Today's Concept of the Week is Occam's Razor, along with other related ideas like Hanlon's Razor.
- The Dragon in My Garage
- Fermi Estimation
- Why your iPhone is probably not recording all your conversations; but if it was what how it might do it.
- How early is too early for Halloween?

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This week’s guest is Mark Ryan, author of the upcoming book Deep Learning with Structured Data.

We cover:
- How machine learning has come to dominate Artificial Intelligence over the last few decades
- How the deep learning, which can solve problems like natural language understanding and image recognition - is becoming more and more practical, and gets results even in more traditional datasets
- How to learn to become a machine learning engineer through online tutorials and frameworks
- Where this is going in the future, and discussions on superintelligence and the technological singularity

Get 40% off the book with the discount code podlocalmax19, at Manning Publishing: https://www.manning.com/books/deep-learning-with-structured-data

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On the news that Amazon wants to put Alexa into wearable devices, we discuss the idea that the focus in consumer tech has moved to sound, including voice controls, augmented reality, and podcasting.

Max gives an update on the Betaworks Hearing Voices conference that highlighted the latest tech, demos, and ideas in this area.

Plus - we follow up on previous episodes, including Aaron’s predictions on the Metaculus engine, and how Max missed a subway stop because he was reading Reddit.

localmaxradio.com/86

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Part 2 of Max's discussion with Anthony Aguirre, cofounder of the Metaculus prediction engine. Topics include:
- The difference between making short term, long term, and theoretical predictions
- The human mind and human emotions - as imperfect as they are - being world's best tool for prediction making
- Calibrating your probabilities, on an individual and group level
- Predictions of humor-detecting AI, waking up after being cryogenically frozen, and political developments

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metaculus.com

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Max talks to cosmologist Anthony Aguirre about the fundamental nature of the universe, with the following questions:
Is the Space Discrete or Continuous?
How does our physics differ from Virtual Reality, or the model we have in our brain?
What is Fourier space?
What does it mean that the universe is made of information?
Is there a fundamental bit?

In most cases, things aren’t what they seem! Check out Anthony’s Book on the subject: Cosmological Koans.

localmaxradio.com/84

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Max follows through on his promise to take down the big lie about Bitcoin - that it’ll consume all our energy and destroy the earth. He goes through the simple math that shows this won’t be a problem, and talk about how Bitcoin can encourage better energy technology.

Jack Ma and Elon Musk were recently in a debate/discussion about AI in Shanghai, and they are in such opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to their philosophical outlook! We talk about what they said, and where they agreed.

Finally, Max starts by responding to Gab CEO Andrew Torba, who threw shade at Foursquare in a recent blogpost.

localmaxradio.com/83

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Henry Abramson, Dean of Touro College in Brooklyn, tells us about how he took his Jewish History Lectures online. We talk a bit about the historical shift in communication, information, and education that the internet and YouTube represent and his dealings with feedback, trolling, and algorithms.

Finally, we learn about his biggest influences, and some specific lectures and why the internet has gravitated towards them.

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henryabramson.com

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Ever feel like there’s something wrong with all the news and information you consume, even when you get it from professional scientists and doctors?

We tackle the reproducibility crisis in science today starting with taking a look at some mudslinging between high profile online academics Andrew Gelman and Cass Sunstein.

We also talk about the probable over-publishing of studies in stock market prediction and elsewhere, and scientists reading too much when interpreting results to fit their narrative and ideology.

localmaxradio.com/81

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The recent sale of the creative and niche site Tumblr to Wordpress from Verizon shows an over 99% loss of value from it’s original sale to Yahoo in 2013. We look back at the phases Tumblr’s been through, and how this fits with the larger social, technological, and business trends.

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This is a conversation with Timoni West at Unity Labs about the emerging tech of Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed reality. We talk about how these new worlds are being created, the challenges that need to be overcome, and how they will be different than you may have assumed from watching your favorite sci-fi movies.

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