guygurari

I used to hold this opinion, but my experience with academic research changed my mind. Much of the scientific knowledge we have is passed from generation to generation by mentoring. The amount of knowledge is so vast, and our means of searching the written literature for relevant facts so poor, that when I want to learn something or solve a specific problem there is no substitute for a discussion with an expert in the field.

The core problem is that human communication is very difficult. It becomes even more difficult when we try to communicate ideas without interaction, as we do when writing a book and expect someone to read and understand it. If I read a paper and I can't understand a sentence, it might take me days to figure out what's going on by myself, whereas asking an expert might yield an answer in less than an hour (sometimes minutes). The difference is really orders of magnitude.

There are whole fields that have effectively died because no one works on them any more. That knowledge doesn't live in anyone's mind. All the literature is there, but actually acquiring that knowledge by reading the literature is incredibly challenging and time consuming.

I have come to believe that the main purpose of hiring scientists in academia is to keep knowledge alive and have it passed on to future generations. Advancing research is of secondary importance. In fact I would say that most new research I see probably has no intrinsic value. I include my own research in this category. We have researchers solving esoteric problems of no value to anyone besides their own personal entertainment. Except, working on such research keeps our neurons firing and keeps knowledge alive. It is a well known phenomenon that taking a break from research very quickly leads to a sort of decay of memory. Our learned ideas and the connections between them wither away without constant reinforcement. In order to keep knowledge alive we have to engage in research, even if it seems pointless.

I use the same sloppy methods. What matters to me is speed and staying in the zone while editing. Trying to get the positions precisely right forces me to think consciously and takes me out of the zone.

About the 'O' problem, try ':set noesckeys' and see [1] for more.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2158516/delay-before-o-op...

Keep it. The text flows nicely now -- that was my biggest problem with the previous mobile UI.

I recently wrote a simulation that involved some heavy numerical calculations. Without optimization it was dog slow and would have taken probably years to produce the results I needed. With compiler optimization it took a few days, which was good enough for me. Perhaps I could have improved on that with manual optimizations, but the speed was good enough so instead of spending time optimizing I did other things.

The implicit assumption in the talk (based on this summary) is that we always want the most optimized code. But in fact that is never the case -- what we really want is for the code to be fast enough (or be space-optimized enough). So the relevant question is this: in what percentage of cases do compiler optimizations take us from 'not fast enough' to 'fast enough'. In all these cases the compiler is useful, because it saves us the cost of doing our own optimizations. In my experience this percentage is far from negligible, so at least for me optimizing compilers are highly valuable.

This belief is unfortunately misguided; there is much suffering involved in industrial milk production [1]. It begins with the cow being separated from its calf, usually when it is just newly born. The cow generally responds by searching frantically for its lost calf, repeatedly crying out for it until its throat becomes sore. The cow might also become sick and lose weight due to the separation. It continues with the milking process, which is painful and terrifying for the cows, as evidenced by their response. Milk-producing cows have been bred to maximize milk production, which means they have oversized udders that lead to illness. These are just a few examples of many. Generally speaking, cows in the dairy industry lead a short and exceedingly miserable life.

If the goal is to minimize suffering without going vegan, I think that wild-caught fish provide the least offending animal-based food. But wild-caught fish are generally bad from an ecological perspective.

[1] See for example http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/real-talk-milk/ , http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/dairy/ , and the documentary films Earthlings and Food Inc. A quick google search will reveal many more sources.

> I have yet to find a case where my pwd manager fails to do this (lastpass). I've also never (with the default settings) had a site reject a password generated by it.

A few minutes ago I registered to T-mobile, and 1Password thought that my username was something like mytmobile.aspx. I also find that 1Password has a very hard time with banking sites. There is at least one bank where it simply fails to login. YMMV of course.

Going beyond these anecdotes, even if these heuristics almost always work, I believe that having heuristics involved at all is preventing mainstream adoption. I think that if the password management interface is standardized and heuristic-free, then we will see password management support in the mainstream browsers. I am imagining a future where the auto-generated passwords work transparently so that users don't even know about them. I think this cannot happen without browser support.

> Mobile apps are a different story, that's where we really need standard system support for delivering credentials.

I agree that password management on mobile is a greater pain point, and (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) the additional problem there is with entering the master password.

Password managers, combined with randomly-generated passwords, solve the most serious problems afflicting user-selected passwords. Adding two-factor authentication solves yet more problems. And yet both password managers and 2FA are not widely adopted by users. Where do we go from here?

I use a password manager, and the UX of registering to a new website is just awful. On the registration page I need to check what sort of password is being asked for (e.g. 'no longer than 15 characters'), and configure the password generator accordingly. After registration I need to manually convert the password into a login; my password manager can try to do it automatically, but it often fails because it doesn't know how to translate fields from the registration page to the login page. Compare this with what most users do: just enter the same password everywhere. Much less friction.

I think we can make using password managers easier than entering the same password everywhere. We can do this by introducing a standard web interface for password managers. This interface will let browsers fill in usernames and passwords on registration and login pages, automatically. It may include password specifications, such as 'password should be between 10-15 characters long'.

Here's the use case: imagine the password manager is integrated with the browser (say as an extension). When it detects this interface on a web page, the password manager hides the password field, replacing it with a message like 'secure password is auto-generated'. Similarly, login pages that support the interface will not show a password field at all. From time to time, the user has to enter their single password (to allow the password manager to access its database). In this scenario, the user has to do less work (on average) than when they enter their password manually. When no password manager is installed, the browser simply displays the same old password field.

Given a standard interface, implementation is simple: on the server side, it's just a few tags that specify user and password fields on registration and login pages, and what to replace them with when the password manager works. There should probably also be a site identifier to let the password manager know which registration page corresponds to which login page. (Currently password managers rely on URLs to figure this out, and this heuristic sometimes fails.) The whole architecture of storing passwords stays the same. On the client side, password managers already do much of this work anyway, including trying to heuristically figure out which fields correspond to the username and the password. This sort of interface makes things much simpler for them.

These universal constants (vacuum permittivity and permeability) are themselves dimensionful quantities, so the same comment applies to them. They can only be measured by comparing to a reference, and there is no natural sense in which they can be said to change over time.

By the way, these constants are no more 'universal' than the speed of light itself.

The speed of light is a dimensionful quantity -- it has dimensions of length over time. Dimensionful quantities cannot be measured, only dimensionless ones can be measured: we can only measure pure numbers.

When we say we measure the speed of light, we are really measuring the ratio between that and some other arbitrary speed defined by our measurement device. Therefore, it makes little sense to ask how the speed of light changes over time; we can only ask this question after we specify how we measure, and then it's no longer a fundamental question.

> Suffering and hardship are not bad things.

Would you also deny others pain-relieving medication?

See, your philosophical stance is admirable. In my mind, thinking of pain as a positive thing is a healthy approach to life. What I find deplorable is forcing your personal view on others. That is pure righteousness.

Indeed, righteousness is the underlying problem here. Taking one's personal views on life ('... a crucial part of the human journey ...') and believing they are a universal truth. Once this belief is formed, the natural conclusion is to force others to live by it, because it is the Truth.

How about we let everyone decide what to do with their own lives, as long as they do not inflict harm on others?

Suppose I create appointment A on my phone's calendar, and appointment B on my laptop's calendar. After syncing, B shows up on my phone, and A shows up on my laptop (as I would expect). Who is the source and who is the target in this case?

According to your definition, this is not 'syncing'. But for most people, it is.

You assume that proof by contradiction always works, but is that necessarily the case?

Great, I think I now understand your biases, and I think you understand mine, and currently I do not spot any disagreement between us. So please allow me to refocus the discussion to the context of the original article. The article said:

> To redress the balance a bit, philosopher of physics Wayne Myrvold has asked some physicists to explain why talking to philosophers has actually been useful to them. I was one of the respondents, and you can read my entry at the Rotman Institute blog. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words.

So in the context of the original article, 'philosophers' are clearly those individuals who hold philosophy degrees, have offices in the philosophy department, etc. You know, those individuals that people usually think about as philosophers. This is the context I was answering in.

You argue that a good scientist should think about philosophical questions that have to do with the nature of his research, and not just about concrete scientific problems. I completely agree. I also agree that when a scientist engages in this activity he is doing philosophy and not science. Therefore, I agree that doing philosophy is important (and in fact necessary) for doing good science.

I do not think that science and philosophy are competing in any way, and I apologize if I gave this impression. My question of "what have philosophers given physicists" is entirely in the context of the original article, which tried to claim that it is a good idea for physicists to talk to philosophers (the official ones, yes?). I am simply asking for evidence that it is indeed a good idea for these two groups of people to communicate.

I hope these comments put us on common ground. We both agree that good things happen when scientists engage in philosophy, today. My question is what good comes of philosophers engaging in philosophy, today. If you like, we can broaden this question well beyond science, and ask -- what concrete positive things have philosophers (the official ones!) contributed to humanity in the last 100 years?

Interesting. Let me stick to physics because that is the field I am most familiar with. If the idea of falsifiability was not well understood before the 60s, then how did physics manage to progress after Newton? I mean well before the 60s physicists had discovered mechanics, electrodynamics, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, etc. There were many other proposed theories, but these were the theories that survived empirical tests. Theories that made no testable predictions did not survive. So, based on the history of physics, it seems to me that physicists understood this idea well before Popper came along. Do you agree?

