I can imagine this has some very undesirable usecases if used in the wrong way.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45704521

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

For one thing, the Hue bridge requiring an ethernet cable is mind-blowing to me. My router doesn't have an ethernet port, and yes it does say on their website, but I wouldn't have expected it to be a requirement, especially when it actually has wifi capabilities on-device, they're just disabled.

Setting up HA was a real pain, it's definitely not "Plug and play". I used a Pi 4 and got a bunch of weird errors, and debugging it is not for the faint-hearted. Eventually I did get it working by downgrading to a year-old version, but now it doesn't recognise my Tapo (TP-Link's brand) lights, the integration just doesn't work.

Overall, it's quite a hassle to get set up so I see why people don't bother unless they've got a lot of free time or are really into it, or just pay the premium for an all-Hue system that does actually work out of the box.

The key idea is that you can only add 'friends' if you've actually met them once in real life. So it wouldn't be overrun by celebrities and pseudo-social relationships, influencers, etc. I'm hoping it would foster more local connections - e.g. if someone often runs into a certain person at the same places and has similar interests, maybe they'll add each other as 'friends'.

'Compete', 'winner', and 'reward' are all left undefined in the article. Even given that, the theory is not new information and seems incredibly analogous to Hebbian learning which is a long-standing theory in neuroscience. Additionally, the metaphor of evolution within the brain does not seem apt. Essentially what is said is that given a sensory input, we will see patterns emerge that correspond to a behaviour deemed successful. Other brain patterns may arise but are ignored or not reinforced by a reward. This is almost tautological, and the 'evolutionary process' (input -> brain activity -> behaviour -> reward) lacks explanatory power. This is exactly what we would expect to see. If we observe a behaviour that has been reinforced in some way, it would obviously correlate with the brain producing a specific activity pattern. I don't see any evidence that the brain will always produce several candidate activity patterns before judging a winner based on consensus. The tangent of cortical columns ignores key deep brain structures and is also almost irrelevant, the brain could use the proposed 'evolutionary' process with any architecture.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845495

Points: 1

# Comments: 1