davidivadavid

This is just the n-th iteration of the naive view of technology is a kind of inert tool humans use, as opposed to a projection of some human wants onto our environment that in turn influences our behavior in a cybernetic loop. That the AI doesn't "spontaneously" start talking to you is immaterial when because of its very existence you've started thinking and acting differently.

It doesn't need to go "beyond" to have influence. Influencing people's imagination is influence.

Mediocre literally means middling, which may or may not be good enough depending on requirements.

My intuitive understanding is that deriving new theorem from existing concepts is "new math" insofar as it conclusively proves whether existing conjectures are in fact true or not by deriving proofs within an existing formal "system" (loosely understood), but it's not "new math" as it doesn't introduce new concepts to the system. It's the usual problem solver vs. theory builder dichotomy.

An interesting thought experiment would be: assuming AI can solve any given problem (or prove it's undecidable), and thus that the "proving" activity becomes trivialized, what's the interesting part that remains? Can we work on "refactoring" mathematics to make it more intuitive? More "powerful" in some sense? What are other refactorings that are worth exploring?

I gave up the belief he could abstain from that after he ruined Return.

Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.

And that's why Curse of Monkey Island is and will always remain the best MI game.

Having working in that area a little bit, simple heuristics to know if someone has dumb ideas about advertising are whether they: a) think it's some kind of magical MK-Ultra-level mind control technology, b) think the business that pays them for a living could exist without any form of advertising. Once that's acknowledged as fantasy you generally get into goal-post moving territory about what is or isn't really advertising but that's purely academic.

And you ask Claude to read it for you. No way I'm reading past a couple sentences of that level of slop.

I think what it boils down to is that in my experience physics education lacks a clear historical component about how the current state of the art is a gradual process of proposing new models and rejecting old ones and figuring out the gaps between reality and the model. Instead, it feels like a God-given set of equations (that lots of people consider "the truth" for some reason), that you apply to cookie-cutter problems you must learn by rote. Though I understand the practical concerns (but then let's call it "physics for engineering"), as far as I'm concerned, you couldn't treat physics in a worse way.

Also, physics (the discipline) is also a construction by and for humans.

My point is precisely that I was often taught physics as if it was mathematics, where there is in fact a profound ontological difference between the two.

Lagrangian / Hamiltonian mechanics, the principle of least action, always seemed neat, in L&L and other places I encountered it, until I tried doing exactly what you're saying: gaining an intuitive understanding. At that point it just never made sense to me and seemed like a gratuitous deus ex machina that happens to work beautifully but for no apparent reason. You won't be surprised to learn I dropped out of my STEM program shortly after, though I keep a keen interest in the topic.

More than twenty years ago, I quit a program that taught math/cs/physics (the notorious French "classes préparatoires") ~almost precisely over this: I felt like I was being taught physics like it was an axiomatic system where the tricks should not be questioned, they just work so "shut up and calculate" (and you don't even need to be doing quantum mechanics for that).

I just felt like we never got to the heart of the matter of why the models work and how to approach developing them, it was all about learning a bag of tricks.

Meanwhile, math and CS being a lot more axiomatic by nature, they also made a lot more sense to me.

That being said, that specificity of physics, the unbridgeable gap between reality and the models we build to describe it, in retrospect, is what makes it more interesting to me today (it's not just a "closed" system in the sense that math is — of course the relationship between math and physics is itself fascinating but that's yet another topic), but I still feel like I haven't found the right pedagogical approach to make it fit my mindset.

True, though those things don't have to be mutually exclusive.

2 inches / sec * 60 sec = 120 inches = 10 ft ? It also doesn't seem like it scans your head from what I've seen.

That's definitely an important point to consider, in fact something I think everyone in these conversations should be cognizant of, and also why it makes me believe the actual conversation should move to whether the device improves false positives/negatives rates or not (or at least has a chance to), which then might warrant wider access/use.

That's basically the only thing I'm interested in reading about this. Based on my complete lack of radiology knowledge, I'd say the images look... a bit blurry or something? So, what would be an example of something this would not allow a radiologist/doctor to see?

Without those kinds of details, radiologists just expose themselves to: oh so you're telling me this doesn't work as well as the machines you paid ~millions of dollars for and are currently charging your clients a lot to use? Mmm I wonder why.

That book cover goes so hard.

"There are more subsets of a set than elements."

Right. Because something is reducible, modulo a bunch of stuff you're not looking at, to a simplistic model, doesn't make it "just" that. Use of the word "just" is often a good tell you're about to read something naive.

Fun book that covers part of that, Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence. [0]

[0] https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final...

A similar confusion exists in French, but we have an extra locution, "en huit", to clarify when necessary. It's far from widely followed, however. Too bad, I would love it if "next" could just mean "next."

https://www.antidote.info/fr/blogue/enquetes/quand-est-ce-le...

French and English are roughly on par for how terrible they are at this.

Relevant concept here is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth

Source: native French speaker and professional translator.

If you want something a bit more "serious" on this, check out The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Bogna Konior. [0]

[0] https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-dark-fo...

Looking at Youtube videos of Barbican apartment visits for 15 minutes will tell you this poster is projecting quite a bit.

The number of tech or tech-adjacent people that have completely torched their reputation in the last few weeks is staggering. I hope they get publicly shamed.

"Bible of design" might be a bit excessive. It's a good design 101 book. Definitely longer than it should be, and kind of fumbles the explanation of "affordances", which the author had to clarify later. It's representative of "design thinking" as a historically well-situated concept in design, but that's not necessarily a good thing in itself.

It really depends what you're looking for. If you want something deeper, more abstract, I would recommend going straight to something like Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander, which I think typically appeals to the more abstraction-oriented part of the mind of engineers. If you want to get more actionable, practical day to day recipes, Refactoring UI as suggested somewhere else in the thread is a decent suggestion.

It is sophistry because that's not the point. Of course there are things that matter more than awards. But pretending like there's some world where we're trading the integrity of awards to solve important problems is a laughable fantasy.

Works now! Another free suggestion: when you drag a bit fast, since the animation is a bit slow, sometimes the boundary between before/after will barely move before your cursor makes it to the edge and reset to the middle, which is a bit jarring / doesn't let me really see anything. Should either make the animation faster, or put the reset threshold outside of the container somehow.

It is sophistry. Common problem around here is that a lot of tech people are too busy thinking they're incredibly smart and always need to be playing 5D chess instead of being decent human beings. I hate to blame Paul Graham for that, but holy shit that /r/iamverysmart shit needs to stop.