aniijbod

Thanks Gus!

I was inspired to post this by watching the following talk: "Stop Writing Dead Programs" by Jack Rusher (Strange Loop 2022) https://youtu.be/8Ab3ArE8W3s

Eno's most celebrated musical experiments were not exclusively confined to ambient music. He was also involved in a project which asked the question: what would it sound like if you created an orchestra which used standard, established musical instruments, playing well-known classical standard themes, but one that was composed of a combination of both fully competent musicians and totally inexperienced and utterly incompetent first-timers? Eno's answer was that you would produce extraordinary musical experiences for the listener which amounted to a unique combination of choice and chance. For me and many others, his translated into some of the funniest musical experiences I have ever known. Please listen to The Portsmouth Sinfonia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpJ6anurfuw

I agree with your claim that this was something that I posted as both facetious and sarcastic. I apologise. The word 'inland' in this context just seemed to be a wholly redundant adjective to use to describe a lake, such that it surprised me that the title of an article covering something of such genuinely extraordinary importance would have what seemed to be such a glaring error left unattended to, or at leased not commented upon. So I sought to attract attention to it in the most attention-catching way that I could come up with at that time, which was to be sarcastic about it.

> Pakistan's floods have created 100km-wide inland lake, satellite images

Is an 'inland lake' different to an 'offshore lake'?

Silly me, I saw that title and I genuinely thought this: "it's gonna be some ingeniously titled PR puff cunningly contrived to get me to read about what was behind Valve's decision to rename their 'Source' game engine to 'Steam Engine'.

But why?

Most of the comments that I can see below are restricted to discussing the impact of announcement and demo on the Unity vs. Unreal situation. However, it turns out that here are other very relevant and important issues which arise from the technological specifics behind the demo which, although they obviously directly impinge on the rivalry, have potentially broader implications.

'Uncanny valley' issues related to face-based (as well as body motion-based) realism in simulation for both games development and video production, whilst there have been recent very significant advances in addressing them are still a (pun unavoidable) rapidly moving target, a target where this demo highlights both substantial advances and still as-yet unresolved serious shortcomings.

The advances mostly relate to the introduction of machine learning and 15TB of training data into the content production workflow to reduce a rendering job from 6 hours per 50 frames to 3 milliseconds per frame as detailed in this article:

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/12/10/234977...

Returning for just a moment to the UE vs Unreal thing, those results were discussed in an article about a demo created using Ziva Dynamics's Real Time Trainer and Unreal Engine 4.26, but Ziva was subsequently acquired by Unity.

The discussion I'd be interested to see here (or somewhere else!) is about how ZRT compares with (or perhaps even fits into?) Unreal Engine's Metahuman workflow and resulting content creation and realism results.

Perhaps more importantly, how might the ML-driven capabilities of ZRT (will they still continue to be available under Unreal as well as Unity?) and ML-based impact upon realism be expected to manifest themselves

Here's a link to the ZRT 'preparation workflow', which a Z-brush user who was trialling the trainer setup says took them about an hour to produce a workable result:

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=15J6vX-6vU5EU...

They'll be here soon, Ziggy.

Maybe I should hesitate a little in calling Javascript an 'early' language but... NaN?

Has anyone here looked into the claim that both iconic works were inspired by ideas from the very same book, Bertrand Russell's 1931 classic "The Scientific Outlook"? Russell himself covers certain aspects of this in his "Prefatory note to the second edition" of Scientific Outlook, where he actually mentions the direct influence of this book upon both Brave new world and upon Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution", a book which contained projections of the future which, as Orwell scholars agree, both horrified and fascinated him and, in turn, turned out to be the inspiration for much of "1984".

In the crypto world, there seems to have emerged an (in my mind, quite socially healthy and highly commendable) institution/tradition/ritual of sending a text or WhatsApp message just saying "Gm!" (meaning "Good morning", not using quote marks, but you can use the exclamation mark) when you "arrive on the scene" (so you can actually send it at any time of day, which means that you can still send it in the afternoon or night, just send it if you haven't communicated with the other persons since the 'previous start of a (working) day'. Personally, I think the best way to think of this is as a kind of "icebreaker", a kind of semi-implicit acknowledgement that the 'social ice' needs to "icebroken" every working day for people who "work together but don't live under the same roof" something which is a key "social challenge" for introverts. That 'arriving at work and not breaking the ice' thing is something that needs to be tackled for those of us who don't feel a compulsion to 'meet and greet' when we 'arrive among others' and workplace arrival is just such a thing. It might sound a bit weird 'sending a text message when you're sitting in the same office', but as I say, anything to 'break the ice' helps deal with the fact that 'meeting and greeting' is something introverts tend to feel uncomfortable about initiating when they arrive every day, yet also feel uncomfortable with and stressed out about the consequences of not having done it.

Why?

