All Quotes

"Even the canny invader William the Conqueror can be thought to have contributed to the total of our plant list. When he came to build what we now know as the s, he preferred use material with which he was already acquainted rather than stone from unknown English quarries, so the walls of castles like and were built from stone imported from the . Incidental to its main purpose, the stone itself carried the seeds of a double invasion — seeds of two plants we think of as being most quintessentially English. The first was the , and the second was . Both were seen blooming on the stone walls of in France, so the pretty little delicate pink which is used in the breeding of nearly all of our border pinks is the result of ."

"Trees can be record breakers: they can be one of the oldest living s in the world: Californian specimens of ', the Wellingonia or Big Tree, are believed to be at least 4,000 years old. They can also be the largest form of life: a which grows in in Mexico — and which, incidentally, is about 2,000 years old — has a circumference measuring 54 s (178) and is 40 metres (130ft) high. Its weight is estimated to be about 500 s."

"Evelyn ... wrote the first (and only) bestseller on : was published in 1664 and addressed and the shortage of . ... "We had better be without gold than without timber," Evelyn wrote, because without trees there would be no iron and glass industry, no fires to warm houses in winter, nor a navy to protect the shores of England. Timber was, as Maggie Campbell-Culver points out, the oil of the 17th century, and the shortage of it created similar anxieties about fuel, manufacturing and transport as threats to oil production do today. Sylva was a response to these fears, encouraging the reader to plant trees as an act of patriotic duty. ... A Passion for Trees is beautifully illustrated with paintings and sumptuous botanical drawings. But the use of explanatory extensive "text boxes" (some are four pages long) interrupts the narrative. As with her first book The Origin of Plants, Campbell-Culver is at her strongest and most convincing when she delves into the lives of the trees, although both Evelyn himself and the age in which he lived remain elusive throughout the book."

"If you want to build a service agent that does returns, you cannot afford for the returns to be wrong one out of ten times. It has to be 99.9% correct. If you have an agent that comes up with a loan, you cannot have an agent make the wrong recommendation about the loan. These are scenarios where we need to have high consistency."

"These are very similar to what DeepMind did when they were training AlphaGo. They have instructions on how to play Go, along with some trajectories on how the game should be played. However, to achieve a breakthrough in performance, they had it interact with another AI. Then they began discovering new strategies, architectures, and approaches for winning the games, and eventually ended up with something that actually beat the gold masters at some point. The same concept can be applied here in the realm of enterprise."

"Generating thousands or millions of trajectories will help us find the right mechanisms for incorporating feedback and re-training those LLMs [Large Language Models]. There are numerous opportunities for developing new training engines, learning engines, and ultimately creating new benchmarks. We cannot improve what we cannot measure. The benchmarks are critical for assessing our current position."

"This doesn't cover all of the objects, fields, and complexity of the orgs that use Salesforce. But even within this simplified scenario, we can go towards something that improves performance for those use cases being tested. The next step is to increase the scope. We need to do more work, add more objects, and more complexity. That's what we want to do in the next phase."

"Prompt engineering is a bit of an art. So, there's a lot of work that goes into that, but finding an automatic way to engineer the prompt could be very useful, because it eliminates the need for humans to do the engineering. You have a system that automatically comes up with the right way of engineering the prompt."

"Our goal is to scale it up and make it as close as possible to real-world use cases. I think it's actually the next stage of the arms race for agentic AI. I have seen these other cases of discussion about simulation bubbling up in this area of the enterprise."

"This kind of scenario can be implemented by plugging it into the right structure, such as CRM-Arena, where we have started simulating all these different business objects and their dependencies. You start training agents that replicate what a customer will do and what a human agent will do to create a lot of interesting use cases. You can actually cover a lot of ground, which is somewhat difficult to predict beforehand."

"intelligence comes about in part from real focus (goal-directed behavior); (this is why you have the absent minded professor caricature[.] it is a rare woman who is not first and foremost focussed on what others are thinking and feeling about her[.] hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you or why you dont own a kelly bag[.]"