If you agree, then perhaps Popper was responsible for spreading this idea to the social sciences, but he was not the one who introduced it to science.

Now, falsifiability is in fact an outdated notion, and this too was appreciated well before the 60s. As a first example, consider quantum mechanics which was formulated in the beginning of the 20th century. It postulates that the state of a system is described by a wave function, but only certain aspects of the wave function can be observed. The theory makes many testable predictions, but not all aspects of it can be tested (and therefore falsified). Popper argued against this theory (along with Einstein), but it turns out he was wrong. So it seems to me that, not only did physicists understand falsifiability before Popper, but they actually understood more than Popper did (or at least some of them did, like Schrodinger).

A second point about falsifiability is that it is in fact quite a naive and unproductive idea, even without the complexities of quantum mechanics. It is true that theories cannot be proven, but it is also true that they generally cannot be falsified, except in very simple cases. If I have a theory that the sun rises every day, this theory can be falsified. But most theories rely heavily on statistical measurements, which are inherently uncertain. Therefore we can only assign a probability to whether the theory agrees with measurements or not. If we start thinking that we actually 'falsified' some theories, this can actually damage the progression of science. If you like Bayesian statistics, for each theory we can assign a probability of it being correct, based on our measurements, but the probability is rarely 0 or 1. This, again, is well understood by physicists, and I don't think this idea was introduced to physics by philosophers.

> clearly philosophical detour

No. I am a string theorist. String theory was created by physicists to solve concrete theoretical challenges -- first the description the strong force (this did not work as intended), and later quantum gravity. These were longstanding open questions in physics. I am familiar with the history of string theory, and as far as I know no philosophers had any influence on it.

Perhaps my question wasn't clear, so let me rephrase. What contribution did philosophers make to science in the last 100 years?

It used to be that philosophers/scientists/mathematicians etc. had a lot of overlap. That is why I constrained my question to the last 100 years. I agree with you that philosophy had useful input for scientific research in the distant past. Can you offer more recent examples? It seems to me philosophy has not been relevant for a long time.

I found the article vague and unconvincing. If philosophy is useful for physics research, where is the evidence? What new thing did philosophy contribute to physics in the last 100 years?

I am a physicist who cares deeply about the foundational issues mentioned in the article. And yet I honestly don't see any meaningful input about these issues coming from philosophers.

I use BibDesk [1], which is open source and comes bundled with MacTeX. It is useful and very fast by itself, and it has a full AppleScript API which makes it extendible without having to dig into the code.

I wrote a couple of 'plugins' for it, one for looking up papers through Alfred, and another for quickly importing papers from the arXiv and from INSPIRE (the high-energy physics database).

[1] http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/

Fair enough. But then he says:

> Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.

Let's go over your list for an ordinary phone call. Here the 'client app' is your phone terminal, and the 'server' is the phone operator.

> - Is any communication not properly encrypted

Yes, it's not encrypted at all.

> - Is your communication being spied on / being recorded

I would say yes, at a similar level of probability as a skype call.

> - Is there a way to add feature "x" to the application

> - Is there a way to remove feature "x" from the application

The specs for the phone terminal are not open-source, so you can only do that with some hacking. The same is true for skype, even though there it might be more complicated technically.

> - Is there a way to use the application on your specific hard / software

Irrelevant for a physical phone.

The main difference between the skype client and a phone, is that a phone follows an open protocol, and therefore you can build your own. This is the only reason I can think of why using a phone is 'free' while using skype is not. But I think that if the skype protocol was made open, Stallman would still argue that it is not free and therefore should not be used, and therefore I do not understand his argument.

Your first point is an argument that you say "conclusively answers the question". I claim this is correct but not interesting.

Your second point is:

> But the other thing to point out is that this question presumes an old idea about the passage of time, which is that things happen in a sequence A, B, C, D, ... and that if you are at C then D "has not happened yet". But if you look at relativity, this appears to be a naïve viewpoint.

Again, this is true but irrelevant to the question at hand, due to causality.

I claim that both points are irrelevant. How is that agreeing with you?

> In the answers I do not see any mention of the Second Time Around Problem, which conclusively answers the question with "there is no way to know".

This argument is not interesting, because "there is no way to know" is a correct but useless answer for basically any physical question.

The best thing we know how to do is to look at the evidence that nature gives us, and try to construct a description of nature from them. We will have different confidence levels for different descriptions (e.g. deterministic vs. non-deterministic), based on how well they match the evidence, but we can never know for sure. Therefore the interesting question is how confident are we that nature is deterministic / non-deterministic.

> But the other thing to point out is that this question presumes an old idea about the passage of time, which is that things happen in a sequence A, B, C, D, ... and that if you are at C then D "has not happened yet". But if you look at relativity, this appears to be a naïve viewpoint.

