For that, I would look at early calculus/pre-calc, I think, examining infinite series and their properties and equivalencies.
There's certain forms like that that have well known values that they converge to as you continue adding terms into infinity. Sometimes that convergence is only possible if your domain is limited, eg. [0,1].
That is a misreading of the article. It's more about discovery through quick, iterative prototyping, which can include rapid discovery of fatal flaws early.
+1 I am reading this is exactly pointing to the same concept as the todo management, but not addressing the todo paralysis. Everyone's mileage may vary. I accept that. Yet misreading something is far more dangerous than ignorance.
The man that spent his time on an overpriced takeover and subsequent ruining of Twitter instead of spending that time with the children he abandoned is a cautionary tale of wasted time, not a sage to be mined for wisdom.
Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds instead of wasting that time gaming an algorithm on a platform he paid too much for to become the leading proprietor of authoritarian-conservative junk posting.
If anyone thinks he doesn't have enough time for that, go over to Twitter and look at what he's doing with that time he doesn't have right now.
> Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds
His life might be richer, but I don't think he would get more done. I do think he is a cautionary tale, but there are also many insights to be gained.
You shouldn't optimize your life for output, but for those moments when you do want to optimize your output it makes sense to glean from those who are very good at it.
Is being an avoidant parent a precondition to being a successful executive? My direct anecdotal experience with successful executives is quite the opposite.
I really think we're giving him far too much credit to assume this is all an intentional time-saving life hack to improve his ability to optimize his output for some planet-saving goal (which his most recent work, frankly, has not been).
> Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds
The people I know who satisfy that definition don't generally get shit done. The ones who do are outliers; i.e. so rare that you may as well judge them to be a rounding error.
My only takeaway from this exchange is you're jealous the man had the money to just go and buy Mysterious Twitter X and do with it as he wants, instead of complaining about it like the rest of us.
His pleasures, accomplishments, fears, and compulsions.
A personality and a lifestyle that drives away everyone except acquaintances and employees.
The kind of insecurity that causes a person to gravely insult a someone who risked their life, many times over, to save the lives of strangers half a world from their home because they dismissed your media ploy in public.
The kind of personality that is so addicted to attention that despite repeated public embarrassments that would make most people rethink their actions, they reform their own worldview in order to blame society instead of rightfully feeling ashamed.
A person who has a compulsion to make money constantly when there is no longer any purpose to do so -- to the point where they use guest appearances on comedy shows to pump and dump novelty crypto coins in order to make a few more pennies.
Does that sound like a happy, content person? If anyone is jealous of that life just so that they can have the fame then all I can say is that there is ever an opportunity where one of us can grab that for themselves, please -- be my guest.
> The kind of insecurity that causes a person to gravely insult a someone who risked their life, many times over, to save the lives of strangers half a world from their home because they dismissed your media ploy in public.
Called him a pedophile no less. He didn't win the libel case in court, but he certainly deserved to.
The actual story of the cave rescue and the highly specialized cave divers that pulled it off is quite incredible, I highly recommend seeing it as it happens in The Rescue. The documentary takes the high ground and doesn't mention the Musk fiasco, but without directly doing so, also lays waste to how impossible the submarine idea was: https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-rescue
It is funny how much criticism you are taking for saying things that are obviously true.
Yes, Musk's personal life is a mess and noone would enjoy being him.
That can be true at the same time as his business philosophy effectively pushes forward multiple businesses more quickly than their competitors. That can even be true while his businesses are run in ways that most of us would find unacceptable.
It's worth pointing out here that SpaceX's current product development practices and Boeing's current product development practices is a bit of a false dichotomy. We could also, for example, consider how Boeing did things a few decades ago.
One particular reason I don't like this false dichotomy is that SpaceX's approach has negative externalities that aren't getting enough attention because everybody's so starstruck by all the fancy rockets. There's a reason the FAA and EPA are starting to pressure SpaceX about the environmental and social impact of their way of doing business. Maybe next OSHA can get on them for the high workplace injury rate. You're not actually doing things more cheaply if what you're really doing is hiding costs that would belong on your balance sheet by surreptitiously foisting them onto the public with the help of corrupt politicians.
