Graph-powered Machine Learning at GoogleOctober 7, 2016
https://research.googleblog.com/2016/10/graph-powered-machine-learning-at-google.htmlThis looks very promising and fits very well with the way I tend to think about things.
2016: The Year of SpaceApril 30, 2016
2016 is shaping up to be the most interesting year for space flight since the days of Apollo, especially if you book-end it with the tale end of 2015.
  | Dec 2015 |
|  | First successful Falcon 9 landing (on land) |
| | First flight of Falcon 9 v 1.2 |
| | Return to flight after June mishap |
| April 2016: First successful barge landing |
| April 2016: SpaceX announces plans for 2018 landing of 5 tonnes on Mars (huge surprise) |
| July/August/Sept: First re-flight of Falcon 9 booster |
| August: SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition |
| September: Reveal of Mars plans |
| Nov/Dec/Jan: First flight of Falcon Heavy |
| On top of all of that: Up to 18 flights and landing attempts of Falcon 9 |
| Blue Origin's first re-flight of their rocket (and in late 2015, the first landing) |
(Also of recent was the reveal of Pluto)
The above represents a lot of very momentous events, all packed into little more than a year. If you're someone intrigued by spaceflight, it's perhaps analogous to the year a sports nutt's favorite hockey team won the Stanley Cup and set all sorts of records.
It could all come to a grinding half if and when the next rocket blows up, but if all goes according to plan, it will be a crazy year.
Widening the scope technology wise, we've also recently had:
| Sept 2015: Autopilot beta goes live -- first compelling semi-autonomous technology on the market |
| Sept 2015: Release/reveal of Tesla Model X |
| March 2016: Reveal of Tesla Model 3, with 400,000 reservations |
| Gigafactory phase 1 starting to come on line |
| Volvo's announcement of 2017 program that will feature real families driving fully autonomous vehicles on select roads |
| AlphaGo beats world "Go" champion |
| Deep Learning making big strides |
| Gravitational waves |
There's a lot happening...
Computation And The Illusion of Being Cared ForMarch 20, 2016
Mysterious title to this blog post...
Last year I created some code to take the Netflix movie recommendations on my account and my wife's account and combine our projected ratings for the movies. Then I sorted the list.
For some time now, I've enjoyed this type of strategy for helping people decide on shared things, whether it be a baby name, or a movie. It seems to work pretty well!
After watching a couple of movies taken from this list recently, I was quite smitten with the result. In both cases, the movies were ones I probably never would have picked off of the shelf, and yet we really did enjoy watching them.
After yet more reflection, I think I've realized that part of what made the end result so nice is that it almost felt like we had hired a person to sift through a bunch of facts about who we are, what our values are, the kind of things that delight us, and then that person went off and spent a few days looking through movies, trying to find ones that would be a perfect fit for the two of us.
Of course, that didn't happen. It was just computer code at Netflix -- lots of machine learning / modeling techniques, and then a simple match rank algorithm to combine Meredith's and my recommendations.
This makes me curious about the future: How often will people feel "cared for" in a sense when in fact it's just algorithms optimizing their lives. Maybe I'm unusual, but in reflecting on this, I actually did feel kind of cared for after watching those two movies. It felt like someone was looking out for me, being thoughtful, on my behalf.
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