Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

In my downtime before uni, between doing some hiking and coding , I figured I'd get into the Cognitive Systems vibe by reading up a bit, and this seems to end up often at some discussion of super-intelligent AI. I'll probably be writing up a bunch of these over the period of my course, but first up: one observation made at lesswrong  from a GiveWell director - in particular, distinguishing between 'agent' (active) and 'tool' (passive) AI, see objection #2. The basic idea is that it is much safer to design 'tool' AI, as it just gives you data and does take action itself, and I'd recommend reading that article first and thinking about it before returning. I think overall it's a good way to start thinking about the problem, but my take on this can be illustrated by the following tale (giving examples through stories seems popular in this area): * * * Investech was a company of researchers and quants, who had a small amount of success writin...

While reading my past blog posts due to its anniversary, I found in one of my posts from 10 years ago (mid-year 2005!) that International PatFute day is July 7th. For some context, about 11 or 12 years ago, when first learning programming, I was teaching myself by writing a game for windows (in Visual Basic, no less). Having way more maths skills than artistic ones, it ended up being a physics simulator thinly veiled as a soccer game - the edges of the pitch are fixed solid lines, and the ball plus all the players are circles, bouncing off everything else. Then, as you can see in my blog, I wrote it again when learning C++ and 3D graphics - this time the players were cylinders, and the ball gained height on kick, but everything else worked the same way. Little did I know, that this foreshadowed the real sport of Bubble ball many years later. When first learning web development, I then re-wrote a javascript version using web canvas, but sadly the code for that has been lost. ...

I'm assuming readers know what Facebook is (or, social media) - if you don't, this probably won't be interesting. For those that do, you may have recognized that when you click to read a shared article, underneath will appear similar articles you may also be interested in. The idea for this post came about after doing just that, and the following was the result: It's probably trick to read at that size, so to summarize: The original link  was a Jezebel article about research published in September 2014 in  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,  where they quote the abstract: " On a daily basis, when people felt more insecure about their partner's feelings, they tended to make their relationships visible ". The first suggested link was from HuffPo about research  published in July 2013 in Social Psychological and Personality Science.  It doesn't quote the abstract but summarizes it, including how the study " found that participants...

I've advocated a number of times (e.g. this post ) the benefit of analysing an issue by considering multiple viewpoints, and have been annoyed how so few articles do so (i.e. I don't trust anyone's analysis if they can't name a few reasons why those who disagree could/should do so...). Time to try living up to my own standards. Source:  http://www.hhcpa.com/services/international/international-tax-compliance.php The topic? Something that has come up a lot in Australia at least, which is the taxation of multinational internet-economy-based corporations (MNC). Full disclaimer: I used to work at one, but was in no way involved in the financial/political side. I no longer work there, and the views contained here were mine beforehand too, and not based on any knowledge internally. To start, a brief summary: The internet is widely used in Australia (like most of the western world) and there are a number of companies founded internationally who profit from selling pr...

It came to my attention not all that long ago that, 10 years ago today, the first ever padsterprogramming blog post was made! It's really weird to think I've been recording thoughts in here for the last ten years, and all that has happened in that time (Blogger looks different, for one, as does my blog template...). I read through all the posts last night in order to catch up with what I was doing over the last decade; apparently there was a time before I was doing TopCoder designs and ACM contests - the first post is from first year uni, so I was still into coding, but with a lot ahead of me yet... Amusingly, there was quite a bit similar - apparently I was  watching survivor  (and it was already season #10: Palau. it's still going, now up to #30). I was planning on getting a 'proper watch' - which I recently just did again, upon leaving Zurich (Aerowatch this time, not Rado though). I was s tarting at Uni (oooh, so many posts about uni...), which will happe...

I recently found out it's possible to make a cheesecake in ~10 minutes with only four things to clean and not much to throw out - a pretty good combination! This is mostly a note for my future self to remember how to do this, but it might be of interest to anyone who (a) likes cheesecake, and (b) likes quick and simple cooking - which is most people, right? I had bookmarked a recipe a few years ago for microwave mug cheesecake, but I didn't have a microwave at the time (whoops...) - having moved recently I now have access to said equipment so decided to give it a go for a mother's-day dessert. Step 0: Prepare Above is all you need, really! Full list: 1 egg white 125g cream cheese (exactly half the tub above) ~60ml sour cream (not sure exactly, I used ~a third of the tub, about three tablespoons) 2 teaspoons of sugar 5 teaspoons of raspberry pulp/jam (either pre-pulped, or mash it yourself).   1 biscuit (Butternut snap is perfect if you can get it) Ther...

This post is from a series of review posts - for the whole list, see my  Kindling page . There's a bit of a short lull while I work out how to write the next few posts and what exactly they should be about, but I've been doing a lot of reading recently due to travel/leaving work; as I was about to clear some books off my Kindle I figured it worth reviving an earlier trend of mine and captured notes for what I made it through recently for those interested now or in the future. So, to summarize my thoughts for the novels just removed: Dark Places ( Gillian Flynn ) - Having seen Gone Girl and immediately thinking it'd be awesome if it were a Palahniuk book focussed on Amy, it seemed a good idea to read another from the same author. Dark Places is Flynn's second novel (before Gone Girl) and already is being turned into a movie, which surprised me a bit as it's a lot less marketable than first movie. The characters are certainly strange enough to be from a Pala...

