I think what we actually want is to be the equivalent of a gentlemen scientist supported by family wealth or a patron, sitting in our study doing what interests us, corresponding with other smart people interested in the same topic, going for long walks thinking about hard problems. Even though we shouldn't complain, we can still strive for this.
Even if it's not hell, it could be so much better. It could be a place that kids actually look forward to going every day. Instead, we put them through 12 years of mandatory low grade torture where nothing they do is connected to the real world, their interest or curiosity, and when they're done they're launched into a world of AGI and ASI where none of what they learned is remotely enough for them to contribute to society in any way.
It's the same kind of people who claimed human flight would not be possible for 10,000 years in 1902. I just can't understand how narrow your mind has to be in order to be this skeptic.
Or the same kind of people who claimed Theranos was a scam, or that AI in the 70s wasn't about to produce Terminator within a few years, or that the .com bubble was in fact a bubble...
I can attest to letting my kid play Minecraft, install whatever mods he wants (at 6-7) and watch related tutorials has catapulted his English (not his native language) to insane levels. Playing with the Create Mod is basically just engineering. I do feel conflicted about how much screen time he gets but compared to how I spent my time as a kid, watching shitty soap operas on TV in the afternoons (because that's what was on), this is infinitely better. How can I be mad when he's throwing around words like "non-euclidean"? He's learning WAY more from Minecraft than school at this point. As a bonus, we're practically neighbors with Mojang, and visited them on a sick day once.
Love this. I have a young one I am thinking of letting get involved in the Minecraft scene (I think far less exploitative than Roblox?). How does one get started? What console are you using? Or PC? How do I enable mods? And who is Mojang?
Generally, minecraft creation is less exploitative than roblox, since mojang (the creators of the game) has no hand in your creations. Generally, a young one's creations will be "maps"/"worlds" (places where you can run around and play etc) and "skins" (how your character looks). AFAIK, minecraft mod creation is a lot more involved than it is for roblox, but I only have a very cursory knowledge of roblox.
Using mods will depend if they are playing the legacy pc version ("Java Edition"), which has much more mod support or the newer cross-platform version ("Bedrock Edition"), where mods are generally limited to things that are approved by mojang (I have a lot less experience with bedrock so don't quote me on that). Generally, you will find mods are either "forge" or "fabric", which are the main two types of framework that you can make them with. I think fabric is the more "modern" version, but both are constantly being updated for the latest version. They have their own modloaders, but you can use programs that manage your mods for you, such as the modrinth launcher or the curseforge launcher. Once you have one of those installed, you generally just drop the mods into the mods folder and assuming you have all the frameworks and versions correct, they should just work. You'll probably want to google for more detailed tutorials on adding mods if it's your first time, as a HN comment is going to be too short to contain them haha.
Generally, making full mods is going to involve java programming, so a decent grasp of java will help a lot there, and there are lots of tutorials for it online as well.
Agreed on Roblox. BUT it has Roblox Studio, which seems like a Unity-light. I taught my son to add different shapes, move them around, scale and rotate etc, so he could build his own obstacle courses. I think if you go down the Roblox route, make sure to focus on creation.
Just be careful that you are aware of roblox being a bit... eh about protecting its creators. This video (https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ) and its successor are about as much as I am aware of the situation, so it might have changed since they were put out
There are two versions of Minecraft: Java Edition and Bedrock Edition. Java Edition is only on PCs/Mac, while Bedrock is on phones, tablets and consoles. Java Edition is the original and I think more customizable in general, a bit more hard core. We just have both.
We use a special launcher for Java Edition called "Prism Launcher" which lets you handle different versions of the game, installing mods etc. It's really taught him important concepts like "if you install 134 mods, incompatibilities will break the game", and general debugging, like, install one mod at a time and revert it something doesn't work. I prefer PCs in general because it's more likely to lead to an understanding for computers.
