oh_my_goodness

The pervious comment includes '/s' and appears to be a complaint about internet 'experts'.

The article walks through the logic. Briefly, wide adoption of the ideology expressed in that Davos declaration ("you can't make us obey laws if we're online") enabled the lawbreakers you mention (corporations violating the law while saying "you can't make us obey the laws if we're online").

Who complained about bringing up the foul stuff that goes on outside the US?

In my opinion Christensen wasn't talking about outsourcing your entire development process to a competitor with much deeper pockets, giving them the ability to turn off your development at will [1], and then running rings around them. I'm sure you're familiar with his story about Dell and Asus. This is worse.

[1] Unless you're assuming that you maintain control over your technology while outsourcing most of the development thinking to a rented AI? Times have changed, and the API is not the only issue anymore.

Absolutely. The fact that they know your app better than you do, and that they can revoke your ability to develop it at any moment, those are just details. Those things won't change the game at all.

Yeah, and the big guys can't steal your customers. What a crazy idea.

I don't know how many. I do it, because otherwise I'm overpowered by the urge to strangle the little suck-up.

Very clear intro to this notoriously slippery area.

It's not just a thought experiment. You can google how to do this and it works pretty well.

Sky found to be blue

Examples in TFA and at least one in the thread. Or say 4-quadrant atan might be simpler or less simple than 2-quadrant atan, depending on what you're doing next. Lots of stuff like that. Is a factored polynomial simpler than unfactored?

Employees are not victims. Sounds like a universal principle.

Exactly. You have to manifest at a high vibrational frequency.

"aren't you part of the problem?"

Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part of the problem"?

Not in general. As people have pointed out elsewhere, it's true if x is real. That isn't always a helpful assumption. (When x is real you can plug that assumption into Mathematica. Then Mathematica should agree with you.)

But consider sqrt(i) = sqrt(exp(i\pi/2)). That's exp(i\pi/4). Your rule would give 1 as the answer. It's not helpful for a serious math system to give that answer to this problem.

When I square 1 I don't get i.

This is sometimes helpful. But more often it has very little overlap with what I need when I "simplify" some math.

"Simplify" is a very old term (>50y) in computer algebra. Its meaning has become kind of layered in that time.

It doesn't, because we might consider different outputs "simple" depending on what we're going to do next.

Possibly you might be missing the point. Unless maybe this comment is subtle humor?

Yeah, hiding the recipes for how the math is really done would make the whole system kinda guess-and-hope for serious users.

His rebuttal? His critics' rebuttal?

What's your take on TFA then?

If the first example was "monkey wrench" instead of "boiling water", we'd never have seen the article.

What a weird, bitchy article. Knuth might be wrong but I gave up.

FDIC limits are very clearly spelled out. Ignoring them is known by high-school kids to be risky behavior.

Of course it's not secret, but they do. Read almost any other comment here.

I said something very specific. You can refuse to compare 2kB to the size of the human brain, but that has nothing to do with me.

TFA describes a 2kB program can play a human game against humans, and sometimes win.

Not really. You have to see it for yourself.

(Partial answer, 2kB is a very small fraction of what we'd like to think counts as human.)

If you ever spent much time at a chess club, you've seen why 2kB is a really disturbing number.

The idea that the US operates under a system of laws is now too controversial for HN.