5 years of Ethereum development experience is longer than Ethereum has been around. These boilerplate Wanted ads won't attract developers with bleeding-edge skills.
There is a tendency among non-technical admirers of ML to regard deep learning methods as beyond their creators: independent entities that will one day, given refined enough algorithms and enough energy, out-comprehend their human creators and overwhelm humanity with their artificial consciousnesses. The term “neural networks” is itself a misnomer that doesn’t at all reflect the complexity of how human neurons represent and acquire information; it’s simply a term for nonlinear classification algorithms that began catching on once the computing power to run them emerged.
The question of whether or not deep neural networks are capable of “understanding” is largely a theoretical concern for the ML practitioner, who spends the bulk of his or her time undertaking the hard work of curating manually labeled data, fine-tuning his or her neural classifier with methods (or hacks) such as dropout, stochastic gradient descent, convolution and recursion, to increase its accuracy by a few fractions of a percentage point. Ten or twenty years from now, I imagine we’ll be dealing with a novel set of ML tools that will evolve with the rise of quantum computing (the term “machine learning” will probably be ancient history, too), but the essence of these methods will probably remain: to train a mathematical model to perform task X while generalizing its performance to the real world.
As fascinating and exciting as this era of artificial intelligence is, we should also remember that these algorithms are ultimately sophisticated classifiers that don't "understand" anything at all.
This is true of ANN, and deep learning. They are mathematical models of learning that are finally practical after a couple decades (not to diminish anything the researchers have accomplished which is incredible).
Then there are biologically inspired neural networks, like Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), that actually correlate directly to how the cortex in mammals work. These have also demonstrated learning capabilities, and seem a lot more promising in the road map to general AI, in my opinion, because after all we should be piggy-backing on evolution (not that we can't find a mathematical model first).
So yeah, the hype is just hype, but it could be justified for the wrong reasons if we see breakthroughs in biologically inspired AI (the Brain Project, to name another example).
Demonstrated learning capabilities? I have not seen HTM models make any breakthroughs on any benchmarks. It's also stretching the facts to say it directly correlates to how mammalian cortexs work. At best, you could say it directly correlates to some theories on how mammalian cortexes work - neuroscience has an incredibly poor understanding of brains in general.
Before anyone believes the hype, they should read all the MIT research papers from the mid-1990s that mention the term "emergent intelligence". This was one of the biggest wastes of research money in the history of AI.
Self-censorship and censorship by others will continue to hamper online discourse until people feel safe from reprisal. A decentralized P2P discussion system would be a huge step toward this goal. I've been following Ethereum for a while now; have you considered using the platform to build this as a dapp?
I'm so glad someone finally has courage to comment so poignantly on what San Francisco has become. This sentence will stay with me: "But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable"
SF is pretty culturally hostile to outsiders. Maybe if more residents felt like it was "their" city, rather than just the place they live, they would feel a greater sense of responsibility to improve it.
This problem probably affects most cities with a large transplant population.
> This problem probably affects most cities with a large transplant population.
I've been thinking about this a lot mainly because I live in Nashville which is experiencing its own growth challenges with a lot of transplants. I've been here since 2008 (TN since 98) and I'm really only just now being to take "ownership" of the city. Perhaps it's because I'm out of school finally and thinking more long term, but it's tough to consider a city "yours" when you know you're going to be transitioning (potentially) to a new job and a new city.
But since I've got a job here, it seems like it's more appropriate to put more effort into my own hometown. It's tough to get past that mindset that you're only renting the city and somebody else will clean it up. Part of it is there seems to be a stigma against having an opinion about how a city should be without a certain amount of time spent living in the city. This just encourages, in my mind, a bad attitude towards active civic involvement. But it has to be tempered with the understanding that a transplant does have less experience of living in the city.
I don't know where I'm really going with this. Maybe all I'm saying is young people, I think, probably view the city they study in as they do their student housing or an apartment: something they rent and somebody else's problem.