I'd start with the base game! Give you kid a chance to familiarize themselves with the core mechanics, particularly redstone, then look into command blocks and resource packs. These are fully vanilla mechanics, no need to fiddle with installing mods (which differs based on platform/version), but are extremely powerful!
Yes, first of all just try the game and see if it sticks. Once there is obsessive interest, you can try to guide it towards mentally stimulating ends. I don't know if I'd recommend YouTube for english native speakers, but for kids like my son, learning English from YouTube is a plus. There are lots of shitty YouTubers just goofing around, but there are some good ones like Pixlriffs (Minecraft Survival Guide), Shalz and Mumbo Jumbo that focus on building things and exploring all aspects of the game and different mods. As an example, my son learned about crop rotation from Pixlriffs, because apparently its a mechanic in the game. Can't be mad at that!
I think it's really underestimated how much "frivolous" obsessions lead to rapid learning. I think you can take any obsession and guide it down a productive path. Played a lot of Counter Strike back in the day, and went to school with two brothers who built a betting site for CS esports games (not real money) and it blew up. I think they're rich now. Final Fantasy may seem like it doesn't teach you much, but it taught you reading, probably inspired many people to learn about Japan and the Japanese language, build websites about it etc.
You have to remember what came before 2012: SVMs, Random Forests etc, absolutely nothing like the brain (yes, NNs are old, but 2012 was the start of the deep learning revolution). With this frame of reference, the brain and neural networks are both a kind of Connectionism with similar properties, and I think it makes perfect sense to liken them with each other, draw inspiration from one and apply it to the other.
If this metric were truly indicative, what should we make of the remarkable ratios found in small birds (1:12), tree shrews (1:10), or even small ants (1:7)?
What came before was regression. Which is to this day no 1 method if we want something interpretable, especially if we know which functions our variables follow. And self attention is very similar to correlation matrix. In a way neural networks are just bunch of regression models stacked on top of each other with some normalization and nonlinearity between them. It's cool however how closely it resembles biology.
sorry, but i think neural-networks came way before 2012, notably the works of rumelhart, mccleland etc. see the 2 volume "parallel distributed processing" to read almost all about it.
2012 was when the revolutionaries stormed the bastille and overthrew the old guard. But I say it was 2006 when the revolution started, when the manifesto was published: deep NNs can be trained end-to-end, learning their own features [1]. I think this is when "Deep Learning" became a term of art, and the paper has 24k citations. (Interestingly in a talk a Vector Hinton gave two weeks ago he said his paper on deep learning at NIPS 2006 was rejected because they already had one.)
[1] G. E. Hinton and R. R. Salakhutdinov, 2006, Science, Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural Networks
Neural Networks are 200 years old (Legendre and Gauss defined Feed forward neural networks). Deep learning. The real difference between traditional ones and deep learning is a hierarchy of layers (hidden layers) which do different things to accomplish a goal. Even the concept of training is to provide weights on the neural network and there are many algorithms to do refinement, optimization and the network design.
I mean, sure, you can model a simple linear regression fitted via Least Squares (pretty much what they did 200 years ago) with a one hidden layer feed-fwd Neural Network, but the theorical framework for NNs is quite different.
For Least Squares, you do not even use a hidden layer. Just a single dense layer from input directly to output. You also do not use an activation function (or use the identity activation function). That is, everything that makes neural networks special.
V13.2 is probably close to 1000 miles per critical intervention now. Geofence it, avoid stupidly dangerous UPLs and fix some map issues and they're already on par with Waymo. Next version has 3x the number of parameters and 3x context length. If you know anything about scaling laws you wouldn't be betting on Waymo right now.
Corollary: do a lot of different things, activities, jobs, hobbies. I need to get better at this.
It's amazing how many different kinds of businesses there are. I once talked to a Dutch guy who designed and manufactured machines that clean astroturf in stadiums. He was rolling in it, small company. So many industries like this you have no idea existed.
That's just cope. With that savings rate he can save for 10 years and spend the next 40 years doing his own thing. As long as you keep your standard of living the same.
