As a German, born roughly 40 years after the war, I still cannot fathom the atrocities we Germans brought to the world at large and to so many million individuals.
I grew up learning the history, I know my grandparents (as well as probably great grandparents) played their part in what happened. I am deeply sorry for what they/we did and even saying it these words just sound hollow in light of the magnitude of cruelty and injustice that happened.
I am very sorry what your grandfather had to endure and I am happy he survived. Though it doesn't change the past I will make sure that my children and grandchildren will remember what happened in order to prevent anything like that happening in our lifetimes again.
He held no grudges by the time I knew him, certainly not against unborn generations. He visited in Berlin in the 70s, as a tourist, spoke german, had german friends and felt sorry for those who (like him) had their communities destroyed after the war. We were brought up to believe the remembering does matter, fwiw.
I have a lot of respect for Germany's honest portrayal and study of its past. It is a rarity, perhaps singular.
Hey fellow European. Please allow me to thank you deeply for that. You cannot be held responsible for anything that some people 3 generations before yours did, but nevertheless your sense of responsibility is really truly inspiring.
> I am very sorry what your grandfather had to endure and I am happy he survived. Though it doesn't change the past I will make sure that my children and grandchildren will remember what happened in order to prevent anything like that happening in our lifetimes again.
You might want to check out the new podcast Day X. It's about resurgence of far right extremism in Germany going on right now. Sadly, the same thing seems to be happening in my country (US).
Germany has an extremely healthy attitude towards the Holocaust; it would do most western nations well to model it as regards their own historical atrocities.
If someone initiates war, brings war to your people, threatens the destruction of your people (I mean as a nation state) - you are morally entitled to do anything required to defend your people. Anything. Without exception, and up to including killing every single person of the attacking nation if that is what is required to stop the war (which you did not initiate). Realistically you won't have to go that far, however there is no scenario where you can have total war on the scale of WW2, and civilians from the attacking side are not likely going to die in very large quantities. All of those deaths, without exception, rest on the moral back of those who began the war.
The attacking party holds the moral responsibility for what is required to stop them.
If you have to kill all the civilians supporting the industrial side of the war in order to stop the war machine supplies (whether in Nazi Germany or under the Empire of Japan), the moral responsibility rests with the party that initiated the war.
Your moral duty as a defending nation is not to trade your people's lives at a equal proportion so that you feel great about not killing too many people. It's to make the attacking party stop, capitulate, give up, surrender their efforts, and that is all. If that requires killing their civilians at a 100 to 1 ratio, that is entirely morally rational and just. The guilt of those deaths entirely rests with the attacking nation.
Which is also not the same as saying that the defending side should kill as many civilians as possible, just to do it. It means they're absolved of civilian deaths on the attacking side as a concern morally, so long as the civilian deaths serves the purpose of helping to end the war.
All arguments of just war and the morality of self defense aside: this a disastrously foolish way to go about being a sentient species on a single planet.
Like the Allies did? lets not forget the German Bombing campaign against the UK in the Battle of Britain. Bombing population centers for years until after the US joined the war. Or the Rape Nanjing by the Japaneses troops, a act so brutal the Nazis found it disturbing and inhumane.
I would suggest avoiding some sort of self-inflicted trauma from this horrible past (which might not be happening but it reads like that to me).
There is no point getting depressed from one's ancestors past - if one looks in the past far enough, there will be probably something utterly horrible that given nation/tribe/group did to somebody innocent. Basically all western european democracies fall into this category, and many, many other nations too.
Don't forget about it by any means, tech your kids as I will do, but don't put emotions into this just because your nation was the culprit. There were similar things happening to innocent civilians en masse in the past elsewhere. Genocides are not an invention of Germany or 20th century, life was often pretty horrible and violent in the past.
I don't know if personal guilt or shame is the correct feeling either, but I also don't think OP should feel nothing.
Time and entropy (empires dissolving or population groups migrating) definitely diffuse the responsibility for a horrific act. Of which there are many in history. But this specific thing happened in living memory, was performed by an organization that still exists (a German speaking nation state, with almost the same borders as before), and by people the OP knows personally. In fact, it's a very wealthy nation that OP has gained a lot of advantage from living in. It's subjective and graduated, but I don't think it's been nearly "long" enough that the Holocaust just background noise next to all other events that have happened in human history.