In relativity, the notion you described is replaced by the weaker notion of causality. It says that for each observer things will still happen in a well-defined sequence, even though different observers will not agree on questions such as "did these two events occur simultaneously?". The way these statements can be consistent, is that events for which there is no agreement on ordering can never influence each other (this is a mathematical result).

Due to causality, the question of whether nature is deterministic is well-defined even when relativity is taken into account.

I tried Airmail for a few days, then went back to Mail. The biggest problem was that I could not figure out how to use operators such as "from:" and "to:" when searching. The other problems included strange behavior in the composer, and an overall lack of polish.

> If you use your thumb to unlock it, the way Apple designed it, then you are looking for the finger which is least likely to leave a decent print on the iPhone.

This is my main takeaway. I suspect the vast majority of iPhone users either do not secure their phone at all, or use a 4-digit PIN, and therefore are not protected against targeted attacks anyway. Touch ID can improve security for these users.

My main reason for protecting my phone is to prevent a scenario where it gets stolen, and the thief can access my data with reasonable effort. My secondary reason is to protect against snoopy acquaintances. A 4-digit PIN marginally achieves these goals: a typical thief is locked out, but a more sophisticated one can easily brute-force my code using commercially available tools.

What if I use Touch ID instead? It is very likely that a thief will not know who I am, and therefore will not be able to go around lifting my fingerprints. They might, however, try to lift prints off my phone. The way to protect against this is to only unlock the phone using my thumbs, because (per TFA) there are typically no good thumb prints on the phone itself. If I do this, then I will in fact be more protected than I would be using a 4-digit PIN.

A couple of caveats. After 5 rejected attempts the iPhone will fall back to asking for a PIN. It is therefore advisable to set a strong (longer than 4 digits) PIN here. Second, this of course may change if the 'secure enclave' that stores the fingerprint hashes gets hacked.

TL;DR: If you only use your thumbs to unlock your iPhone, Touch ID currently provides better security against typical threats than a 4-digit PIN.

> Until then I reserve the right to consider the current Haskell/FP craze the biggest amount of bullshit since the Java/OOP craze.

You make it sound as if the consensus following the 'Java/OOP craze' was that the naysayers had it right all along, and we should all go back to C/ASM. Well, it wasn't. Even though it was overhyped, I bet most developers (myself included) would still choose Java over C. Of course this means we would take a performance hit, but for the vast majority of jobs it wouldn't matter one bit.

At the tail end of most of these 'crazes' (Java, Python, Ruby, etc.), once the dust settled we ended up with something that is in many ways far superior to what came before it (certainly when compared with C).

AgileBits is a Canadian company, not a US company. This is also stated in the article.

Here is another version of 'marks' for Mac OS that aligns the arrows. It also works when 'ls' is aliased.

    function marks {
        \ls -l $MARKPATH | tail -n +2 | sed 's/  / /g' | cut -d' ' -f9- | awk -F ' -> ' '{printf "%-10s -> %s\n", $1, $2}'
    }

I applaud your efforts! I did not see mobile mentioned. Will there be a mobile-friendly version of the web client? Will there be IMAP access from (e.g.) mobile devices? (Under 'Current Features' you mention IMAP, but I did not understand if this refers to you acting as an IMAP client or server.)

By the way, there seems to be a copy-paste typo in the description for 'Spam Detection'; it reads 'PGP encryption and verification of emails and recipients'.

For me, it is not just that web apps feel slow. It is that they feel clunky. I can often see the UI elements being drawn one by one, the animations are rarely smooth, and the gestures (if I'm on mobile) never register as well as they do in native apps. The seams are showing.

Even when native apps are slow, they can have a feeling of cohesiveness and polish that web apps lack.

I fail to see how sprint speed, or indeed any other sports-based metric, is related to health. A strictly vegetarian diet is more healthy in the sense that it dramatically reduces the chances of getting various diseases. These include some of the top killers in developed countries, like heart disease and stroke. Vegans are also far less likely to be obese, and obesity is an important risk factor of many diseases.

The three main factors that influence health (in the sense above) are smoking habits, diet, and exercise. The factors you mention are secondary. I refer you to the sources I cited above for more details and evidence.

> Basically there is no such one-fits-all scenario for a diet.

That's a bit like saying that not everyone should avoid arsenic... There are of course personal variations, but the fact that meat, dairy and eggs are bad for you is not one of them. The basic mechanisms that cause animal-based food to be harmful, like the fact that saturated fats increase bad cholesterol, are well-studied and do not vary greatly from person to person.

On the other hand, a vegan diet is not one-size; it's not like we just eat lettuce all day. In fact, when you go vegan you discover that you do not lose any diversity, because there are many plant foods that non-vegans usully don't consider eating (for no good reason).

See my reply to mlent.