"I'm not suggesting that teachers never tell the truth, only that it isn't necessary to do it all the time. Since coming to one's own conclusions is mostly how we learn, the real job of a teacher is to force students to come to sensible conclusions by confronting what they already believe with stuff that is antithetical to those beliefs. A confused person has only 2 choices. Admit he is confused and doesn't care, or resolve the confusion. Resolving the confusion invloves thinking. Teachers can encourage thinking by making sure students have something confusing to think about."

"I think that’s why we have programmes like the Digital Public Goods Alliance. I really appreciate the wave of awareness among funders to see the value of these tools in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and to understand that there’s some maintenance that’s required, not just on the technical side, but in the communities that are the backbone."

"There are endless books about what every third grader must know that use the idea that factual knowledge is the basis of the ability to read as their justification. Unfortunately, the writers of these tracts have misunderstood the cognitive science behind those statements. It is difficult to read things when you don't understand what they are about, but it does not follow from that thatthe solution is to ram that knowledge down kids' throats and then have them read. It is much more clever to have them read about what they know and to gradually increase their knowledge through stories that cause them to have to learn more in order to make the stories understandable to them"

"Certain things need to be done again and again in life, but those things can be learned only in context, not as an abstraction. Different contexts must be provided in order to motivate students and to provide real world skills that will be remembered, not because they were studied and tested but because they were practicied again and again."

"... Let me start with the top mistakes that teachers make. Some of these mistakes are forced on teachers by a badly designed education system, and some are ones that teachers make no matter what they are teaching or which system they are teaching in. Some of these are less than obvious, so let's consider them one-by-one."

"Choosing the freedom to be uninteresting never quite worked for me."

"I learned I couldn’t shed light on love other than to feel its comings and goings and be grateful."

"I think my role for the Internet was that I was lucky to be part of the people who spread the Internet through Southeast Asia. I brought the Internet to Thailand. That was the reason why I’ve been recognized."

"That was more than twenty five years ago. So, at that time nobody knew about the Internet or even to use the existing telephone for email. That type of technology was totally new. So introducing technology to a country which was not aware of the possibility was not easy. It was very tough to do. And once the people started to know about this new technology, the existing telecommunication operators were afraid of the impact on their business."

"So we had to all the time try to live under that condition, which is not easy. So that was the challenging part of our task, to be able to introduce the technology to the public and at the same time we needed to be able to work out with the telecommunication operator that we have to look for the benefit of the whole country instead of you know, looking at their business alone."

"I always see the Internet as sunny."

"There’s so many exciting things that happened throughout the past twenty almost thirty years for me. And it’s always sunny. Even though there’s many challenging problems, there’s a lot of issues that you never looked at before, and once you have Internet technology coming in, you start to ask yourself and try to clarify with yourself what kind of the impact of the Internet, which makes you understand your society even better. So I always view this in a positive point of view and I think it’s always sunny."

"As it is sunny, I don’t fear anything. I like the sun. Because I think you know, whatever technology you bring in, there’s always a negative side of that. And if start fearing that negative aspect which prevents you from doing any other interesting things, I think you are not going the right track. I think the best way is to try to understand a new technology and its impact, and how we can try to accommodate that in our society. And you know,"

"making sure that people would benefit more from the technology than the negative impact."

"Life is like a shoe, you cannot drink a cow because the earth is carrot Think about it"

"(Nigerian pidgin language) Even if tomato no red, cow can’t be snake because potato and yam are not siblings If he reach ur turn put Wetinx them understand"

"(Nigerian pidgin language) Even if rain forgets umbrella, fish can’t drive bicycle because moon and bread don’t share the same Wifi. If he reach ur turn put Wetinx them go understand"

"(Nigerian pidgin language) Boniface no serious he dey everywhere / I Dey club like Leverkusen and club like milan want me and I no serious / So if I serious na club for Jupiter I go Dey play / Clowns 🤡 everywhere / If I no serious and I dey this level make I remain like that 😂"

"Disrespecting your body and wasting your money with different girls won't get you anywhere in life, I don't know when y'all will be wise, Find yourself 1 girl or 2 girls and settle down highest 3 girls or if you're going through a lot 4 is okay."

