He was one of the youngest professors ever at his University and was one who was experimented on by the CIA. There are some novelties here that exist other than him being a random school shooter.
Yikes! I just interviewed at Zume Seattle less than 3 months ago and they had over 100 head count open with plans for an office move that doubled the space. Wasn't the right place for myself at the time and I seemed to have dodged a bullet. Seems they banked a little to hard on their relationship with SoftBank and the promise of future funding.
Most legal plans offered, even through third parties, explicitly do not cover employee-employer disputes. This has been the case at both Microsoft and Amazon that I have seen.
That's just rude. I think so long as the funding is out of the company's control there's no ethical violations but again there's a lot of rules and I could be wrong.
That looks like a lot of fun. I wonder if they would let me do a 1 year residency with that team. HP Enterprise was doing something as well with "the machine" (very large memory systems) which generated some interesting papers.
I feel like we do not yet have a calculus for analyzing the mix of "entanglement" of data across transactional expressions. It is a problem I've puzzled over since about 2001 when Steve Kleiman asked me to scale file systems without speeding up the processor.
If I aim a gun and pull the trigger, the results are not the byproduct of chance, excepting that in some sense everything is.
This was consciously aiming a gun at an explicitly-named remote target, ricocheting the bullet off an unprecedentedly-reasonable number of explicitly-chosen elements, and hitting the target.
Don't let semantics muddy the water about this achievement
There is no selection for reproductive fitness until there is a replicator. Once a random process has stumbled upon a replicator, selection for reproductive fitness is inevitable, so long as some of the replicator's descendants survive. Reproductive fitness, therefore, is a feature of sufficiently large, complex and long-running random processes, not something additional that is imposed from outside. This is what Dennett called "Darwin's dangerous idea".
No. The "dangerous idea" is that design might not require a designer.
As for the first replicator, we simply do not yet know how (or even when) that came about, though random chance does seem likely. So I guess if you add enough layers of "built the machine that..." then you do end up with pure randomness (probably). But I would conjecture that there's a lot less "informational distance" between the cosmos and the first replicator than there is between the first replicator and Adam Yedidia.
It might not be what Dennett meant, but I don't think issues of informational distance refute the claim that we can expect selection for reproductive fitness to be a feature in any random process that gives rise to replicators. After the appearance of the replicator, the random process continues to operate under the same rules (laws of physics) as before.
After the appearance (and sufficent success) of the replicator, it stops being a random process. Edit: or at least not a completely/primarily random process.
I think the selection is a byproduct of the underlying laws, thought one must rely on chance until a system complicated enough to engage in selection emerges. Now, are those underlying laws reliant upon chance? This requires understanding beyond that of the current universe, so maybe.
Etymological arguments for either position. Regardless, I wouldn’t claim the distinction exists, and would find it hard to justify that it’s VERY important.
