Transfinity

> And, like in art, the formulation matters, and more often than not the best formulation is the original (because its closer to their source, the thinker who came up with those ideas).

This is sometimes true, but I think it depends on who you're reading. The skill of philosophizing, and of carrying on a discourse with other philosophers, is very different from the skill of bringing a novice up to speed. Not everyone who's great at one is great at the other. There's also value in what the grandparent post mentioned about establishing historical and biographical context before jumping into primary sources. It helps you understand what you're reading and what the community thinks is important about it.

That said, I definitely agree that primary sources are valuable to read, and to appreciate as works of art in their own right. Yes Wikipedia can give you the big ideas, but it's just not the same. But hitting Wikipedia first can give you context to get more out of the primary.

> The concept of "state of the art" exists for engineering not art

I don't understand this. Yes philosophy is not a linear progression of ideas, but the iterative process of people building on one another's ideas is definitely present, as it is in music or mathematics or poetry. Philosophy responds to current events, to art, to science, and to itself.

To put it another way, it's totally valid to ask "what was up with philosophy in X decade". You can look at the ideas that were floating around, how they interacted with each other, how they built on the past and led to future ideas. As I see it, that's the "state of the art". It's more a question of "what were top minds in the field working on", or maybe "what ideas were most influential", than anything else, but that's true if you ask that question of technology too.

> Smartphones or cars change messaging methods and habbits, not philosophy.

Philosophy (or philosophers) respond to what's around them. The conversation around whether the brain is a computer, for example, is very different today (and probably more interesting to most people) than it would have been 200 years ago.

This feels fair to me. The news agencies spend time and money to research, verify and publish the news. If Google wants to use that content to sell ads, then they should pay for it.

I don't understand the negative comments here, and I'm not seeing an explanation for the disappointment. Maybe I've missed part of the story here?

Having done a lot of traveling along with a lot of reading (often at the same time), just reading about a place is a good start, but there's no substitute for actually going there, meeting real people, eating the food, dealing with public transportation and the weather, experiencing all the tiny inconveniences and innovations that shape life. It broadens your worldview, confirming beyond a doubt that the way things are done in your town is neither the only nor the best way, just one of many, and that the people who live "over there" are in fact people, not just statistics.

I agree that the environmental impact is a big problem. But perhaps if more people traveled, we would be more likely to get the kind of international cooperation we need to tackle climate change systemically.

Bigger factories being the kind of thing that takes hundreds of hours to build.

The game is beautifully optimized and will run quite well on a potato.

I think I agree with you.

I would say this trouble comes about in programming though, in the form of DSLs. Anyone who's worked with Rails knows the pain of having to go look up the non-obvious syntax for xyz specific file that you haven't touched in months.

Maybe you could say this is a problem with large software systems in general - the problems they solve often aren't that complicated (especially if you've worked on other similar software), but learning all the names and patterns and existing features creates a high barrier to entry.

I would say that JSX is popular precisely because the cost of teaching it is low, which in turn is because of its similarity to other commonly used notation (HTML / XML).

Of course it's got its fair share of dumb gotchas, but I found it far easier to learn than, say, any of the myriad Rails DSLs.

Look at how much trouble NYC has had building new subways over the last few decades. That's a system that already works (pretty) well, that people trust and believe in and are invested in, and yet they can barely get enough fiscal buy in to do maintenance.

I would argue that reinforces the point. Car customers don't really have a relationship with a dealership until they're far into the process of selecting and buying a car. Even then the dealership doesn't own the relationship, there's lots of competition and the customer can play dealers against each other.

OTOH, a customer certainly has a relationship with the car manufacturer, through advertising and mental image.

When you shop for a car you choose the make and model first, then find a dealership that will sell it to you. If you get your media from Amazon, you go to Amazon to see what they have and choose from that. Amazon controls the relationship in a way the dealer does not.

IIRC, this is basically why car dealerships exist and you can't just order a car out of a catalog.

One of my favorite courses in college was basically this. I learned so much about filesystems, data structures and concurrency that has been useful in my career!

One big thing is that you can't change the default browser, so any time you click a link you end up on safari. In my experience (I tried iPhone for 2 weeks after my previous phone died, before returning it and switching back to Android) that makes installing a different browser effectively useless.

The rendering engine restriction is less obvious to the average user. And, frankly, if you don't trust Apple with your data then what are you doing using their network stack?

I love the sentiment, but where else would you turn? AWS takes money from the CIA, Google has drones and Dragonfly, and Oracle doesn't even pretend to be a bastion of freedom.

So long as those probabilities are aware of context (style, form of this piece, location in the form, etc.). I've played around with Markov models a little, but I don't think they would quite cut it. This problem is probably slightly less difficult than generating prose from scratch, but it's a similar type of difficulty.

Getting solid curated input data would also be tricky, unless there's some big and well-annotated library of midi recordings sitting around somewhere.

For building a good app today, your best bet is almost certainly to use existing sheet music, pieces and etudes in the given style.

As a programmer, I love this app. As a musician, I think it would be good for novices who are still in the "note identification" phase, as others have mentioned.

However, I'm not sure how useful it would be for an advanced student. Much of becoming truly proficient at sight reading is context-dependent chunking. In other words, given the key, style, tempo, what was just played, location in the form, etc. what patterns are likely to appear? Training yourself to identify and predict longer and longer sequences of notes as single "chunks" is key to professional level sight reading. An app that generates random notes can't simulate that stylistic context.

Source: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/getting-there-greener

Turns out motor coaches (e.g. Greyhound busses) are the most efficient at pretty much any distance.

The United States has a variety of techniques for making sure its business interests get what they want. Aircraft carriers are one (see Iraq, and possibly Iran if things go south), CIA-sponsored coups another (Guatemala, El Salvador), economic sanctions a third (Iran again, Russia, much of Latin America). Negotiation at gun point often takes the form of crippling sanctions until and unless a US-friendly regime is in power - there's no actual guns, but there's also no free elections.

Noam Chomsky is a great resource if you want to go deeper on this topic.

The Rainier Valley where this service is being tested is a long north-south residential corridor, bordered by Lake Washington on the east and a steep ridge on the west. It's a few miles wide, just wide enough that it's not reasonable to expect people to walk from the edge to the center to catch the train. Because it's relatively sparsely populated and most trips would be short last mile trips, there's no way running full bus lines would be cost effective.

I am cautiously optimistic about this one. Partly because of promising recent decisions from them, and partly because if there's one thing Microsoft knows how to do well, it's business software.

> Young men apparently don't have to work full time to survive, don't want to, and are free to do things they want. This is being painted as a bad thing...

I don't agree that the authors call this a bad thing. They call it out as an interesting trend that is different than what we've seen before, and run through the thought experiment of what you could do about it _if_ you thought it was bad. From the article:

> You might argue this is a good thing. People actually prefer to spend their time consuming media over working, and we have achieved the luxury of enabling them to act on this preference.

> If you’re in the camp that thinks lower economic output is bad, the natural follow-up question is what kind of policy changes might counteract this phenomenon.

> While it is fun to explore alternative mechanisms for motivating the labor force if labor supply no longer responds to increases in wages, it is far more likely that lost worker productivity will be made up for with technology (eg, automation via robotics, software, artificial intelligence) that makes remaining workers more productive. While this would lead to a host of other problems (eg, inequality) and almost certainly lead to a welfare state, it is probably more straightforward to implement the necessary technological advances than the attention tax. Furthermore, a welfare state where most people could devote most of their time to the pursuit of leisure seems to be more consistent with preferences revealed by recent trends in labor participation and alternative uses of time.

I feel like I've seen 3 or 4 big interesting DARPA initiatives announced in the last week or so. Is something going on or is it just a coincidence?

I think the main difference between the two mediums is that email is push-based, while Facebook is pull-based.

With email, you have to explicitly select recipients. You're essentially saying "here are my photos, I think they are relevant to you specifically". The onus is on the sender to figure out what's good for the receiver, and it's considered rude to send many frivolous or irrelevant messages. Think of how you grumble when you unsubscribe from some company's mailing list - this is an example of this social norm.

With Facebook, you say "my photos are here, anyone may look at them if they want". Figuring out whether the content is relevant is now the job of the receiver, not the sender. Facebook's UI is well aligned with this role: unlike email, where you must explicitly download attachments and mark messages as read, on Fb image previews are displayed inline and to never see a message again you must only scroll past it. Advertisements aren't considered intrusive, it's just content from another source that is (in theory) just as easy to ignore. The social dynamic is very different, and so it's used to send a different sort of message than email.

It's not just browsers. I work in storage, and their NFS client (a 25 year old protocol) is without question one of the worst we've seen. The number of hoops we have to jump through and spec violations we've implemented just to get the server to play nice with Macs is a little disgusting.