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Idea: Answering Tricky questions with Amazon Mechanical Turk
I know that the Echo gets the bulk of its responses from Alexa, but I think amazon is missing an opportunity with their own mturk service. Each time Echo responds with “sorry”, the transcript of that command is already flagged for staff review. If enough people ask for anything, the appropriate response will eventually be available for Echo. However, what if Amazon could create new responses to tricky questions in less than a day? Using Amazon’s own Mechanical Turk service, Amazon can reduce the threshold for human review. Overall decreasing the turnaround for creating better responses from weeks down to hours or even minutes! For the uninitiated, Mechanical Turk is…
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Software will save us
Summary: Some old insights are still true. Hardware has almost 2000 times more transistors in each chip comparing 1995 to 2015, but steadily increasing software demands of hardware have given us slower and slower systems. A basic task on a 1995 machine completes only slightly faster on a modern machine. Our computers are not 2000 times better or make us 2000 times more productive. I was reading a press release from Intel on the feasibility of chip advancements after the next gen 10nm chips. Ideas do exist, but nothing will gain the power and speed that the brute force method of “make it smaller with more transistors” approach has for the last 60 years. Got me thinking…
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Reminiscing about XBConnect
What is XBConnect? It was an online gaming service for the original Xbox. This was before Xbox Live was popular. XBConnect used the system link mode built into many Xbox games, basically hijacking the network traffic and rerouting over the internet. XBC stayed relevant through the years due to two factors: 1. it was free and 2. it was compatible with the “new” xbox 360 which used the same system link as the original xbox. XBConnect was a great service for broke college kids who had access to non-dial-up internet. After writing several help guides, I was invited to be a moderator and eventually an admin of the forums from 2004 – 2014.…
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Let’s talk about luck
Luck can be quantified. Each person has a set max amount of luck they can carry with them, and a set flow rate that their luck is replenished. A person throughout the day uses there luck all the time, without even realizing it. Each time you take a risk, big or small, you use a portion of your luck reserves. Here is where people run into problems. Using too much luck creates a luck deficit, this is the cause of bad luck. A person who presses their luck all the time with a risky lifestyle will find themselves out of luck when they really need it. Don’t worry too much…