chongli

If there exists a text which only one person can understand, that person can communicate their understanding to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. That dissemination of knowledge is what provides the value, not the mere existence of the text. If that person forgets or dies before they can share their knowledge then it will be lost.

We have many examples of this from history: ancient texts written in a lost language. These texts provide us with no value until the day they can be deciphered, unless you count linguistic puzzle-solving as a virtue.

Understanding == Value

If a mathematician produces something incomprehensible then it has no value. It's meaningless. Indistinguishable from random noise.

An AI which produces incomprehensible text is producing no value. We didn't need to spend trillions of dollars on LLMs to figure that out. Markov chains can do that job perfectly well.

You keep falling back on "incomprehensible for some people" but that wasn't the claim. It was about a text which is incomprehensible in principle; that is, utterly impossible for any human to ever understand.

All the stuff you've listed is understood by some person, and that understanding is the source of its value.

Now that we've cleared that up, can you furnish an example that satisfies the original claim of incomprehensibility and value?

As to your second point, Terry Tao already has an answer [1]: the proof isn’t the contribution, shared understanding is. This issue was already raised back when the four-colour theorem was proved. Machine proving and machine proof checking are useful tools but they don’t mean anything without the interpretative work and the communication necessary to build shared understanding.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056620

Yes, a site would still be able to host their own ads but advertisers wouldn’t be able to collect any analytics without implicitly trusting the host site. That really matters!

It means the advertisers need to enter a business relationship with the site directly. They can’t simply join a JavaScript ad-auction (the way nearly all ads work now). This makes them more akin to the sponsors we see now in videos. No tracking, just plain old fashioned audience targeting pertaining to the subject matter.

I have zero faith in government’s ability to regulate these things correctly. Viz. cookie pop ups.

What I really want is a non-executable web. I first started using the web in the mid-90s and most websites were like that. HTML, images, colours, fonts (but only from a pre-defined short list), and the occasional sound. If a site used JavaScript at all, it was for trivial stuff such as rollovers (which can now be done using CSS only).

I’d like to go back to that situation, maybe not exclusively but as a separate option. Give me a non-executable web of text, hyperlinks, images, videos and sounds (but no auto-play), CSS, forms, and web components (that can be targeted by links and fetched without refreshing the entire page) so we can do really nice discussion forums, web mail, multimedia encyclopedias (think Encarta) and other server-rendered resources, all without client-side scripting.

It doesn’t even need to be a different protocol or anything like that. It would be enough to have an otherwise modern browser but with no JS engine and a search engine that only indexes pages that lack JavaScript so that they render and function correctly on that JS-free browser.

Naturally, the search engine would miss a lot of the spam sites out there because they all rely on JavaScript. It would also miss many legitimate sites that rely on JavaScript but that’s okay.

It would create a space for JavaScript-free sites to get attention and develop a community. It would of course allow commercial sites, but they’d have to rely on display advertising and traditional marketing (targeted audiences based on subject matter) rather than behavioural tracking. This was the kind of advertising used in magazines and newspapers. It was far less obnoxious but still quite effective when the audience was large enough. It also demanded a lot more creativity from the ad industry, as documented in the show Mad Men.

[1] https://www.webtender.com/

That's leaving out fuel prices. The planes may use half the fuel, but aviation fuel has increased 7x in price since 1990. I couldn't find prices for 1969, but if you take the price of crude since then you're looking at a CPI-adjusted increase close to 100x.

Sounds much more like a warning than a dismissal to me. If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.

Your best bet, if you really want an automatic chicken door, is to get a dumb one that just opens when powered on and closes (via springs) when powered off, then plug it into a smart outlet automated to turn on at sunrise and off at sunset.

[1] https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/amateur

The amateur is the one who hones a tool’s edge until it’s razor sharp, and cuts away all unnecessary detail until they’ve found the essence of what they’re trying to achieve. The work of an amateur is often highly impractical and uneconomical, but sublimely beautiful.

Dialling in espresso isn’t simply a matter of finding the right grind setting on the grinder and locking it in. One coffee may pour a perfect 9 bar espresso and then a different coffee might gush like a shower head and spray sour, weak coffee all over the place, while a third coffee could jam up like squeezing water out of a stone, with barely a drop of extremely bitter liquid falling in the cup, all on the same grind setting!

In other words, every batch of coffee beans needs to be dialled in separately, and there can also be a lot more adjustments needed than simply the grind (water temperature and brew ratio are big factors as well). An expert will know how to adjust at least those 3 variables (grind, temperature, ratio) all in concert to get the most out of a particular coffee. On top of all that, the true master can make use of grinder type (burr design) pressure, flow, and even temperature profiling to fully customize a shot, but that’s going far into the weeds.

I, on the other hand, have a pretty good nose and I can pick out peach, raspberry, toasted nuts, caramel, marshmallow, chocolate, and blueberry notes from a variety of different coffees I’ve bought. The smell of some of these coffees is mesmerizing, like walking into a high end patisserie.

Without that smell component, the coffees taste either sour or bitter or somewhere in between.

I think a more interesting tack on this argument would be to say that hard sci-fi tends to be more pro-technology and soft sci-fi tends to be more technology-critical. But some soft sci-fi is genuinely technology-neutral, using futuristic settings for aesthetic reasons only, not for any kind of investigation or argument either way.

There's curves to all these things. It just feels like we're accelerating on the downslope of a lot of them right now.

I do love the Pink Streisand Paradox though. I think the solution involves technology: you build a riddle-recognizer that scans the book for you and tells you whether or not the riddle is present, without telling you the words of the riddle.

But that further raises the question: how do you know it's the riddle you're looking for? How do you know what riddle you're looking for if you don't know the riddle itself?

Let’s say you’re controlling a piece of machinery with an app in the background and the machine starts on fire. Wouldn’t it make sense for the app to steal focus so it can show you some alarms (in addition to audible alarms which you may not hear because they’re in another room).

New Reddit is full of ads plus social media engagement-bait garbage. New Reddit makes money. Reddit the company wants people to use New Reddit.

So why does Old Reddit still exist? Because that’s where the content creators live! Old Reddit is a cost centre but a necessary one to keep the old guard of high-effort posters around. Alienate them and the New Reddit users won’t have any new content to engage with.