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Magnnus

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hubskier for: 3211 days

recent comments, posts, and shares:
Magnnus  ·  2972 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How they found the World's Biggest Prime Number - Numberphile

Biggest known prime number.

Magnnus  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Microsoft no longer lets you opt-out of a Windows 10 upgrade

Also this tool to suggest a linux distro.

Magnnus  ·  3141 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Russians Demand Permanently Ban Windows 10 Because it Spies on Users

So, are Facebook and Google also banned in Russia? Seriously, I get that people are concerned about privacy in Windows 10, but the criticism has been heavily lopsided towards Microsoft lately.

I'm actually curious to see how messed up my website looks on IE6.

Magnnus  ·  3150 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Even when told not to, Windows 10 just can’t stop talking to Microsoft

TD:DR:

Microsoft sends your search query to bing when you search bing (with a Machine ID)

Microsoft sends a ping to "www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt and ipv6.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt" when you connect to a new network (to see if the network is active)

Microsoft sends data to the ssw.live.com OneDrive server (even if OneDrive is disabled)

Microsoft sends data to a content delivery system (bypassing your proxy), to which Microsoft claims, "updates may be delivered to provide ongoing new features to Bing search, such as new visual layouts, styles and search code. No query or search usage data is sent to Microsoft, in accordance with the customer's chosen privacy settings."

Magnnus  ·  3151 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: New type of pentagon discovered with the ability to tile the plane

Metaheuristics search a problem space to find an exact solution (total plane tiling). In order to search that space, they need direction. The "almost plane tiling" is the direction. You said it would be difficult for a genetic algorithm to find a solution because the set of solutions is very small, but that's missing the point of a metaheuristic.

It's the difference between climbing a hill and a cliff. Either way the goal is at the top, but the hill is easier to get up.

Magnnus  ·  3151 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Microsoft Edge, your layout skills disappoint me

Funny thing is, at least in my experience (as a web developer), IE 11 had fewer issues than Edge.

Magnnus  ·  3151 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: New type of pentagon discovered with the ability to tile the plane

You just need to provide a gradient for the search space. Something like inverse of average gap between tiles. This is standard for any metaheuristic search (of which genetic algorithms are a sub-category), so I wouldn't call it "doing something clever".

Magnnus  ·  3155 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Screeps - The world's first MMO strategy open world game for programmers

Now may not be the best time to mention I'm also working on a semi-intelligent crawler (non-virus) bot.

Magnnus  ·  3155 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Screeps - The world's first MMO strategy open world game for programmers

Can your program have non-volatile memory? I'd be interested in setting up a learning AI for this game, but it would need memory that isn't easily wiped.

Magnnus  ·  3162 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How To Stop Windows 10's Spying Ads

It's easy to say "don't use Windows", but the reality is most applications only support Windows. For most people, it's not an option.

Magnnus  ·  3170 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An experimental UI for teaching programming

    Last year this graph went around the internet, showing how the number of women programmers began to drop off in the mid-80s

    I was recently struck by a vague correlation: that's around the time we stopped programming in assembly!

    Perhaps it's not accidental that that was when the demographics started to shift at the top of the funnel? Perhaps there was something about high-level languages that added an extra layer of complexity early on, and made programming harder to learn.

Is it just me, or is he implying that there are less women in computer science because it's too hard for them? He's also implying that high level languages were harder to learn than assembly, but that's a whole nother issue...

An old development phrase comes to mind: "Broken gets fixed, crappy stays forever". The Windows Registry is just shitty enough to work, but not shitty enough to be replaced.

Magnnus  ·  3173 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Neural Network in 11 lines of Python

Neat, but not functional. It only learns a hard-coded function (xor), and has no way of even activating the network once its learned. However, it does a good job of illustrating how simple a multilayer perceptron (this specific breed of neural network) actually is. People hear about machine learning and think they must be incredibly complicated algorithms. Simple systems work best.

Magnnus  ·  3173 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: This site is reporting that self aware robots have been created.

If machine learning interests you: This website has a number of interactive toys that demonstrate the deep neural network set of algorithms. This one is my favorite. Udacity also has some fantastic free courses on machine learning.

In general, if you're interested in AI, you'll have to look past the media. Books and journal papers are your best resource, and there are a few good video courses.

Magnnus  ·  3174 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: This site is reporting that self aware robots have been created.

So, apparently the bots are supposed to determine which of them can speak. Did you notice that the only bot to perform any action stood up THEN spoke? If they were all running the same software, logically, each bot would stand up, then attempt to speak.

This is ridiculous on so many levels. Even if every bot was running the same software, and only one recognized its ability to speak, unless it learned this fact from a state of 0 knowledge (as opposed to being programmed to recognize a pre-programmed sound clip, then speak another sound clip), it is no more intelligent than a microwave.

Magnnus  ·  3174 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: This site is reporting that self aware robots have been created.

Just wanted to point out. Modern AI (at least the machine learning subfield) is not based on hard coded logic rules. Instead, it's based on systems that observe data and automatically learn functions that model that data and generalize to unknown data. We've come a long way since Eliza, but we're still far from strong AI.

Magnnus  ·  3174 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why you should never, ever, ever use MongoDB

I wouldn't call myself an expert on databases, but my understanding is non-relational databases are easier to scale, and perform better at large scale. This is why Google is built on a non-relational database.

Magnnus  ·  3181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Chromebooks Gain Traction in the Enterprise

Excel is covered by Google Sheets. Even on Windows I prefer the Google Docs set of software to Microsoft Office.

Magnnus  ·  3186 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Apple Watch Sales Drop 90 Percent From Opening Week

Thing is, for most people, a smartphone is less a phone and more a small laptop. I make phone calls about once or twice a month, and text a few times a day at most. I browse the web, listen to audiobooks, take notes, and play games on my phone throughout the day.

Magnnus  ·  3186 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What's your favorite alternative language to javascript and why?

This looks fantastic. Very similar to Haskell. I've always liked Haskell, but it doesn't have the library support for most of my work. Looks like I can use Elm for my front-end scripting.

How well supported is it, and can it easily interface with native javascript?