Modern Germany is awesome btw. Really respect how they've reckoned with this awful time in their history.
I currently work 32 hours / week at 80% pay and have done so for some time. On paper we agreed on 5*6,4 hours per week, but it is really flexibel. In practice I work somewhere between 32-40 hours a week and additionally take a couple of days off per month.
For me, it's the best arrangement I've ever had. If I don't feel like it or need to take care of some other stuff, I just work for a couple hours a day. Other times I really enjoy it and work 8-10. Additionally I get long weekends without having to use any holidays.
I also think my employer gets a better deal this way. Being productive 8 hours a day is more or less wishful thinking. I think the reality is somewhere between 4-6 hours for normal people. Hence I'm still almost as productive asif I were working 40h/week, but at 80% the cost for my employer. Everybody wins.
The easiest explanation I've ever heard and which immediately made me understand it was the following:
Instead of 3 doors, imagine there are 100. 99 of which have a goat and only one of which has a price behind it. Now blindly choose a door and the host opens 98 of the other doors which have a goat behind it. Would you switch your door now, given the choice?
It's easy to see that your probability of choosing a "wrong" door when you had 100 doors to choose from was much higher than choosing the right door when you only have two doors to choose from.
This method of thinking, i.e. increasing or decreasing the problem space by some orders of magintude has helped me a lot in thinking about problems and their solutions in general.
I also do this, among other things to find subtle bugs in code and math. For every unbounded variable, what happens if it is 10^100, or 10^-100? It's a good habit that also makes you view division and logarithms with great suspicion :)
One of my first computer science teachers pronounced "/" (in C) as "divide and throw away the remainder", which sounds awkward at first but turns out to be quite helpful. It's one of those operators which, unfortunately, looks just like one from math class but acts very differently, even in common cases.
Interesting. I was explained this question the exact same way (100 doors) some years ago and it was instantly intuitive to me. Maybe it's how every brain works differently.
I understand that it makes sense intuitively, but how do you justify it to yourself mathematically? As far as I can tell there is nothing in the original formulation that explains why it would scale that way.
I'm the host, and I also happen to be blind. I chose 98 doors and none of them have the car - terrible luck on my part! But probably this lends some credence to your initial guess?
This is correct, but based on specific assumptions. If the host flipped a coin and selected a door and 1/Nth of the time it had the car then you switching would not change your odds.
Similarly, an adversarial host who sometimes opens a door and sometimes just shows you your choice can similarly mess with the odds.
It’s really due to the host both being forced to show a door and knowing which door to choose that you gain from leveraging that knowledge.
That is also a very interesting way to think about it, if I understood you correctly. Seeing the host as another player, any "bad luck" he has, should translate into myself having a higher chance of success if used correctly.
With the host as another blind player, his opening of 98 goat doors only increases the probability you were right from 0.01 to 0.5, so still makes no difference for you to change. But of course the original version of the problem is predicated on the host knowing where the car is and only revealing goats.
Seems like one turn is 60°.
Is there a specific reason why it isn't 45° or 90°? Is there maybe some advantage to the 60° in regards to the ascii rendering?
Might be some stupid questions, but maybe someone can enlighten me:
Could this explain the Schrödingers cat experiment, i.e. the light moving through both of the two slits? If light has a self torque, a single beam of light could travel through both slits (almost) simultaneously depending on the torque.
Also, can someone clarify whether every beam of light has self-torque? Or do you need to create a beam of light in a special way to achieve this property? If every beam of light has that property, wouldn't that mean that light doesn't travel in wave form, but rather in a wave-cylindrical form?
In case anyone is interested in a similar open source solution that can be self hosted I can recommend Trilium (https://github.com/zadam/trilium). It was also recently featured on HN. I since host it on my private server and it works like a charm.
Curiosity and persuit of knowledge are what drives many people. I would like to believe that HN is a place where these traits are encouraged and not looked down upon as you seem to do with your comment. If I could down vote your comment I would.
