I want a guarantee -- with physics and mathematics, not with laws
-- that we can give ourselves things like real privacy of personal
communications. Encryption strong enough that even the NSA can't
break it.
We also want real privacy of personal records. Our computers are
extensions of our minds. We should build them so that a thought
written in the computer is as private as that thought held in our
minds.
Some weeks back, I was talking with my manager about AI and how it
is such a bogus field. My manager replied that in a few years we will
see applications that use AI in our daily life. However, I was quite
skeptical - and I refused to agree to this. He then gave an overview
of neural net and how they can learn to solve the problems. Here I
pointed out that Bayesian filters can also be considered a form of AI,
as they can learn from their previous data and they can make
decisions, but Bayesian filtering is mathematics and not AI. At this
he replied that most of AI is mathematics and only some part of it is
hocus-pocus and hand waving.
This brings me what I have been thinking for a long time.Joel write
A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google
told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction
than Microsoft. "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses
the if statement," he said.
. I had always suspected
this and had also felt that this was the way to go. A few months
back, we had a presentation by a researcher (not a Yahoo! employee),
who was working on extraction and summarization of documents. He had
a formula that he was applying on the sentences of the documents to
find the weight of the whole sentence and then finally if the weight
of the sentence was above some limit, it showed up in the summary. I
was skeptical about this approach - my belief is that the Bayesian
approach can be used to classify documents. Luckily, there is a project that seems to
provide a framework on which things can be built further.
I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my
lifestyle.
- Arthur Dent
Problem Statement Life sucks. More specifically, I am
dissatisfied on the following parts of my life.
Health - To say that I have been neglecting my health would
be an understatement. I have not been doing any physical exercise -
except pushing my chair to get away from my desk. I have gained a lot
of weight and have grown wider.
Volunteer work - This part is balance I guess. I
contribute to the PHPCommuntiy
and quite a few mailing lists. I have also joined as a developer for
addons.mozilla.org
website and I am still trying to get my head around the code. The
part lacking here is that I do not write enough technical articles.
Book reading - Currently my reading list has been limited to
technical books/webzines/blogs only. I should read at least 2 books
each month (self development, literature, fantasy, non-fiction)
Hacking - Not enough hacking, have not written something
which does something utterly cool. One idea floating in my head is to
write a "knowledge digger" - a script which when give a word or a
starting url, will find the list of key terms on it, will run through
wikipedia and del.icio.us and look for urls that give more idea about
the terms.
Fun - The less said about this, the better it will be.
Bangalore sucks - there is absolutely nothing to do here. Most
of my good friends are in Delhi and to make the matters worse, the LUG
meeting (at least the one I attended) was as fun as a funeral .
Quite a lot of this problem can be solved if I get up early, get to
the office early, put in 8 hours of work and be back home early.
Below is the ideal outcome in each part of my life
Health - Lose 20Kgs over next 3 months
Volunteer area - Put 3 hours weekly in writing articles
(to produce 2 articles monthly) and put in 1.5 hours of work daily in
the u.m.o website code
Book reading - Read for at least an hour daily. This will
not include the time I spent in reading blogs
Hacking - Think of one cool hack every month and implement
it. I think that hacking does require any flash of insight, but
simply hard thought. Spend 4 hours every weekend on this.
Fun - Spend half hour each day in solving puzzles
I also have to find a way to measure how effective I am at
following these measures. Each month will have 3 tables - for my
daily, weekly and monthly goals. Anytime I reach my goal, I will put
a dot in the column. But I have still not worked out the format for
recording them. I will have time to do it this evening.
.