Mike Duffy

“The interface theory says that space and time are not fundamental aspects of objective reality, but simply a data format for messages about fitness, a format evolved to compress and correct such messages. Objects in spacetime are not aspects of objective reality, but simply messages about fitness coded in a format of icons that is specific to the needs of Homo sapiens. In particular, our bodies are not aspects of objective reality, and our actions don’t give us direct access to preexisting objects in spacetime. Our bodies are messages about fitness that are coded as icons in a format specific to our species. When you perceive yourself sitting inside space and enduring through time, you’re actually seeing yourself as an icon inside your own data structure.”
― Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

“Decades later, Widrow, recalling Wiener’s personality in a book, painted a particularly evocative picture of a man whose head was often, literally and metaphorically, “in the clouds” as he walked the corridors of MIT buildings: “We’d see him there every day, and he always had a cigar. He’d be walking down the hallway, puffing on the cigar, and the cigar was at angle theta—45 degrees above the ground. And he never looked where he was walking…But he’d be puffing away, his head encompassed in a cloud of smoke, and he was just in oblivion. Of course, he was deriving equations.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI

“most businesses don’t care about ML metrics unless they can move business metrics. Therefore, if an ML system is built for a business, it must be motivated by business objectives, which need to be translated into ML objectives to guide the development of ML models.”
― Chip Huyen, Designing Machine Learning Systems: An Iterative Process for Production-Ready Applications

“Cosmic inflation generically produces a gravitational wave because the inflaton field, like a stone on a pond, disturbs the space-time fabric.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe