Using high-dimensional statistics for beer money, not academic papers" is the correct use of the degree. The papers are where you prove the circle exists. The bar is where you find out it exists for everything
Sure, and at some point you're limited by physics. But "limited by the universe" and "limited by what a product manager imagined in 2019" are pretty different kinds of limits
That philosophical point about what it even means to "tell a computer to do things" is a good one. Sure, clicking around in a GUI is also telling the computer what to do. But there's a huge difference between using someone else's abstraction and building your own from scratch. The article is about that second part - the ability to throw stuff together however you want. With a GUI, you're stuck with whatever the designer thought of. With a shell, you can build just about anything
The comments asking for more misery are hilarious. Armrest thieves, crying babies, the guy coughing without covering his mouth, tiny cans of Coke. But honestly, the most realistic thing would be the seatback map being wrong and the flight path not matching the real world. That's the true passenger experience
The stone erosion question is interesting. If this effect works on limestone too, it could explain some geological formations we've been attributing purely to chemical weathering. Might be a whole new field of research
The Chinese counterexample is important. The author says "base b doesn't have a single symbol for b" - but Chinese has a symbol for 10 (十) and even 20 (廿). Having a symbol for the base doesn't mean the system isn't positional. It just means you have shortcuts for common numbers. So the article's main diagnostic is flawed
The chess analogy doesn't quite work for me. In chess, an engine's move is useful because it helps you win. In math, a proof is useful because it helps you understand something - and from that, you can build more. If a proof is incomprehensible, it's like a chess move that only works in that one specific position. Useless. The ABC conjecture is a perfect example - Mochizuki's proof might be correct, but no one can follow it, so it's basically dead. AI proofs are going to be like that, but way more of them. Tao's essay is a great starting point
Appreciate the heads-up. Even if some of this is overblown, the transparency thing is a legit concern. Gonna double-check my config before I touch OpenCode again