One of the techniques used in some sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence is training: one feeds one’s apparatus a set of known good associations (e.g. this word sounds like this and that like that, or this is the number 3 in forty different styles of handwriting), and for each sees what answer it returns, then correct it based on its answer. This obviously requires a large corpus, and building such a corpus is time-consuming and error-prone.
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A scientist has engineered tobacco to produce an anthrax vaccine. The current vaccine has severe side effects; the tobacco-derived vaccine does not.
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A scientist has engineered tobacco to produce an anthrax vaccine. The current vaccine has severe side effects; the tobacco-derived vaccine does not.
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Spotted an article about Jorf, a programming language which came out at about the same time as Perl and Python, and had some neat ideas — unfortunately, nothing came of it.
4 February: updated URL. It’s awesome to see that the author is still blogging!
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Spotted an article about Jorf, a programming language which came out at about the same time as Perl and Python, and had some neat ideas — unfortunately, nothing came of it.
4 February: updated URL. It’s awesome to see that the author is still blogging!
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On Friday I started playing around with MoinMoin Desktop Edition; it’s a personal wiki. The idea is that it can act like a free-form personal information manager. Playing around, it looks pretty neat; I’ll be using it over the next month or two and will see how it actually works out in practise.
04 February 2018: updated URL. Nowadays, I’d suggest Org for this kinda of thing.
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On Friday I started playing around with MoinMoin Desktop Edition; it’s a personal wiki. The idea is that it can act like a free-form personal information manager. Playing around, it looks pretty neat; I’ll be using it over the next month or two and will see how it actually works out in practise.
04 February 2018: updated URL. Nowadays, I’d suggest Org for this kinda of thing.
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Allin Cottrell believes that word processors are stupid & inefficient. While those might not be the exact words I’d choose, they are quite true. For the vast majority of computerised document preparation, word processors are not the correct tool to use.
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Allin Cottrell believes that word processors are stupid & inefficient. While those might not be the exact words I’d choose, they are quite true. For the vast majority of computerised document preparation, word processors are not the correct tool to use.
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Someone actually produces Menger Sponges for sale. I desperately want one.
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Someone actually produces Menger Sponges for sale. I desperately want one.
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Just came across Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?, a presentation by Charles Petzold on the process of programming. Very good points about the rhythm of coding and how we can come to over-rely on tools — as well as how that over-reliance can translate into much more complex (and hence brittle) systems. Anyone with an interest in human-computer interactions should take a look.
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