This is probably my final one of these for a while due to leaving Zurich  and no longer being employed, but after 2.5 years of living only a few hours away, I finally made it to Paris! It's one of the most popular tourist cities in the world, as quickly made clear by the lines of non-french folks everywhere. Having only been once before, when I was about the age of two, it was definitely high on my list of places to visit - and so as I was leaving, I felt now was my last opportunity. First up - Paris is huge, over 12 million in the Paris metropolitan area , and it certainly feels like it. I came in by train, so managed to avoid the much maligned CdG airport, but still, getting from Gare du Nord station to my hotel (about 10 mins walk) in the dark and rain was a serious introduction to Paris traffic. For most of the trip I'd resigned myself to doing completely touristy stuff rather than trying to get a better feel for the city - partially for language constraints, but m...

Some of you may have heard it already, but I haven't really broadcast it yet: 31st March was my last day working at Google, and probably my last day as a professional software engineer! I wanted to hold off announcing it until after April 1st, to avoid any suspicion of an elaborate hoax, but now it's the 4th, I think it's safe: officially, I'm now unemployed. Some more details to answer what people have been asking me most often: Why?  I like to think that it was inspired by this wonderful SMBC comic . While not following exactly, I had been doing coding for around 10 years (4 at university, 6 at Google), so it was time for a change. Additionally, it's a good time to change - I was finishing a project at work, I had to move out of my apartment anyway, I have no dependents (partner/kids) and working at Google has made me financially stable, at least for the next SMBC 'lifetime',  There were a few other (relatively minor) things at work which made the d...

For Christmas this year I decided to continue my tradition of heading towards the German  Weihnachtsmärkte , or Christmas markets. Two years ago it was Stuttgart , last year Berlin (sorry, I forgot a RtW post for it!) and this year I decided to make a bit more of a trip out of it: first a train to Stuttgart again for two days to catch up with a friend, then train to Munich for a few, then finally continuing the rail journey to end at my main destination of Vienna for five days, including the 25th. Also: one warning, being from Australia, I apologise if at any point in this post I write that instead of Austria - it's hard to retrain my fingers, but I mean .at, not .au. Vienna had been high on my to-visit list for a long time, mostly because (a) it's an old European city with a rich (and musical!) history, and (b) it consistently ranks as one of the top cities to live in, so I had high hopes. Note that 'liveable' doesn't necessarily mean good to visit - Zu...

Travelling over the winter mostly slowed down due to skiing instead, so this is the first round-the-world cities post in a while. Other travels in that time included a trip home to Australia (Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide - maybe I should add them to the series?) and London (already written up), but otherwise, just sticking within Switzerland. Anyway, to Rome (via Florence). Florence had been recommended by family as a good place to visit, and as it lies between Rome and Switzerland, it seemed a worthwhile place to add a stopover on our trip. Arriving pretty late on a Thursday night, we only got sneak peaks of all the fancy buildings on the way to the hotel ; which turned out to be interesting, it appeared to have only just opened (i.e. still under construction, although not near the rooms) and the walk up the stairs to our room past a giant old fresco was a good reminder we were in Italy. After a good half-hour introduction from the extremely friendly Cesare, and a quick peek o...

Hey all - in case you're curious at what's been occupying my time recently: www.coursera.org In particular, while in Zurich I've been filling a bunch of my spare evenings and weekends with some online courses. While I spend most of my day doing computer-science-y stuff (or, I guess 'software engineering' to be more exact), I feel the amount of new stuff that I'm learning now is pretty limited and there's only so much coding I can do before wanting to learn something else... so while my first was a programming course (Scala), the remainder have been a mixture of economics (Economics for Scientists, Competitive Strategy, Advanced Game Theory), med (Computational Neuroscience, Diabetes: Diagnosis, Treatment and Opportunities) and psychology (Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behaviour, Social Psychology, Moralities of Everyday Life). In particular though, three of those courses mentioned above (Comp Neuro, Game Theory, Moralities) were all offered at the s...

Ψ Just this week, I finished my fifth Coursera MOOC - Social Pyschology , from Wesleyan University . Somewhat interesting, I didn't really learn as much as the behavioural psych and it was a lot of watching videos from experiments, although that still had some hilights like original shots from the Milgram Obedience and Stanford Prison Experiments. Plus, going back to writing assignments took a bit of adjusting to :) One thing is for sure though, I think Social Psych (or at least, the people running this course and discussing the most on the forums) seemed too closed-mindedly left-wing for my liking. While that might not be a bad thing on average, it's a bit unfortunate in a hopefully scientific, educational environment if logical reasoning is dropped and people just follow oversimplified arguments. Anyway, the course is over, enough of the mini-rant. The actual interesting thing that seemed worth posting about is something I noticed when doing part of the required re...