aeorgnoieang

> makes it look to a lay person like he invented arbitrary precision arithmetic

I think that's pretty uncharitable. If what you claimed were true, particularly of his intentions, I'd expect him to have written something like "Arbitrary precision in the Wolfram Language got it right.".

But then I can't imagine a layperson having any idea what almost any of the sentence you quoted means anyways so your point seems pretty moot.

For anyone that already understands or is at least familiar with 'machine precision', 'floating point numbers', or 'arbitrary precision' (computer arithmetic), I'd think his claim that "Wolfram Language gets it right" would seem to be a pretty innocuous plug. Yes, the man regularly promotes the products of the company that bears his name on his own blog. I think it's fine.

Are you including the extensive notes in the book when you claim that he doesn't mention any connections nor cite any existing research? I think he wrote the main book much like a textbook, i.e. a straightforward presentation of the ideas, and not like a typical academic publication. IIRC, the extensive notes do mention many connections and include a lot of citations.

The entire book is available online for free. Here's the first section of the notes:

- [Note (a) for An Outline of Basic Ideas: A New Kind of Science | Online by Stephen Wolfram [Page 859]](https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-1-1--mathematics-in...)

... but, after looking at some more sections of the notes, I think now I remembered very much incorrectly – there are in fact very few citations or specific references. There are, in my opinion, very many connections noted tho.

Also from the notes:

- [Clarity and modesty – Note (e) for General Notes: A New Kind of Science | Online by Stephen Wolfram [Page 849]](https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-0-1--clarity-and-mo...)

- [Citations and references – Note (d) for General Notes: A New Kind of Science | Online by Stephen Wolfram [Page 850]](https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-0-1--citations-and-...)

If you can overlook his immodesty, or choose to ignore it, I think you might enjoy reading NKS. It's very interesting, even if you don't agree that he deserves all of the accolades he claims he's owed.

I don't think 'faith' covers both things. Yes, a lot of people accept lots of things as being true on the authority of others, but there's lots of other evidence that those authorities are trustworthy. The details, i.e. the specific differences, of religious claims aren't correlated with any other evidence, or even possible evidence, which is why it's so much easier for so many different creeds to exist even given that they make different, and often contradictory claims.

As an example, most people haven't directly carried out all of the relevant experiments needed to discover the laws and theories of electromagnetism, but the evidence of TV, radio, telegraphs are easy enough to perceive and thereof trust. There doesn't seem to be nearly anything similar for religious beliefs, that would make any specific religion more likely than any other. Most of the evidence that does exist for religions seems to be common to any or all of them, e.g. the benefits of group cohesion, common morality, etc..

That's not a charitable interpretation of the comment to which you're replying. They didn't state that they wished or wanted or preferred that that happen, merely that it not happening effectively reveals the limits of the state's 'desires'.

> ... price discrimination leads to better market efficiency ... but it is also true that pretty much everyone viscerally hates it.

The same dynamic is true for markets generally and even economic thinking; truly sad facts!

Interestingly, the useful parts (for you, and likely lots of others) are those that would be readily adapted to a regular web app/site.

The author does, explicitly, consider benign intentions. But beyond serving as a read receipt it also includes location data and timestamps for each 'read' which is much harder to consider as due to a benign intention (from the perspective of the recipients).

Other email clients support 'read receipts' without using tracking pixels. It's not impossible that Superhuman chose to use tracking pixels for a good reason, but I can't think of one and I haven't read of one either.

That's not necessarily true. Like with pricing anything else, the maximum total revenue is at a price that's neither 'too low' or 'too high'. And the residents of Venice seem willing to forego some revenue for less tourists anyways.

> If, as clock A nears the speed of light it appears that stationary clock B is slowing down, doesn't that mean that at the speed of light is no time?

If clock A could reach the speed of light (which it can't), then, yes, clock B would appear to be 'frozen in time'.

> Does a photon in a vacuum arrive instantly at its destination?

From the perspective of any possible observer, no, it always appears to be traveling at the speed of light. If an observer could travel at the speed of light (which it can't), then, yes, it would appear as if it arrived instantly in the sense that clocks at both its source and destination would appear to be not running at all.

> If a photon looks at another photon, does the other photon appear not to be moving at all, or... Ouch my brain.

Yeah, this is tricky. Photons can't look or see – what could that mean as looking/seeing involves detecting photons (or, in the sense that something like echolocation is 'seeing', detecting a pattern of matter, e.g. sound)? In a sense, not moving at all or both moving at the same maximum speed don't seem to be much different, from the 'perspective' of a photon.

Somewhat related, this video describes how, if one could travel on a vehicle that could accelerate at a constant rate continuously for decades, one would eventually see the cosmic microwave background radiation as a rainbow ring because traveling closer and closer to the speed of light would shift the apparent frequency of the radiation first into the visible spectrum (and then beyond it).

I think you need to relax the idea of 'detecting life' towards 'detecting evidence of life', i.e. evidence of populations of locally-entropy-defeating systems that reproduce.

Once you relax the requirement that 'answers' must be 'yes or 'no' to 'more likely' or 'less likely', it should be clearer how one would go about searching for life. For one, is there chemical activity one wouldn't otherwise expect if there was no life?

Almost all Earth life sure, but I wouldn't bet on absolutely none being able to survive. NASA can't even completely sterilize their vehicles and payloads already.

