András Salamon

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• Commented on The coming storm
  There is no need to speculate about why Saudi Arabia didn't do renewables, when one can instead read about the projects currently happening: https://www.pv-magazine.com/press-releases/1-25-gw-yingli-solar-to-supply-panda-n-type-high-efficiency-modules-for-mega-pv-power-plant-in-the-middle-east/ and read about the strategic project this is part of....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Charlie, which version of Edinburgh do you inhabit, or are you a Glasgow native now? Auld Reekie in my timeline has New Leaf Co-Op, Real Foods, Dig In, and several others. I've never quite made it to Moscow but I...
• Commented on Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
  Indeed, we often can create useful and sometimes surprisingly simple explanations of biological systems. The same would apply to many artefacts produced by machine learning. For instance, many neural networks are really just overcomplicated regression classifiers. However, the skills to...
• Commented on Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
  Peak population estimates: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth (depending on how several critical factors turn out, including possibly some not yet well-understood ones, peak is anywhere from 8.1 billion up to no limit)....
• Commented on Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
  Explainable AI, and more specifically turning large opaque boxes into smaller less opaque boxes is one of the hottest fields in AI right now. See https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8939263267074417112 for the 2587 papers (as of right now, climbing most days) citing the 2014...
• Commented on Upcoming events
  I have had good dehumidifier performance from Meaco; the current unit has been working for several years and is still doing well....
• Commented on Happy Halloween!
  Aside from some issues that the proofreading phase should have sorted out, the latest Laundry instalment showed off finely honed storytelling skills and a welcome step back from an earlier tendency to turn all the knobs up to 11 for...
• Commented on Test Case
  See also Austria, Eastern Europe (with taller buildings), and Scandinavia....
• Commented on Test Case
  Your car is learning from the environment Actually, machine learning is currently quite limited in scope. The environments that cars need to navigate are too noisy and have too many dimensions for effective learning. This has even been noticed by...
• Commented on Test Case
  I hope you experience a stable enough political environment to be able to work on that third procedural. To those working in AI who know your work, the Halting State/Rule 34 pair is your signature work so far. (In contrast,...
• Commented on Test Case
  On gold versus silver packages: it seems conceivable that some interest group would use this incident to try to establish a precedent for requiring owners of vehicles used for commercial purposes to prove that they meet a higher standard of...
• Commented on Test Case
  Regarding the original question, as far as I can tell, the current system in the UK heavily favours blaming the human driver and the pedestrian, with the rest mostly mere distractions. If my interpretation of the various laws is correct,...
• Commented on Test Case
  We know how much they cost: £60-80K on release. Moreover, those are Series 1 vehicles, so hardly "top spec"....
• Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
  Referring back to the original post, SN is a nym used by a subset of Bob Hettinga, Vince Cate, and Nick Szabo. Every thriller plot will therefore have to have at least one leg in Anguilla, and use the machinery...
• Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
  More bizarreness in how the Cuba story is being handled: https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/finally-a-likely-explanation-for-the-sonic-weapon-used-at-the-us-embassy-in-cuba...
• Commented on New Book Week!
  Most of the typos I found have already been reported above, but one seems to remain: Hindenberg in the context of zeppelin history should be spelled Hindenburg. The registration number matches that in TL0, so I'm presuming this is not...
• Commented on Crying fire in a crowded theatre for pleasure and profit
  It seems the British public is less in thrall to the bleating of "the press" than is often supposed....
• Commented on The World of Tomorrow
  Oh, many-named one: This narrative of looming protein shortages seems predicated on the old discredited models of protein requirements. According to these models, even humans in milk-guzzling, meat-with-every-meal countries are on the threshold of protein deficiency, because the models were...
• Commented on The World of Tomorrow
  The new tendency (Deep Learning) is where no one, especially not its inventors or funders, knows how it works. Instead of Wired clickbait, perhaps try reading about interpretability in machine learning. Yes, we currently have little idea how many machine...
• Commented on The World of Tomorrow
  Taking these comments about Spinoza at face value, I just don't follow the argument. The socially constructed cloud of overlapping entities we refer to collectively as Spinoza was essentially excommunicated from the Abrahamic religions because of their pantheism. How is...
• Commented on Rejection Letter
  Regarding ecological analysis of systems, this seems to be all the rage in the social sciences over the last several years. Even economists are now perhaps going to join in the fun: https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/kate-raworth/seven-ways-to-think-like-21st-century-economist (puff piece for book, still worth reading)....
• Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
  But what does Commander Brown do if the enemy is not led by one of the Markov family members? It might even be necessary to look beyond what General Gauss advises, to Weibull or Cauchy....
• Commented on I can't keep up
  ThatPoppy is either creepy, or funny, or hillarious, or dumb, depending on your frame of mind. (Maybe hillarious; is that a deliberate reference to HRC?) Perhaps the deathtronica undertow or the affectless delivery have achieved their hypnotic effect, or I've...
• Commented on A reminder
  The article on neurobiological bases of altuism was rather odd. Although nominally interdisciplinary, it seems to predicate a strict biological view of the world, so misses an obvious possible mechanism that could explain many of the "puzzling" cases: what if...
• Commented on A reminder
  Your story provides a nice dose of optimism. In this scenario, would the female patients receive smaller fee rebates than the males?...
• Commented on A reminder
  The limitation of schadenfreude is that there needs to be some schade to begin with. Alas, many oil-rich countries are also near the equator, and several are investing heavily in low-cost, high-output solar electricity generation. I would not be surprised...
• Commented on Playtime is over
  The recent tone taken by this instantiation of your multi-faceted identity reminds me of this: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/a-solution-for-global-warming Good luck, I hope you get the recognition that you seem to be angling for. As far as I can tell, these posts are...
• Commented on Playtime is over
  I repeat: all narratives are lies, but some lies are useful. It is easy to spin stories out of almost any collection of facts, especially if one casts the net as widely as you do. How are your stories, half-told...
• Commented on Playtime is over
  Do you really think the term "working class" is likely to remain a useful component of the political landscape? Or that a labour theory of value will be a narrative with much predictive power if current trends in automation continue?...
• Commented on Ever Young?
  Ta, will digest these in my own (slow) time. Emergent models don't say much to me, other than: this black box behaves like that one. Being an extreme reductionist, as most mathematicians are, I prefer looking for simple models instead,...