jamesrcole

seeing it as non-conformity

I think this is a glimpse of the future. I can imagine ever-greater amounts of information overload, and AI used everywhere to filter it to manageable levels.

> papers that lay the foundations for a whole field are usually very approachable. i'm not sure why this is

Kuhn talks about this in his works[1]. If I recall correctly, his argument is that when someone is creating a new field (new paradigm) there isn't pre-existing jargon to describe it in terms of, so it has to be described in accessible language.

It's once people start doing work inside the field that they start developing jargon and assuming things.

[1] I think it would have been The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and/or possibly The Copernican Revolution

I don't know whether this'd be possible for you and your situation, but have you considered trying to start one?

Try to find other people who might be interested, and get some of the basic equipment a makerspace would have... and then work on some projects with the other people. If you can't afford the some equipment, perhaps ask some local businesses etc to sponsor the makerspace.

There's info out there on how to set one up https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+setup+a+makerspace

Or if they're looking for written content, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great resource. It has articles on lots of philosophical topics, and they're fairly accessible

https://plato.stanford.edu/

> This is less a device to look at code

why though?

you, or someone in a situation like yours, might at times find it valuable to have like a giant whiteboard in front of you, that you can walk around in front of, and on which you could spatially arrange a bunch of details

I read the Wikipedia article... it's scary and sadly a number of people died or were injured... but then I think about something like the Covid pandemic and, compared to that, the number of deaths from radioactive sources like this basically round to zero.

If people are strongly affected by the radiation, then it's probably not going to be that long until the problem is tracked down and dealt with.

I suppose the worst case scenario would be if the radiation was in a place where it wasn't affecting people as acutely and lots of people were passing nearby it, such that the existence of the radiation wouldn't be as obvious or as easy to track down.

They made a factual claim. It is either correct or incorrect. Are you saying it is incorrect?

Seems a similar issue to: how can you trust someone you buy a physical product from online?

Do they have a reputation? If a third party mediates the sale (eg eBay) do they have policies in place to handle such issues?

I think it’s worse than that. It makes people have to police their own thought about what they’re going to say, to avoid stumbling over one of the linguistic trip wires. I think that’s antithetical to creative thought.

People striving to do what they want is generally a good thing, I think. A lot of innovation and benefit to society results from that.

just a minor thing to note here: there's the foundations of mathematics... questions like, what are numbers and other mathematical structures? How is it that math, any math at all, can potentially accurately describe parts of reality? Symbolic representations of math are just squiggily lines... why should squiggily lines have any special relationships to the nature of the universe? Details like that are far from being understood.

that's not what I heard on Twitter, from various people who work in hospitals, nor in various news reports.

The capacity issue is staffing, and that can’t just be spun up. Basically because it takes time to train people

> 1) exponential growth has consistently ceased before the hospitals overflowed too bad

I believe quite a few hospitals around the world overflowed pretty badly.

> I've read some where the common cold was probably a pandemic virus originally, and it mutated to a common cold we have today, and we mutually evolved to deal with the common cold. Something like that...

A factor that comes into play is the following. Diseases tend to be less dangerous to children. When a new disease emerges, no-one has immunity to it, so there's plenty of adults who may get it more severely. But, after a certain point, the people being born are exposed to that disease when they are young, where it won't affect them as badly.

This can look like the disease getting milder, but it's just that after a while most people will experience it when young when they will get milder effects from it. And after that point they'll have some immunity for it.

I think their absolutist statement was more to do with responding in kind to the comment they were replying to, which said “The overall number of activists or the growth thereof has absolutely nothing to do with that.”

nope. What has that got to do with my comment? Someone was implying that it was impossible, I was saying that claim was implausible. People estimate those kinds of numbers all the time for statistical purposes.

> Why would you expect the murder rate to be constant?

they didn't expect it to be, they said if it remains constant.

You seem to be the one making the assumption -- that it wouldn't remain constant -- otherwise why would you have made that comment?

the idea that there's no possible way to reasonably estimate the number of environmental activists seems very unlikely to me.

i disagree with the implication that murder somehow shouldn't be looked at in statistical terms. I am not saying it should only be looked at in statistical terms, but it is one important way of looking at it.

> "Doing what you love" is a total new-age garbage scam, only possible because we (most of us on HN) collectively live in the wealthiest, most powerful empire the world has ever seen

You seem to be implying that living in a wealthy, powerful society somehow invalidates the opportunities that affords.

> and nearly all of the important work (food, defense, fuel, manufacturing, etc.) is done by lower class citizens who don't know what an API is.

such work is important but it's not true that this is "nearly all of the important work". Our modern world couldn't exist without, for example, so many of the decades and centuries of developments in the various branches of mathematics and science. Think of how much of the modern world is dependent upon our understanding of Quantum Mechanics, for example.

> Don't worry so much about "loving your career", I promise you no migrant farm workers harvesting your berries love their career, and yet I doubt they wake up with internal mental crises because they haven't achieved self-actualization at work.

Some people actually do love what they do for work. All things being equal, it's better to be one of these people.

One reason you can love an area of work is because you think it is important or valuable, and contributes something meaningful to society. Whereas some forms of work don't appear to contribute much to society (and I think people tend to hate these sorts of jobs). So that is a good reason for doing what you love.

I'm not sure how that's relevant to my comment. I'm not saying any particular thing will happen. I was just disagreeing with the person who said "The only thing that prevents ... from executing arbitrary code on your system is their promise to keep the scope of updates limited. You already operate under this trust model." My disagreement is that it's more complex than "the only thing".

Yes, it's always "one malicious update away", but what I'm saying is different to that.

You're talking about "installing" a change, and talking about more about their capability to change what happens with your data.

I'm talking about 1) the effort required to _write_ the change and -- more importantly -- 2) the potential backlash being different as to whether it's a modification of an existing functionality vs an entirely new type of functionality. This second point is a major one, because it would be seen as much worse if it looks to the public like they've gone out of their way to do something wrong, and would be much more damaging to their reputation. IMO anyway.

but once a system is in place, it becomes easier to do things that are a variation on what that system already does. As opposed to doing it from scratch.

Also, I think the outcry would be larger if they did it from scratch compared to if they did it as an extension to some existing, known capability. If that's the case, they'd have less to lose in doing such a thing if the base system is already in place.

Someone had to make the conscious choice to make it do that, then add the code for it — I’d love to know what their rationale was. I find it difficult to imagine how they thought it’d make things better, and how they could have missed the downsides of it.

I think it’s something they really should fix, because it screams “poor judgment”, which gives a bad first impression of their work.

If something seems that way to you, and you want to say to others that it seems that way, you could explain why.

It’s not like it was developed by random nobodies, and it’s not like the default assumption should be that some work is the result of cranks (the default assumption should be agnosticism towards it)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch

why? You don’t explain.

> Bring on the regulation and the public outrage! Just let it be directed at Tile for not doing this sooner.

Public outrage seems to be based on a very low-res view of reality drawn from viral sound-bites, so I doubt that's how any public outrage would work.