Here goes an intro! Just today, and because it is the first edition of the newsletter.
I am Walter González, I work with data and computers in business environments; something called Data Science nowadays, but that may change, as it has changed in the past.
Data, complexity, decision science and in general quantitative approaches to answer questions form the *real world* are my main interests.
My superpower? I manage to find almost anything interesting. Of course, it is also my curse.
I spend a lot of time surfing the web, reading reports and newsletters, checking out repositories and papers, as well as other voices from Twitter, LinkedIn and other networks, and I decided to share a selection of that material with you.
I am a firm believer in the renaissance of blogs and newsletters as an emergent product after a decade or so of almost exclusive interest in centralized social media. I know, it’s a long -and interesting- debate as well, but here is my two cents: Aleph Week.
You can contact me in Twitter and LinkedIn, or write me an email to gualterio at gmail.
Cheers!
Interesting stuff form the WEB:
>> How to tell the difference between AI and BS.
>> GPT2 and the Nature of intelligence.
One main line of Western intellectual thought, often called nativism, goes back to Plato and Kant. On the nativist view, intelligence, in humans and animals, derives from firm starting points, such as a universal grammar (Chomsky) and from core cognitive mechanisms for representing domains such as physical objects (Spelke).
A contrasting view, often associated with the 17th century British philosopher John Locke, sometimes known as empiricism, takes the position that hardly any innateness is required, and that learning and experience are essentially all that is required in order to develop intelligence. On this "blank slate" view, all intelligence is derived from patterns of sensory experience and interactions with the world.
In the days of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, all of this was speculation.
Nowadays, with enough money and computer time, we can actually test this sort of theory, by building massive neural networks, and seeing what they learn.
>> Machine learning games? Yes, we are going there…
>> OpenAI showcased a new AI system, DALL'E, that is able to generate images from image captions. / DALL’E Explained in less than 5 minutes. / A snail made of garlic: How DALL´E works.
>> Predictions 2021 from Rodney Brooks.
>> Insights for AI from the human mind.
>> Machine Learning is going real-time.
>> Eric Weber’s “10 things I wish I had done *less* of when I started my data career” post in LinkedIn, with some interesting discussion.
>> How to Gradually Exit Twitter. By Balaji S. Srinivasan.
From Twitter:
From Reddit:
>> AI learned to freestyle in the obstacle course on its own! The power of Machine Learning.
>> How close we are to human level AI?
>> Yann LeCun CNN demo video from 1993.
This week I read:
>> The Management Myth, by Matthew Stewart.
Quote from the book’s web:
How do so many who know so little make so much by telling other people how to do the jobs they are paid to know how to do? Why do people pursue expensive graduate degrees that have no demonstrable effect on their performance? Why do so many bad books of management advice sell so well? How can I get a job where I make millions in stock options and then leave my company in the dust?
Alongside his devastating critique of management “philosophy” from Frederick Taylor to Tom Peters, Stewart provides a bitingly funny account of his own days in an ethically-challenged management consulting firm.
Check the author’s web here. WSJ review. Here you can read an excerpt.
Learn something:
>> Top 10 SQL learning resources according to Eric Weber.
1. Zachary Thomas' SQL Questions https://lnkd.in/g-JJzuD
2. Select * SQL: https://selectstarsql.com/
3. Leetcode: https://lnkd.in/g3c5JGC
4. LinkedIn Learning: https://lnkd.in/gQXFc4n
5. Window Functions: https://lnkd.in/g3RtPCJ
6. HackerRank: https://lnkd.in/grv_9sB
7. W3 Schools: https://lnkd.in/gJPfrrv
8. CodeAcademy: https://lnkd.in/gT5xmpN
9. SQLZoo: https://sqlzoo.net/
10. SQL Bolt: https://sqlbolt.com/
>> Cracking the Coding Interview in Python 3. The solutions all have detailed explanations with visuals. Amazing hands-on material.