In a sense tho, at-the-speed-of-light is real time, as it's the maximum speed of anything.

I'd watch a movie based on The Phoenix Project book.

If anything, it's a pretty pragmatic view about the high frequency with which new systems intended to replace legacy ones fail to do so.

Certainly applications can be supplanted or replaced, and often are, at the discretion of users and customers.

But 'living' (running) systems can often only be successfully replaced in the manner of the Ship of Theseus.

> Unfortunately there's just not a lot of value to being able to put on your resume that you're an expert at an older language that nobody has heard of, built on an in-house framework that will never be used outside of your current company.

I think this is, fortunately, only approximately true. Most of my career to-date has involved exactly this kind of work and it's certainly not true that there's no value in it, even on a resumé or mentioned in a job interview. And certainly some non-zero amount of people derive considerable value from exactly that kind of experience as some non-zero number of employers or customers need someone with it.

And, in a lot of ways, working on legacy systems can be both immensely fun and rewarding. Even just incremental improvement in or around such systems can itself be immensely valuable, e.g. setting-up automated builds or deployments, adding integration tests (to make future refactoring easier and safer), or rewriting or replacing a key portion of the system using newer tools or with a better design made possible due to the wisdom accumulated by a system performing real work over a significant period of time.

I read a related claim about this. People that just bought an, e.g. refrigerator, are much more likely than others to buy a second one soon as they're more likely to need a new refrigerator and even the small chance that the one they just bought doesn't work or isn't satisfactory means there's a much greater chance they'll need or want to buy a second one than that other people will want to buy one.

I could imagine buying a mattress would be an even better example.

> regulatory capture, a feature and not a bug of capitalism unfortunately

That seems pretty uncharitable. Would you agree that mass murder is a 'feature and not a bug' of communism?

The fact that you're aware of 'crony capitalism' would otherwise imply that you're aware that the cronyism is not considered a feature.

> Mass murder for profit is normal operating procedure.

That's just not true. Of course a profit-maximizing entity (which is an idealized abstraction that doesn't perfectly match anything in the real world) would 'love' an addictive product, or to minimize their costs, including an externalities for which they're liable, but, again, ideally, those same entities would absolutely prefer that their product does NOT in fact kill their customers or potential customers as that would just reduce their maximum potential profit.

Per your hyperbole, mass media is also engaging in 'mass murder for profit' as they cause people stress and stress likely shortens their lives. A tradeoff involving the potential loss of life or some period of life is not literally murder.

If you sold all of your possessions and lived a life of poverty you could donate the proceeds, and any income you earn that you don't strictly use to prolong your own life, to a charity that could save lives or lengthen others. That you do not, nor almost anyone else, is NOT literally the same as murder.

> churn the stuff out relatively cheaply

The marginal costs (per unit) are relatively cheap but the fixed costs, especially regulatory costs, are very much not cheap; which is one reason why there's so little competition.

> mass murder for profit

This doesn't make sense. Only an entity out to make a quick one-time score would literally kill their customers or potential customers. If anything, you'd want to bleed your customer for as much as you can, which is closer to what they actually do, e.g. provide 'discount programs' for people with less wealth or income to obtain drugs with high 'sticker prices' for much less.

Remember that, generally, if anyone is paying these high prices, it's insurance companies, not private individuals.

I'm sure there are other barriers as, if what you are describing is complete, one could earn a pretty riskless profit by some combination of (a) 'threatening' to become a new entrant in the market for an expensive drug; (b) stockpiling the existing entrants drugs when they drop their price to try to drive you out of business.

I remember reading a book about the history of some (famous) chemical company in the U.S. – Dow? Dupont? – doing exactly what I described to compete with the at-the-time existing German chemical company cartel.

Why not? I've always enjoyed it in languages that support it.

Yes, it's really a 'style'. Some people switch between feminine and masculine pronouns too.

> foobar2000

I was sure that was a placeholder for you to avoid naming the program until one of the other replies to this comment seemed to confirm that it was in fact an actual name of a program.

> the root cause to a buggy garbage collector

Or, rather, unsafe access of memory managed by a garbage collector:

> The bug was in a computer program the Gateway uses to translate payment messages between two formats. When the program was operating under load, the system tried to clear memory it believed to be unused (a process known as garbage collection).

>

> But because it was using an unsafe method to access memory, the code ended up reading memory that had already been cleared away, causing it not to know how to translate the date field in payment messages.

It's sad to realize that the world is worse than we previously thought, but it's not obviously worse overall. Not having social media, or anything similar, and thus not having to moderate awful content, wouldn't (necessarily) cause all of the terrible behavior depicted in that content to not happen.

People can be awful. So can other organisms (independent of whether they're evil or just immoral). Not facing that fact, at all, isn't obviously best.

I like to include (mostly-professional) jokes or humor in my comments and documentation as it's pretty nice to read later.

> Daylight saving time rules can change

Which is why all of the good date-time libraries come with the standard timezone database, which contains a full history of timezone changes. So, (carefully) using one of those libraries, you should be handle to handle any date-time ever.

But they're not using 'rationalism', which is the specific thing term you mentioned. And lots of other fields, likes economics and decision theory, use 'rational' and that term covers the core interest of the 'rationalist' community.

Naming is hard, it's common for lots of people to make 'mistakes' similar to what you've pointed out, and it seems like a very minor criticism of what is otherwise a great group of people united by an interest in important and useful thinking.