(Ostensible libertarians, pay extra attention to those last six words.)
They can be trivially shown to reason. It's quite normal for many things to have reasoning capacity, including amoeba, sunflowers, cats, LLMs, and humans.
The real issue is establishing the limitations of their reasoning capabilities, and how to improve them.
As has been noted in other threads, for a low enough definition of reason, yes, certainly. But even an amoeba appears to reason better than an LLM, which only regurgitates by nature. There is no independent cognition whatsoever, no logical constructs and decisions, no abstractions.
Reducing reasoning beings to the level of AI is an affront to—and demonstrates a genuine lack of understanding of—the nature of organisms and reason itself, and the nature of AI and its capabilites.
Distilling my thoughts on 'debiasing' here, and in a variety of other modern endeavors.
It is better to have representations of reality that you can then discuss and grapple with honestly, than to try to distort representations - such as AI - to make them fit some desired reality and then pressure others to conform their perception to your projected fantasy.
Representations don't create reality, and trying to use representations in that way only causes people to go literally insane, and to divide along lines of who accepts and who rejects your fantasy representation.
So, for example, if you try and remove any racial bias from AI, you are going to end up crushing the AI's ability to represent reality according to a variety of other real factors: income, judicial outcomes, health risks, etc. Your desired reality makes the actual tool worthless, except to confirm one group's own intended fantasy world as they envision it. The problem doesn't get dealt with, it just becomes impossible to think about or discuss.
So instead of dealing with real problems, you hope you can simply prevent people from thinking thoughts that cause those problems by wrapping them in a bubble that deflects those thoughts before they happen. This is magical, wizardry thinking: treating words as if they create reality, instead of merely describing it. And it will break, eventually, and in a very ugly way: people dividing along lines of their perception of reality, even more than they already do.
"Reality" is a tricky concept. For me, I follow Jeff Atwood - if it isn't written down, it doesn't exist. According to this logic, people wasted a lot of time on imaginary, illusory things for most of human history, but now they have phones and most communication is digital so there is the possibility to finally be productive. This definition shows how the concept of distorting reality or honestly representing reality is flawed - reality is what I write down, I can in fact create more reality by writing down words, and regardless of what I write, it will be reality. Representations like books, scrolls, papyri constitute the reality of most civilizations - there is no other evidence they existed. It is true that representations don't create reality - rather, humans create representations, and these representations collectively are reality, no creation involved.
Representations are art - for example books, they are "literary art". It is uncontroversial that people will like and dislike certain works. It is more controversial whether art can be "inherently" good or bad. PG actually wrote an essay, https://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html, arguing that there is a meaningful metric, and that one can learn how to have good taste, defined as being able to identify whether the work is universally appealing or distasteful to humanity. There is good art and people will notice if it is good. I think this is uncontroversial in the LLM space, there are various benchmarks and human rating systems and people have formed a rough ranking of models. Now when there is good art, there is also bad. And similarly bad representations. There is a myth that representations can make people insane - for example, the concept of infinity, or NSFL images - but practically, words can't hurt you. You can make and break representations with abandon and nothing will happen, other than wasting your time. It is just that some representations are bad. Like phlogiston, aether, ... complete dead ends. Trust me when I say you will read the Wikipedia page and come away wondering why the ancients were so stupid. That is all trying to remove racial bias is, is improving art. Whether it crushes the AI's ability or not is a matter of science and taste, and so far experiments have been promising.
To focus on exactly why your perspective is misguided: Can you describe what there is about reality that cannot be described with words? :-)
I think Villeneuve - out of the current cream-of-the-crop directors - best understands how to /adapt/ for film. Chiang has a masterful grasp of the short story format, in turn. Both the short story and film delighted me, and both seem suited well to their medium.
Arrival and Dune Part 1 are both really good, 10/10, adaptations.
Dune 2 to me shows that even with an amazingly talented adapter/director, that there are some limits to what can be conveyed from literature to film.
