Comment by interpunct | Hacker News Reader

Comment by interpunct | Hacker News Reader

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> At the close of the war, he [Shannon] prepared a classified memorandum for Bell Telephone Labs entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography", dated September 1945. A declassified version of this paper was published in 1949 as "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems" in the Bell System Technical Journal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_Theory_of_Secrec...

> what societal changes happened as a result of engineering the Bell system specifically

I don't have that much time, but in general think about how I am even capable of communicating with you at all. Start with the "https://" at the beginning of most modern URLs.

UNIX, transistors, foundational information theory, "on and on till the break of dawn." If you want to become more familiar with Shannon's work and Bell systems, separately and together, try his master's thesis, followed by his Ph.D., ...

> obviously

I thought my original comment was obvious. At least we both seem to be familiar with the principles of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#/medi...

Thank you for for helping me clarify my thoughts, and have a nice day.

Thank you! That was a super-helpful response. I wasn't asking because I disagreed, but because I didn't fully understand what you were getting at. Now I do. Thanks!

I wasn't trying to be snarky. Here is a 7 volume "A history of engineering and science in the Bell System"

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1460436

The first volume 1875-1925 is over 1000 pages. I'm telling you, Bell was an important organization with respect to modern sociology.

Volume 1 of this book can be read at archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/bellsystem_HistoryOfEngineeringA...

Another interesting book is "Engineering and operations in the Bell System", which can be borrowed at archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/engineeringopera0000attb

Though perhaps not strictly societal in its effect, let’s also not overlook the discovery of the cosmic microwave background…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_cosmic_microwave_...

> thought my original comment was obvious

Your comment is stronger without this. (From a fellow Shannon fan.)

Thanks for the feedback!

However, if you can discern "better" (i.e. 1 plain old bit of difference) by taking a few words off my posts on social media, you have "Beat the Shannon Limit". ;)

Hello,

Update, I thought of a way to express the parent comment here:

0 + 0 = 0, substituting literal values, dropping the units, for some convoluted overloading of the operator '+'. My TSH (thyroid test) came back from the lab without units this, I guess I'm modernizing.

0 dB S/N + 0 bytes originating information = 0 bytes transmitted (arguably error free to be fair).

Contrast this with P. Graham's comment last year "Why would I want anyone to fail?" on Twitter, which (I'm not a fanboi of Graham or Shannon or Turing, just an admirer of their work), was the most information transmitted to me over any medium, with any S/N that year. Perhaps we should revisit the basis of Shannon's work, in light of what we have learned from the Internet--Einstein wasn't afraid of arguing with Newton. :)

Bye.

Hmm..took my brain several orders of magnitude longer to warm up than a 6L6 power tube.

AI suggested that I was being generous with my 0 dB S/N for social media, it should be -∞ dB. Good catch.

It also didn't like my unit compatibility (reminding me of the utility of unit analysis), but remember that my '+' is overloaded--most programmers would probably write:

    int plus_ungood(int bytes, double SNR);

dropping the units. Of course we programmers also add geometric points together without dividing, which is mathematical no-no too.

I guess I'll put this on my TODO list for a fun project--"Relativistic Shannon: A Critique of Pure Reason on Social Media":

    Einstein wasn't afraid of arguing across time with Newton, nor should we be afraid of arguing with Shannon.  Arguing on social media, well that's a different thing altogether....[continues for 7000 pages]

I did learn what semantic density was without AI's help, postulating that it would be involved (viz Graham above) using my alarmingly down-trending cognitive abilities.

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