eggdaft

Scheme was taught in my first year of CS.

One thing I noticed is that those who hadn’t coded through their teenage years found scheme much easier to learn than other languages we were being taught in the first year. I think that was because scheme felt more like mathematics and everyone had done A Level maths (in the UK), many to an advanced level.

Immutability and functions make a lot more sense than weird variables that keep changing and - what the heck are classes? We just unlearn this mathematical thinking when we start hacking Python etc.

I think that’s mostly spillover from over social media, combined with the very opinionated nature of us nerds :-)

I also see LLMs primarily as a better search engine. Stack overflow gave us code snippets and was a huge step forward. Now we can find those snippets and explanations much faster.

The secondary use is as a duck to bounce ideas off. A duck that is not as smart as a human but always available. And I can ask stupid questions to check my understanding.

The final use is for code generation. If I’m super tired it can do trivial coding for me. Or if it’s boilerplate, which is very little code for me. Generally it doesn’t help a great deal within the IDE, and I’m not completely sure it’s a net win there yet.

Polarisation in general can be well-explained by the business models of social media. You’re shown content that you react to strongest, and that is usually one end of a spectrum of views.

For a long time I thought we were on a solid track to full VR, which would be indiscernible from reality. Recently I’ve realised that I was very wrong, and this is why. The visual element of VR is pretty much solved. Audio no problem. But the movement in space is intractable I now believe, and it is an absolutely critical issue that scuppers the whole idea.

Tricks like this can give you a better approximation but I don’t think it’ll ever be good enough. You want to jump, spin, crouch, crawl, lie down. And interact with others.

I think AR is going to be massive and Apple Vision Pro will be a big hit by gen 3 or 4, but VR is something likely to be “Human-Brain-Interface complete”.

Given HBI success will likely arrive on or after the time we reach AGI, I don’t really know how that’s going to work out. I think headsets will be really fun for a while, but we’re not going to get the full experience.

Unless we can suspend people in some kind of viscous fluid with respirators, and ummm people think that’s acceptable… suspend them on cables and blow compressed air at them? Google glass no longer looks so embarrassing…

On the second one - if that’s in code than a good IDE will not only do it with a single keypress, but will also (optionally) do it intelligently eg change only in the code, not the comments, show you a browseable preview, and offer undo should you get it wrong.

I like the shell but I also think IDEs are underrated.

The average human can do plenty whilst sitting at a computer, far more than a computer can do on its own, and in fact the entire knowledge economy is based on that fact. Fortunately, your assertion about most humans is demonstrably false. If you can entirely automate what they do already, feel free to start a company and capture most of the world’s wealth creation.

Why replicate AGI? Wealth creation determines living standards and AGI would vastly increase wealth creation. That’s one reason.

What you want from AI is a different conversation. I agree the ultimate point of AI research is not necessarily to make AGI as per the above definition. It might be to say understand the universe or greatly accelerate technological progress. That’s a subjective call. But orthogonal to the problem of choosing a good definition of AGI.

If the simulation hypothesis of reality is correct, does this mean we might encounter such edge cases in physics? Where should we look?

That is not how artists learn. This is a false equivalence used to justify the imitation and copying of artists’ work. Artists’ work isn’t derivative in the same way that AI work is. Artists create work based on other sources of inspiration, some of them almost or completely to the disregard of other art.

Many artists don’t even go to art school. And those that do, do not spend most (all) of that time learning how to copy or imitate other artists.

I’m not expressing an opinion of whether GenAI is unethical or illegal - I think that’s a really difficult issue to wrestle with - just that this argument is a post-hoc rationalisation made in ignorance of how good artists work (not to say ignorance of the difference between illustration and art, conceptual art training vs say a foundation course etc).

A machine that can do anything an average human can do whilst sitting at a computer.

A little off topic, but there’s a nice example of making a game with your kid in “Doom Guy” by John Romero. I enjoyed the book and it’s also a good accompaniment to “Masters of Doom.”

> Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art?

Logically, the answer to this is (almost certainly) yes, so you’ll need to discount this argument.

If the answer were no, then either an infinite number of humans have lived (such that there was always a previous artist to learn from), or it was true in the past but false in the present, which seems unlikely given humans brains have generally become more and not less sophisticated over time.

I presume what you’re missing here is that the brain can be inspired from other sources than human art. For example: nature; life experience; conversation.

Not making any other comment about what machines can or can’t do, just wanted to point out this argument is invalid as it comes up a lot and is probably grounded in ignorance around the artistic process. It’s such a strange idea to suggest that the artist process is ingesting lots of art to make more art. That’s such a weird world view. It’s like insisting every artist is making art the way Quentin Tarantino makes films.

I’ve spent a lot of time with artists, I’ve worked with them, I’ve been in relationships with artists, and I can tell you the great ones see the world differently. There’s something about their brains that would cause them to create art even if born on a desert island without other human contact. Some of them don’t even take an interest in other art.

In fact, those artists that _do_ make art heavily based on other artists’ work as suggested are often derided as “derivative” and “unoriginal”.