The limit in Dune 2 comes down to the fact that much of the “action” in the novel takes place via internal monologue. To convey that in film ends up being very, very hard and with Dune you can’t escape it.
In my viewing of Dune 2 I thought they weren’t able to really show the vastness of Paul’s internal journey, his visions of Jihad, struggling with his place in the universe as his mind is transforming. I didn’t feel that was in the film and made a lot of other actions and motivations more confusing.
I’m glad we have so many ways to tell stories, and I’m wholeheartedly for adaptations, but the fact that some types of ideas and stories are best expressed via one medium over another is something to embrace as well.
Certainly true! Expressing internal conflict and ideas in external, comprehensible ways is maybe the single most difficult challenge for the filmmaker. It's very hard to get right. 'The medium is the message' still rings true.
I always custom-select hunks of my current work to assemble into coherent commits, where possible. I find it really helps me to rearrange the work I've done in my head in such a way that if I needed to walk someone through it, I could do so by walking the commit line.
Reheated pure materialism. Not terribly interesting, and the only thing removing category distinctions here will do for you is give license to treat any organism however you wish - you have removed any semblance of moral consideration from the equation. And that, I think, few will accept: the experience each person has of living testifies against such a view. There is more to life, and to /our/ lives, than mere engineered material.
After all, what benefit is this article if it is simply one machine communicating to another?
I also struggled to find an interesting new thought in the article. It was a bit nihilistic to just say that there is no dividing line and leave it at that. Great... there is no clear-cut line, so what?
Categorization is a tool for scientists to use for comparison. It's kind of like k-nearest neighbors learning. We have to draw the line for categories somewhere initially, then we adjust where that line is over time and add more categories if needed.
At the same time with taxonomy, we're basically lossy encoding the information and so data is lost or glossed over. IE, white walls aren't exactly white, there's other color information there but it's easier for our brains to encode. Creating lines, borders and categories is a lossy function and if objective truth is to be obtained, it's important to retain as much of it as possible while we can also be intellectually honest about our needs for such distinctions.
> the only thing removing category distinctions here will do for you is give license to treat any organism however you wish
This is only true if what stops you from treating certain organisms in a certain way are these objective category distinctions (rather than the approximate ones your brain makes), but I don't think that's generally how it works. People who wish to harm others will harm others regardless, the only thing that will stop them is consequences. On the other hand, people who don't wish harm to others will not harm others regardless of whether they believe objective categories or objective morality exists.
> People who wish to harm others will harm others regardless, the only thing that will stop them is consequences. On the other hand, people who don't wish harm to others will not harm others regardless of whether they believe objective categories or objective morality exists.
This discounts that there are those who wish to harm others who aim to persuade others still to look the other way or even join in on the harm. If the only argument against them is that they'll face consequences, they only have to grow their numbers large enough to avoid said consequences.
To say nothing of those who'll argue against there being any consequences in the first place.
What would suggest it is strictly within the bounds of materialism? There must be some observation that underpins your idea that it is within the bounds of materialism to claim it is the simplest and most logical explanation. I'm not saying you are wrong, but I think we should be open to other explanations.
You assert there is 'more' without evidence beyond subjective experience.
Even if we are open to other possibilities, many are unfalsifiable and therefore they cannot be proven. Unprovable theories have limited value. Certainly not enough to discount what can be observed when the physical brain develops and decays.
Where did I assert there was more? I merely say that defaulting to materialism is not necessarily merited when you have so little evidence. I usually tend to take your stance, but nowadays I wish for more observations. Defaulting to materialism is a way of stopping creativity. We need more playfulness, is my claim. Its pure intuition, though, haven't done any research on it.
I only questioned the statement that "the experience each person has of living testifies against" materialism. I didn't say any of the things you mention in your post.
Yes. That is one argument. It is the experience of life, we do not feel like automatons. Are you saying you had to write this reply? Or did you have a choice?
