Amina Safdar

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on the atlas — 31

highlights — 66

wrote an entire essay
Back Just In Time To Close Out the Year - by Dorian Taylor
Aristotle referred to this tradition by repeating Democritus’ examples, but he did not maintain that technology can only imitate nature: “generally technè in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates nature”
Philosophy of Technology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
One early theme is the thesis that technology learns from or imitates nature (Plato, Laws X 899a ff.
Philosophy of Technology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Mitcham (1994) calls this type of philosophy of technology “humanities philosophy of technology” because it accepts “the primacy of the humanities over technologies” and is continuous with the overall perspective of the humanities (and some of the social sciences).
Philosophy of Technology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
meaning of technology for, and its impact on, society and culture, rather than with technology itself
Philosophy of Technology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
It is hugely important not only as an economic force but also as a cultural force
Philosophy of Technology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
You can't get humans to be freed from boredom.
Dr. Richard Hamming on “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.”
That's why man ended up at the top of the heap. He has the flexibility built in. But don't ever try to get humans do something reliable.
Dr. Richard Hamming on “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.”
The other thing about the situation is that 90% of the scientists who ever lived are now alive
Dr. Richard Hamming on “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.”
From Newton's time to ours, we have about double the knowledge every 17 years.
Dr. Richard Hamming on “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.”
You can't copy me directly, you won't get away with it.
Dr. Richard Hamming on “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.”
ppendix 2: Using Anki to learn APIs
Augmenting Long-term Memory
Procedural versus declarative memory: There's a big difference between remembering a fact and mastering a process.
Augmenting Long-term Memory
First, if memorizing a fact seems worth 10 minutes of my time in the future, then I do it*
Augmenting Long-term Memory
You can reasonably think of the essay as a how-to guide aimed at helping develop virtuoso skills with personal memory systems
Augmenting Long-term Memory
for instance, people often talk of “rote memory” as though it's inferior to more advanced kinds of understanding. I'll argue against this point of view, and make a case that memory is central to problem solving and creativity.
Augmenting Long-term Memory
While Anki is an extremely simple program, it's possible to develop virtuoso skill using Anki, a skill aimed at understanding complex material in depth, not just memorizing simple facts.
Augmenting Long-term Memory
A thesis represents an investment with an uncertain return, mostly because its life-changing aspects have to do with process. Maybe it’s the last time your most harebrained ideas will be taken seriously. Everyone deserves to feel this way. This is especially true given the stories from many college campuses about the comparatively lower number of women, first-generation students, and students of color who pursue optional thesis work. For these students, part of the challenge involves taking oneself seriously enough to ask for an unfamiliar and potentially path-altering kind of mentorship.
A Guide to Thesis-Writing and a Guide to Life | The New Yorker
It’s also about engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with “the knowledge that anyone can teach us something.” It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of one’s own voice.
A Guide to Thesis-Writing and a Guide to Life | The New Yorker
When everything else you learned in college is marooned in the past—when you happen upon an old notebook and wonder what you spent all your time doing, since you have no recollection whatsoever of a senior-year postmodernism seminar—it is the thesis that remains, providing the once-mastered scholarly foundation that continues to authorize, decades-later, barroom observations about the late-career works of William Faulker or the Hotelling effect.
A Guide to Thesis-Writing and a Guide to Life | The New Yorker
invocation of thesis-as-first-love
A Guide to Thesis-Writing and a Guide to Life | The New Yorker
“A more just society,” Eco writes at the book’s outset, would be one where anyone with “true aspirations” would be supported by the state, regardless of their background or resources.
A Guide to Thesis-Writing and a Guide to Life | The New Yorker
How to Write a Thesis” is sparked by the wish to give any student with the desire and a respect for the process the tools for producing a rigorous and meaningful piece of writing.
A Guide to Thesis-Writing and a Guide to Life | The New Yorker
Eco’s career has been defined by a desire to share the rarefied concerns of academia with a broader reading public.
A Guide to Thesis-Writing and a Guide to Life | The New Yorker
translation by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina
A Guide to Thesis-Writing and a Guide to Life | The New Yorker
Note that that essay describes a set of heuristics for reading papers – indeed, of syntopically reading entire literatures – that are largely orthogonal to the heuristic I’m about to describe.
Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics
How can we make actionable this idea that it’s possible to deepen our mathematical understanding in an open-ended way? What heuristics can we use to deepen our understanding of a piece of mathematics?
Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics
essay by the mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov
Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics
What does it mean to understand a piece of mathematics?
Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics
What is desired is that Alice observes specific examples from the course, and then has to answer new, but related questions on the exam
A Course in Machine Learning
very simple model of learning called a de ci sion tree
A Course in Machine Learning
and how to determine success (or failure)
A Course in Machine Learning
what does it mean to learn?
A Course in Machine Learning
A t a basic level , machine learning is about predicting the future based on the past
A Course in Machine Learning
In general, this means making informed guesses about some un- observed property of some object, based on observed properties of that objec
A Course in Machine Learning
for the philo- sophical questions it raises about what it means to learn and succeed at tasks
A Course in Machine Learning
ny plausible approach to artifi- cial intelligence must involve learning, at some level, if for no other reason than it’s hard to call a system intelligent if it cannot learn
A Course in Machine Learning
Because computers are incapable of creating meaningful ontological categories, and because the invention of new ontologies requires collective acceptance before they can be used, the most workable approach is to have the expected consumers of an ontology create and maintain it themselves. We could call this process the crowdsourcing of ontology.
The Stupidity of Computers | Issue 13 | n+1
When the Library of Congress finds a book difficult to classify, they either refine their ontological system or they fit it into the existing system as best they can. It is always a matter of approximation.
The Stupidity of Computers | Issue 13 | n+1
ut they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money.
The Stupidity of Computers | Issue 13 | n+1
Rather than underscoring the impoverishment of semantic analysis, the great success of Google has indicated how much can be done in the absence of that analysis.
The Stupidity of Computers | Issue 13 | n+1
Any instructions to a computer must be as laboriously precise as these. Some of the towering achievements in computer science have been in the creation of brilliantly clever, efficient, and useful algorithms such as Quicksort, Huffman Compression, the Fast Fourier Transform, and the Monte Carlo method, all reasonably simple (but not obvious) methods of accomplishing precisely specified tasks on potentially huge amounts of precisely specified data. Alongside such computational challenges there has been the dream of artificial intelligence: to get computers to think.
The Stupidity of Computers | Issue 13 | n+1
You could even say that these men were engaged in a strange parody of the activities of the men of the Enlightenment, who used the printing press to diffuse a new attitude toward life that broke with the inherited traditions
Game Theory | Issue 7 | n+1
You could even say that these men were engaged in a strange parody of the activities of the men of the Enlightenment, who used the printing press to diffuse a new attitude toward life that broke with the inherited traditions and dogmas of the past.
Game Theory | Issue 7 | n+1
Do you think that augments are the death of craft? Like does craft even matter nowadays? You could also say that craft matters more than ever before. Now that we have this new frontier of skills we can use as artists, there’s a whole new focus on the beauty of skillful creation again. Like, I think of my art as conceptual art, but it’s also meant to be beautiful and really well made. Which is more than you could say about a lot of art by people with no technical skill. Including a lot of conceptual artists.
My Kid Could Do That | Online Only | n+1
But most of the art using augments, like your projects, aren’t really about augmentation, they’re just using the AI as a funny joke or novelty. There hasn’t really been any art that uses augmentation not just as a tool but as the content of the work.
My Kid Could Do That | Online Only | n+1
People also argue that these artworks don’t constitute forms of self-expression. They say there is just “too much” technological mediation in the way between me and the final form. But I think it’s the opposite. The augments allow me to express myself that much more authentically and directly than any other technology ever invented.
My Kid Could Do That | Online Only | n+1
And I wanted to acknowledge that the engineers are creative decision makers in their own right. For those reasons I always list the engineers as collaborators in my work.
My Kid Could Do That | Online Only | n+1
These are all technologies that enable artists to express ourselves to the best of our ability.
My Kid Could Do That | Online Only | n+1
But three other bisociations, admittedly less ambitious, have proved to be very fruitful, and they structure this short history. Famous Frenchman René Descartes reconciled algebra and geometry; the British logician George Boole brought algebra and logic together; and an American engineer from MIT, Claude Shannon, bisociated binary calculation with electronic relays
Homo informaticus | Issue 141 | Philosophy Now