AI & Understanding

One thing I've learnt having spent the past year or so with a bunch of kids is that rules are made up. Sure they're there for a reason, but that doesn't take away the fact that they are made up.

It's 500 B.C.
The people close to you start telling you that you've gone mad. How do you convince them you have not?

Lemme turn the question around:
you're dead sure a friend of yours has gone mad. What could he/she say or do that would change your mind about their sanity?

How does one prove sanity?
We wouldn't have this difficulty if the thing in question was one of the five senses because you can easily prove you can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and feel.

You have a fair coin (both outcomes are equally likely). You flip it 9 times and get heads 9 times. How likely is it that you'll get heads on your next flip?

Having your code run error-free on the first try is basically the same thing as a girl you just met telling you she loves you.
You want to believe it; you want it to be true, but deep down you know it isn't because that's just not how the world operates 😂

Confirmation bias is when your brain ignores evidence that doesn't support your beliefs. And then it cherry-picks the evidence that does. And, generally, when people hear this term, they think it's a broken unscientific way for our brains to approach the world. And this is true. But you could judo-flip it to your advantage. The trick is to positively apply confirmation bias to your relationships. If you assume good intentions on the part of your friends and family, and you tell yourself you're lucky to have them, your brain will naturally work to find evidence to support that. That's just how our brains work. If you tell yourself that your fellow humans are inherently good, your brain will find examples of it everywhere. And that will reinforce your outlook. The opposite, unfortunately, is also true. Basically, whether you think the world and everyone in it is out to hurt you or help you, you're right.

- Mark Rober
(from his 2023 MIT commencement speech)

An ironic last name for someone that exposes robbers 😂

Bugs are essentially text-based puzzles that you inadvertently create for your future self. However, unlike any other puzzle:
1. You are unaware that you are creating them.
2. You are also unaware of how to solve them as you create them.

Now that the Stack Overflow developer survey results are out...
https://youtu.be/75Ju0eM5T2c

While the phrase “Artificial Intelligence” was coined in 1956, it was first conceptualized in the 1600s by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German mathematician and philosopher.

He theorized that human thoughts, in any capacity, are all quantifiable and hence could be replicated by a machine - a theoretical mechanism he named "the great instrument of reason"

Cool, huh?

From NAB Newsletter