Amazon’s Ring and Google’s Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State, Glenn Greenwald

But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

What You Can’t Say, Paul Graham

Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, “The Crucible,” about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller’s metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a “witch-hunt.”

I have created a public mirror for the Battlefield 2142 archive and Refractor 2 Modding discord for Battlefield 2. Feel free to check it out.

https://battlefield.modding.dpdns.org/

Response to Chess engines do weird stuff (has quite a wild home page layout) AlphaZero, RL, and SPSA, Cosmo Bobak

I argue forcefully against the notion that the self-play loop is in some sense “not necessary”, or even “only necessary one time”. Distillation from a fixed oracle has a ceiling: the student can approach, but never exceed, the quality of the teacher’s data. To surpass that ceiling, you must search-amplify the new network, generating better data than the old oracle could, and distill again — and this is precisely the self-play loop. The distance from random play to superhuman play is not crossed in one leap.

Rendering the Visible Spectrum, Brandon Li

You might wonder why we should go through all the trouble of making an extremely accurate picture when there are already a bunch of others that seem good enough. You might bring up the fact that we very often make use of “inaccurate” or oversimplified depictions of phenomena in science communication and education. And often, teaching a simplified version of a concept is the best way to introduce it to a student, in and this case you have to make sure the student is aware that what they’re learning is a simplified version of the real thing that is stripped of all the complexities and nuance. This is okay because here accuracy is being scarified for ease of learning, but what about when making something as accurate as possible has no downsides? Such is the case with pictures of the visible spectrum. Here there is an issue with choosing a random picture to represent it. It may give the students the wrong idea of what the spectrum “should” look like.