"I took over Ushahidi at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. Surprisingly, the pandemic was a silver lining because the use of our platform skyrocketed, proving its usefulness. There was a group in Spain, Frena La Curva, who set up the platform to create a kind of mutual aid functionality. They documented that model and shared it with 22 other Latin American and Spanish speaking countries, and it ended up being used. It’s been very helpful because we’ve been able to communicate the value of the platform in this day and age, while showing the challenges in terms of resources. Our messaging was around we are a small team, here are ways you can get involved and help, you can start an instance, you can share some of your feedback. Then we combined that with participating in programmes like Google Summer of Code and Outreachy."

"I mention that because we got over the barrier of entry on the first point. We’ve managed to get the volunteers paid, thankfully, through the support of the Outreachy structure programme, and I’ve actually been able to hire two people who have come out of the community. That’s all well and good. I don’t know what will help us to grow, but it’s a first step."

"We were looking for someone who could bring administrative experience, interdisciplinary research excellence and their international worldview to our Integrated Engineering program. We are lucky to now have Shahryar leading Engineering at Brock. He is already actively involved in moving the department forward."

"I am interested in research on efficient design and application of computational intelligence techniques especially evolutionary computation genetic algorithms and genetic programming, swarm intelligence, especially on particle swarm optimization, and artificial neural networks. A major application area is in optimization with a focus on combinatorial optimization, multi objective optimization, and optimization in dynamic environments."

"Lately I am also interested in complex networks from two angles. That is, using genetic programming for the automatic inference of graph models for complex networks, and developing fast algorithms to determine critical nodes in complex networks."

"Nature is medicine for the soul, Miss Rolston"

"Mentally tease apart the threads that keep you connected to your mother. See that those threads, those feelings, that you experience with her are what find the two of you -- but they do not have to weave the tapestry of your entire life."

"Anything she says will be ok with him -- this she feels instinctively. She looks up and meets his eyes: eagle against the sky, his eyes boring into her. He leans over and kisses her, first lightly, then his arms circles her waist and his hand grasps a shoulder blade, pulling her up and closer. Inside her a diamond, the glittering spot where her feelings have solidified into the hardest substance on earth, catches fire and melts"

"The mother needs mothering too"

"For instance, if AI cannot be conscious, then if you substituted a microchip for the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness, you would end your life as a conscious being"

"And if an AI is a conscious being, forcing it to serve us would be akin to slavery"

"If superintelligent machines are not conscious, either because it’s impossible or because they aren’t designed to be, we could be in trouble."

"For if we are not careful, we may experience one or more perverse realizations of AI technology—situations in which AI fails to make life easier but instead leads to our own suffering or demise, or to the exploitation of other conscious beings"

"In the long term, the tables may turn on humans, and the problem may not be what we could do to harm AIs, but what AI might do to harm us."

"Kurzweil and other transhumanists contend that we are fast approaching a “technological singularity,” a point at which AI far surpasses human intelligence and is capable of solving problems we weren’t able to solve before, with unpredictable consequences for civilization and human nature."

"According to a recent survey, for instance, the most-cited AI researchers expect AI to “carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human” within a 50 percent probability by 2050, and within a 90 percent probability by 2070.”"

"The development of AI is driven by market forces and the defense industry—billions of dollars are now pouring into constructing smart household assistants, robot supersoldiers, and supercomputers that mimic the workings of the human brain."

"The Macintosh Keyboard was one of the ancestors of HHKB. Other ancestors were VT100, Sun Workstation Type 2, 3, 4, etc. They were all typewriter paired keyboards."

"The HHKB inherited only the central key positions. On the other hand, the famous Teletype Model 33 keyboard, which was logical paired or bit paired, was not an ancestor of the HHKB."

"There were some logical pairing keyboards in Japan because JIS Standard supported the logical pairing."