Wow! It’s 10pm on a cool spring night of March 2021, and what do I discover lurking in my drafts? A review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions from 2018 that I never got around to finishing! (Maybe because Slate Star Codex published a review around the same time and I got dispirited?)
Struggling to find time to fit everything in while finishing my master’s thesis, a friend lent me a copy of Edmond Lau’s The Effective Engineer. I didn’t find the extra hour a day to watch Netflix read papers that I was hoping for, but the book did have an impact on my research workflow.
There are a lot of neat things going on in deep reinforcement learning. One of the coolest things from last year was OpenAI and DeepMind’s work on training an agent using feedback from a human rather than a classical reward signal. There’s a great blog post about it at Learning from Human Preferences, and the original paper is at Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences.
Zoe’s points: Self-fulfilling prophecy Not black-and-white/unpleasant to be diagnosed like that Knowing about patterns: can make you over-interpret Prevents you from having interesting relationships Not necessarily desccriptive of the individual
For a long time, I've been wondering about formalisms for human stuff.
oh my word, what an incredible dream.I had last night where did it start?! right. I was skydiving, and I’d just landed in a field somewhere, and was trying to work out how to get back to the skydiving centre but…somehow…was I captured by the enemy? there was some kind of a war on as it turned out but the next thing I knew I was at some kind of emergency camp that had been set up (it was on our…
A few years ago I stumbled upon Aaron Swartz's Raw Nerve series. All seven pieces are extremely good, but his idea in Lean into the pain of looking at mental pain as workout burn, especially, made something click in my mind that has stayed with me ever since.
Sometimes I have really weird dreams. Writing short stories about them seemed like a fun idea.