I'm also curious about this. The pre-blockchain history of distributed ledgers sounds like it might be an important topic in this context: https://medium.com/blockstreethq/before-blockchain-there-was...

"All Blockchains are “better” than one another"

Yes, but are there any (other?) "non-blockchains" that are better as distributed ledgers"?

I'm assuming here that you didn't count Google Sheets as being a Blockchain, but that you did count it to be (capable of being used as) a distributed ledger

That's exactly why I put the word "better" in scare quotes.

Americans would be utterly baffled as to why so many boomer Brits will see that (originally Carter and Reagan, now changed) headline and automatically think of George and Jack (rather than Jimmy and Ronald) before they click on the link.

The very first thing that Hal Abelson says and puts up on the chalkboard in his very first SICP talk (Lecture 1A 6.001 'Structure and Interpretation') in 1986 is that "Computer Science is not about either science, or computers'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY

"very quickly changes to vastly different terrain"

I anticipate potential use-cases ('level/scene generation' in game content creation) where this actually turns out to be the most valuable aspect of the output. I can't imagine that it would be too much of a stretch to 'start with a photo' as a 'seed' and use it to create a 3D world. My only concern would be 'sameyness tendency', in other words, the problem would be that a variety of seed photos of similar kinds of scenes would end up creating worlds that were too similar to one another to make 'still photo to fly-through movie to navigable detailed 3D world' a sufficiently 'creative' source of sufficiently differentiated new game worlds (or of sufficiently differentiated new fly-through movies). I suspect this could all be fixed by 'differentiator algorithms' interfering with the key variables of the 'refinement' process, as well as broadening and continually adding to the range of movies in the training data.

Fantastic challenge for AI sense-making software, no?

This study is extraordinary in terms of the extent to which it reveals just how little we fully understand about what is actually taking place in the genetic process. Quote from the end of the paper's introduction section: "In particular, the demonstration of highly efficient splicing in mammals in the absence of transcriptional pausing causes us to rethink key features of splicing regulation." https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.11.944595v1....

Or SGML?

Just think, things like today's latest and hippest deep learning tools are possibly going to look like legacy skills long before most of us 'old timers' retire (do old coders ever really retire?)

A way that I could see a Blockchain relevance?

Well, once you had developed a tool for automatically generating Domain Specific Languages (presumably based upon getting the tool to educate itself about the domain in question) you could try to get it to develop a language specific to the Blockchain domain (perhaps intending to come up with an alternative to Solidity?).

I get the feeling that even it all does nothing but go hideously wrong, we might just stand a real chance of producing some genuinely hilarious unintentional comedies.

> There is no "emergent" phenomenon currently in AI.

This is a very interesting claim!

Are you making this claim on a purely empirical basis, as in:

(1) "no AI has ever 'discovered' anything notably new/important/useful/interesting/valuable

or are you instead claiming/suspecting that:

(2) AI could not 'in principle' discover/generate anything falling into the positive categories above?

> teaching the model what a human wants from a language

Yes, I think this kind of requirement would lead us to a very interesting specification exercise which would address questions like:

(1) what are the different use cases relevant to identifying 'as yet unaddressed' programming language design issues?

(2) what are the 'success metrics' of a new language design?

(3) what are the 'unresolved shortcomings' of existing languages?

(4) What are the issues related to 'non-human language design'?

This last question is kind of about the opposite to 'readability as we know it', where you could anticipate a language suited to creating non-human-intelligible code, which might require tools to translate it into human intelligible form, kind of like the assembly-language to higher-level language issue but kind of in reverse.

A question/challenge that I was hoping would be posed: "but what would be the point?" Here are my answers: (1) To see if it was possible to make a programming language that was 'better' (in terms of performance, flexibility, readability, debug-ability, ease of learning, or any other metric) that any existing programming language? (2) to see if AI would or could create a language that was profoundly different to any existing 'human created' programming language (3) to see if this kind of exercise could give us any new insights into aspects of the nature of programming languages (4) to see if it was possible to use such an exercise to improve upon or refine existing 'language development tools' for creating domain specific Languages (DSLs)

I am deeply concerned when I hear the phrase in the title. Good customers are a unit test our professionalism, our entrepreneurial capabilities as founders and the effectiveness of the processes we implement, whereas bad customers are merely a test our humanity. Ultimately, we know which of those two tests we least want to fail.

I tell everyone that The Core is the science community's most derided movie, and yet it is in fact an excellent science movie for an important reason, which is simply that it puts science and scientists on a world-saving pedestal. The fact that just about everything that is in the film is in fact unscientific doesn't detract for a moment for the deep implicit respect for the value of science to humanity that the film promotes. This script would likely never have been given the kind of budget it got when it was made and so we need to count ourselves lucky that something so entertaining also offers so much to those looking for a scientific stick with which to beat the Hollywood studio system.