As a computer scientist? Garbage.
As a layperson? Magic, because that’s how these things are marketed by startups and journalists.
20,066 karma · joined October 10, 2011
As a layperson? Magic, because that’s how these things are marketed by startups and journalists.
What if I told you that (morpheus.jpg) this has been common knowledge in pedagogical research for over half a century now, and that pretty much all attempts of reforming education in the light of that simple fact have failed :(
- download the content through whatever means are most convenient for you, and paypal the author/mail the author a check. My money has never been returned :)
master -> changed to main/parent (depending on context)
slave -> changed to child
blacklist -> changed to blocklist
black magic -> changed to magic
white space -> changed to whitespace/empty space (depending on context)
The universe is ~15B years old, and we expect it to keep forming stars (as good as any of a metric for “hospitable to life”) for another trillion years. In other words, we’re in the first percent or so of the lifespan of the universe.
Doesn’t seem too crazy that if we start conquering the stars, we might be the first ever species to do so.
(And if history is any indication, we’ll probably cause some sort of galactic global warming in the process, that all starfaring species after us will curse us for)
This idea that "consumers allow the behavior" is a very pernicious one - it's common in the context of global warming too ("if only people stopped driving their car and started caring about the planet!").
It's an utter reversion of causality. People are going to do whatever makes the most sense given their own context, and if you're struggling time and money wise to take care of your family in a nutritional desert [0], and the only jobs you can get require you to drive an hour a day, then of course you're going to be buying frozen waffles at Walmart and Big Mac takeout for your kids and driving your car around. Not to mention the billions of dollars spent on advertising to manipulate people - what do you want citizens to do, when their own educational system fails to teach them the most basic literacy/numerical skills? [1]
We need to be angry at governments and companies, not people doing what they can to merely get by.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert [1] https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/patterns-literacy-among-us...
I don’t disagree, we should all be kind.
That said, this post gets voted to the top because it has (samaltman.com) next to it. If it had (jonnybeeble.blogspot.com), it’d get maybe a few upvotes and comments and that’d be that. But here it immediately gets upvoted to the front page, therefore receiving intensive scrutiny, and here we are at 80+ comments all kind of saying the same thing.
Are you aware of anyone who made an interactive version (eg in the browser) of the boxes and balls model? Would be really fun to mess around with it interactively.
From a product point of view, I find it interesting that the illustrations/concept videos for these things always show people interacting very closely to the wall - e.g. playing chess, sitting around a table, etc.
https://tonari.no/static/media/family.48218197.svg
But in practice, people tend to keep their distance from it. E.g. the pictures of this setup tend to show people clustered in their own group on each side of the wall, with a solid 2-3 meters from the wall.
https://blog.tonari.no/images/ea56c74d-a55d-4183-9a7b-d69795...
It makes sense, it's awkward to be close to a large solid (emissive) surface, and humans instinctively get closer to their in group when faced with an out group. I wonder how the system could be designed to encourage participants being closer, if there is an advantage to that.
The thing is that when we talk in a room, sound will take <10ms to reach my ears from your mouth. This is what "enables" all of the human turn taking cues in conversation (eye contact, picking up whether a sentence is about to end/whether it's a good time to chime in/etc) - I've been looking for work from people who've tried to see at what point things start feeling really bad (is it 10ms, or 50ms?), but haven't found much so far. No matter what it is though, it's likely that long distance digital communications just cannot match it.
See also this interesting comment about the feeling of "closeness" from phone copper wires:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931809
Landlines were so fast and so "direct" in their latency (where distance correlates very directly with time, due to a lack of "hops") that local phone calls were faster than the speed of sound across a table, and for a bit after they came out--before people generally got used to seemingly random latency--local calls felt "intimate", like as if you were talking to someone in bed with their head right next to you; I also have heard stories of negotiators who had gotten really tuned to analyzing people's wait times while thinking that long distance calls were confusing and threw them off their game.
This was all very different from the more "corn on the cob & chicken nuggets eaten in front of the TV" USA I had known until then.
Of course there's the cost difference, but then again that goes both ways - I can find avocados, strawberries, etc. here of a quality and at a price you'd be hard pressed to find in France. Tbh, I'd argue that as far as meat/seafood/etc. is concerned, you can get better quality in SF than you can in 90% of France, where your main option will be an Intermarché or a Carrefour.
I'd also argue that the pastries you find at Tartine/Four Barrel/etc. (they typically source from a variety of bakeries from around the bay) are way beyond, in quality, what you'd find in 90% of French bakeries (the glory days of master bakers are long gone, and a lot of it is frozen crap these days, although it's been getting better in the last few years). I suspect that by this point there are more world class bakers by square kilometer in the Bay Area than there are in France, perhaps with the exception of Paris/Lyon (quite a few that I've met went to France to study baking though, so our national pride isn't completely destroyed). I bake my own bread and can buy freshly milled flour from the The Mill, which would also be hard to find in France unless you had personal connections.
But of course, I haven't gotten to the main part - which is the insane diversity of food stores and restaurants here. No matter what kind of south american, african, middle eastern, asian cuisine you want to make/eat, you'll be able to find it. That is not the case at all in France.
These women tend to be wealthier on average, and thus have access to various “artificial” methods for conception. Egg freezing is becoming mainstream.
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/article/30412...
Might make for a good scifi story.
You need a catchy slogan, like “enumerate all humans!”
And as you point out, that makes the notion of a dealbreaker a fairly nuanced one - e.g. I might tell myself that I would never date someone who doesn't want kids because I do want kids, so why would I waste my time? On a website that shows these preferences, I will likely not engage with profiles who mention that they don't want kids, and ignore their messages.
But of course when the new guy shows up at work and he turns out to be really cute and interesting, I may be interested in him/we may start a romantic relationship before these preferences become apparent.
Which can then go in any number of directions - the relationship might fizzle out really fast. Or it may engender personal change for the partners. Or it might lead to many decades of bitter resentment. Who knows! This could make the rational argument that one should accept to chat with anyone on a dating profile regardless of their displayed preferences, but of course that's not how humans tend to reason.
Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays is really fun to thumb through.
The Book of Numbers is fantastic and something I would gift to any mathematically curious, somewhat independent, child.
Knuth's Surreal Numbers is also a great read.
Got On Numbers and Games coming in the mail, and am trying to track down a reasonably priced copy of The Symmetries of Things.
I'm tempted to get the Atlas for my collection, but I don't think I'd actually get much from reading it (:
In non-Conway recommendations, The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a huge brick of a volume, but is a very complete math encyclopedia that I love to keep on my desk and thumb through when I feel distracted. You always end up learning something new.