Having written my bachelor's thesis on how negation in sentences affects their sentiment: it is really, really difficult. Even just differentiating between negative/neutral/positive sentiment is successful only about ~65% of the time (depending on the source material). Text based Irony/Sarcasm detection is still an unsolved problem (most of the times even for humans, as it is strongly context dependent, not to mention missing indicators such as tone of voice and body language). Basically, you are way better of listening to your own intuition rather than using a computer to flip a coin.
Short answer: yes, crowd sourcing would work better.
Long answer: It's difficult to determine how good/bad people actually are at detecting the correct sentiment, as data sets containing phrase/sentence <-> sentiment pairs are often created by majority decision of human taggers. E.g. 7 people are given the same training examples and whatever most of them choose is then used as "correct" answer (gold standard). This might not be the real correct answer though. However, even if we accept this gold standard to actually be the absolute truth, most humans only have a correct detection rate of about ~80% (this is a very rough number, as it depends strongly on the source material, e.g. Tweets, product reviews, etc.). Still, this is way better than computers perform at the moment.
Then again, I assume those texts are written by humans for humans. So isn't the "correct" sentiment exactly what humans tend to make of it? And if humans aren't very good at detecting the sentiment, maybe the writer is at fault, not the readers.
I think letting a number of people read the text and choosing the majority vote as the text's sentiment might not actually be a very bad way of determining that.
It might be correct to say that a group of humans is interpreting the sentiment "incorrectly" if they don't have all the relevant context / information.
"Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest— with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output— yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.
It seems that evolution had not merely selected the best code for the task, it had also advocated those programs which took advantage of the electromagnetic quirks of that specific microchip environment. The five separate logic cells were clearly crucial to the chip’s operation, but they were interacting with the main circuitry through some unorthodox method— most likely via the subtle magnetic fields that are created when electrons flow through circuitry, an effect known as magnetic flux."
This is absolutely incredible. Makes you wonder how much potential the real world has compared to the simulated environment usually used to test theoretical solutions.
It's an example of overspecialization and finding weird local minimum trough loophole in the way the problem is encoded.
Genetic algorithms have the ability to capture the imagination of public and computer science students because they can find very messy and random solutions if you run them long enough.
In the general context of search and optimization algorithms they are not impressive. When you can't use anting better, like Mote Carlo or simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms are often the last hope before brute forcing it. GA can be very impressive when you can restrict the search space and find good representation for the problem.
I get the advantages of generic algorithms. But sometimes overfitting can be very useful. Imagine wind or water turbines where this method could be used to increase their efficiency based on the individual hardware.
Its also likely the solution it found would not work across the operating temperature range of the device. To do it properly would take a lot longer and need a lot more test cases.
Assuming proper instrumentation, GAs provide much better performance vs. brute force in locating software defects. E.g. http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/
Yes they do. I didn't mean to imply that they are useless.
Evolutionary algorithms and swarm optimization algorithms are the next step above brute force and random search. In the space of optimization algorithms are below everything else.
Usually they are the last option. Using them to locate software defects means that you have no special insight into software defects but you hope to generate something better than random.
I don't think it's that incredible - it demonstrates that even evolutionary algorithms are susceptible to overfitting. In this case, the algorithm found a solution which would work - however, only in the specific environment of the tests and not in the general set of environments that the researches expected the solutions to work.
Has anyone done an actual analysis of how the evolved circuit worked? The suggestion that the unconnected cells interacted through "magnetic flux" seems very hand-wavy. I'd be much more included to blame capacitive coupling between signals, noise spikes from switching, voltage fluctuations, leakage currents or even thermal effects.
You are right. This is incredible. Ignore the naysayers saying that this is just extreme over fitting. This is more than that. Literally it is using rules outside the rules of how to program an fpga to find a solution.
Additionally it is the one algorithm that has produced the human brain and the one algorithm that has produced biological nanomachines that move and think. No other algorithm has done such a feat. It is naive to dismiss such an algorithm as "overfitting" when the incredible results are all around you.
I am very sorry what your grandfather had to endure and I am happy he survived. Though it doesn't change the past I will make sure that my children and grandchildren will remember what happened in order to prevent anything like that happening in our lifetimes again.