relational databases evolve toward rigidity?
, 5 min read
The Hanson law of computing states that: Any software system, including advanced intelligence, is bound to decline over time. It becomes less flexible and more fragile. I have argued at length that Hanson is wrong. My main argument is empirical: we build much of our civilization on old software,…
, 1 min read
In my latest post, I explained how you could accelerate 32-bit integer divisions by transforming them into 64-bit floating-point divisions. Indeed, 64-bit floating-point numbers can represent accurately all 32-bit integers on most processors. It is a strange result: Intel processors seem to do a…
, 2 min read
Josiah Zayner, a biochemist who once worked for NASA, became the first person known to have edited his own genes (…) During a lecture about human genetic engineering that was streamed live on Facebook, Zayner whipped out a vial and a syringe, then injected himself. Now, following in his…
, 3 min read
On current processors, integer division is slow. If you need to compute many quotients or remainders, you can be in trouble. You potentially need divisions when programming a circular buffer, a hash table, generating random numbers, shuffling data randomly, sampling from a set, and so forth. There…
, 2 min read
When people train, they usually don’t try to actually run faster or lift heavier weights. As a relatively healthy computer science professor, how fast I run or how much I can lift is of no practical relevance. However, whether I can walk the stairs without falling apart is a metric. I am not an…
, 3 min read
I have previously reported that there has been a silent revolution in science where countries like China, India, South Korea… that previously contributed few research articles… have started to catch up and even exceed the productivity of the western world. The National Science Foundation (NSF)…
, 8 min read
Read the following quote from the New York Times: Business is taking an interest in artificial intelligence, or A.I., and some professors, are forming or joining companies to capitalize on the expected boom. But the new move toward commercialization is disrupting the academic community and…
, 7 min read
Though most relational databases (like MySQL) are “row oriented”, in that they keep rows stored together… experience has taught us that pivoting the data arrow so that columns, and not rows, are stored together can be beneficial. This is an old observation that most experienced programmers…
, 3 min read
There is a very famous picture commonly used in image processing research and classes, that of Lena Forsén. Lena Forsén posed nude for the Playboy magazine in the 1970s. A cropped version of the picture has been used ever since. The picture being used is “safe for work”, but if you Google…