> you have removed any semblance of moral consideration from the equation
I think rather we have invented the notion of life so that we can divide the world into things that are morally relevant and things that are not. People do this all the time: my phylum is better than all the other phyla, my nation is better than all the other nations, my species is better than all the other species, my race is better than all the other races, my gender is better than the other gender (or all the other genders -- I am not trying to make this an argument about gender). We decide there is a scientific basis -- we declare this by fiat -- for ourselves having ethical privileges.
Morality does not need to be centered around preserving the privileges of the winner. We don't need the concept of life to decide what is right. For instance, there is the balance of perceived harm. If something does not have interests or a means of pursuing them, we need not concern ourselves with harming it.
In any case, deriving our ethics from reason and facts is at least as good as deriving it from distinctions of uncertain basis that happen to always work to our own benefit.
Is alternative to pure materialism "reality is mind"? Even from that perspective I currently cannot see how that simplifies the distinction between living or dead. When is there a moment where electron does not have a subjective experience but I do?
But morality only concerns itself a certain complex class of organisms, right? We don't weep for loss of innocent life we inflict when we take antibiotics.
Why is it necessarily an all or nothing question? Can't we simply say we concern ourselves more with complex organisms than less complex? That reveals the emptiness of this question of where you put the dividing line.
Morality is importantly a question for the individual. The question is, what do you weep for, not what do we weep for. If you're taking moral cues from others, you're not doing morality, just groupthink.
> But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.
This seems incomplete, using the wrong definition of 'competition' to try and make a clever point. Competition does not necessarily grant permanent 'winners' or 'losers', unless the 'game' is forcibly ended for good. Infinitely repeated games are very different in nature from singleton games, and the number and nature of the players involved are also not fixed.
I just picked up Java (via Kotlin) for the first time in four years, during which I've been doing Rails dev. I needed an AWS Lambda for zipping files into and out of S3. I banged my head against broken/unsuitable Node packages for doing so before finally giving up, since it is the lingua franca of Lambda.
I was able to rewrite and deploy the function in Kotlin in two days' time. It was easy to set up and run, and worked literally first compile and run - a benefit of static types.
Now, would I recommend it to anyone who is unfamiliar with the JVM ecosystem? That's a harder sell. But the stability of the ecosystem and a modern set of saner tools and libraries have made it much better to work in; I'd even call it pleasant.
AWS Lambda is the once place where you should never use Java. You have specific thresholds for how fast your function responds, jvm prevents that and requires more memory.
AWS Lambda’s documentation shows how to accept a Request and send a response. You don’t need a package for that. For making zips from s3, again, AWS’s sdk. It’s one of the most commonly asked questions on SO. Here’s one implementation for you that could have saved you days:
Trust me, I looked up dozens of references. All would mysteriously halt after several files - known issues with how the Archiver library works, and none with any kind of fix, basically a data race within the library itself. Node's streams and promises are far too complex for far too little added benefit, and leads to broken concurrency in a multitude of libraries, and I'd had enough.
As for startup time - the latency isn't that important and would be an order of magnitude less than the ZIP construction, so the JVM warmup delay is actually just fine. The cost will be slightly higher, but it's not an operation I expect to run with high regularity - it's only on-demand for a reasonably small userbase.
As for complexity - which I am able to weigh due to the above constraints - Java's streams are not only simpler in design, but vastly more stable, and far more straightforward to glue together, and with highly stable implementations of ZIP stream wrappers and output-input pipes. A couple of additional stream wrappers for chunking into multipart upload segments and forwarding streams (introduced in JVM 9 when I'm on 8), and I was ready to go.
All that to say: don't create universal rules, though I agree that all of what you mention are good rules of thumb for certain. My given constraints work just fine with Java, here.
A minimal Java app can easily start up in 0.1 seconds, which might just as well be good enough, but if not, there is also GraalVM that can output a native binary.
It's language straight from the Law, a mixture of phrases that emphasize the totality of the curse over all of life by reiterating it in a number of ways. See Deuteronomy 6 and 28 for examples of both the 'totality' language and the phrasing of curses.
There's certain forms like that that have well known values that they converge to as you continue adding terms into infinity. Sometimes that convergence is only possible if your domain is limited, eg. [0,1].