By Stuart Russell Although it was published several years after Bostrom’s Superintelligence, I recommend reading Human Compatible first. Russell covers similar ground with respect to the problem of control over a superintelligence but in a style that I think most interested readers will find easier to follow and more insightful. If you then want a… Read More »
Given that I was reading Factfulness during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis, the book was a pleasant release from the bitter news each day, even though Ebola, tuberculosis, the swine flu, and the Spanish flu play important roles in the book. In chapter ten in the section “The five global risks we should… Read More »
AIQ by Nick Polson and James Scott is a book I would have loved to have written. I often give talks to non-engineers on the core ideas behind machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. It took me many months to refine the material but I think it is possible to convey the core ideas… Read More »
When you export a PDF from Google Slides, metadata for the “Creator” attribute will be set to “Google”. In the Mac Finder, selecting Get Info on the file will show this attribute under More Info, along with a link to the original presentation. This can be handy for you but maybe not something you want… Read More »
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a deeply analytical, and yet hilarious, look at what Internet users tell us through their behaviors, as opposed to what they might directly tell us if we asked them. Stephens-Davidowitz digs deep into… Read More »
Reinventing American Healthcare is a pleasurable antidote to the ongoing misinformation about the ACA and the US healthcare system. In Part 1, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel describes in great detail how the American healthcare system has evolved into its current overly complex state, riddled with misaligned incentives. As has happened in other industries, well-intentioned changes resulted… Read More »
An American Sickness is a meticulously reported book on the troubled US healthcare industry. Rosenthal clearly lays out deeply compelling facts, but the book is much more than that. She weaves in a fantastic collection of her personal stories and those of many others regarding significant impacts on their lives from complex and unjustifiably high… Read More »
I recently stumbled upon a fix for a very annoying Evernote issue that caused no windows to display, not even the Preferences window. Hopefully, my solution below helps someone else. After changing my password on a work laptop running Sierra, I finally rebooted after about 10 days. After a long series of prompts indicating different… Read More »
A little over two years ago I was no longer able to log in to my WordPress install. This happened around the time Dreamhost moved my MySQL databases to a new host. I don’t know if those events were connected, but two years later I finally got the motivation to dive in and fix it.… Read More »
In Naked Statistics, Charles Whelan does a great, and often very funny, job of not only explaining statistics in very simple terms, but also explaining why you should understand statistics. Statistics can be used to simplify complex situations to a small set of indexes or metrics, many of which are meaningful only for relative comparisons.… Read More »