willguest

it's flimflam. at least that's what i call it, and banning flimflam in the strongest possible verbiage seems to help

it's great, even though i'm bad at it. "45,485 · top 95% of players today!" is such nice way of saying that:

The complexity is certainly awesome, however there are all kinds of "free lunches" that we can take advantage of here, I'm paraphrasing (and glazing) Mike Levin here - when you work with biological systems, you are handling an agential material that naturally expresses itself.

I suspect that, once scientists lean more into the right kind of communication with these systems that many substantial leaps forward will be made. I am very excited about it too, mostly because I think it has the potential to positively impact how we see ourselves (humans) in the natural world.

lovely, but needs sound and an altimeter. i went flying over NZ, the controls got really laggy, hence the chaotic experience...

https://filebin.net/jltba21fn87ea5pm

yes, this is the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ries

Coming from the blockchain space, but wanting to build something with bright patterns, while also using DLT and crypto, has been painful, to say the least.

I would like to know how best to stand out from the toxic, finance-driven world that is defi and crypto generally, without getting rolled in with all the clowns. Of course, I know that clear messaging and verifiable, evidence-driven claims are good, but I am thinking about the more abstract, strategic side to things, which I still feel under-prepared for.

tell me, where in this piece is there any acknowledgement that the technology, if used well, can bring people together?

show me, and i will accept there is nuance

> what most people understand to be "AI"

most people understand it to be an LLM, but that doesn't make the term mean only that. the point was illustrative, perhaps Meta's attention maximization algos would be a better example

my point was not that they are the same, but that the author seems to advocate for some technologies, like video calling and text messages, but cannot make the leap to see that it is how we use that matters. It is a selective diabtribe, framed in a positive voice, hence my counter-examples to match

I really love it when people put spirit into a piece of writing that, thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN.

I am pleased that I can share musical discoveries with friends that were recommended by an AI, or make them laugh with some absurd image that fell out of Dall-E.

I am happy that, with the help of an AI, i can make a news reader that is full of bright patterns, instead of dark ones, that i can share with my friends so that their standard of life is ever-so-slightly better.

Reducing the commentary to "tool bad" is lazy, even when beautifully phrased

the author is not describing the world. they are describing their experience of it. classic mistake, and quite an anxious version of it.

it's not wrong, but it is tangled in the waves...

people who choose to live in deep in ignorance do so well. many evil people sleep sweetly because they simply do not care.

those that care swim to the surface to escape the pressure, but there they find waves, smashing them against the cliffs.

the trick is to break free from the surface. clearly the author has the will, but not yet the tools. to help, i would suggest the following:

- learn the difference between complexity and complicatedness - learn about systems thinking - keep developing your emotional smarts, and actively use this capacity - read Krishnamurti

thanks. i really enjoyed it

We have CNC machines, and we still have sculptors.

Mechanising the production of code is good thing. And crafting code as art is a good thing. It is sign of a wider trend that we need to look at these things like adversaries.

I look forward to the code-as-art countermovement. It's gonna be quite something.

thanks for helping people to lie

I love the idea that we believe that we can replicate all of the natural processes involved in getting a tan, and to such a precision that we can then speed up the process 10 fold, and that we can fit it all into a single unit that can be wheeled in and out of the room.

Unless of course our calculations are a bit off, then we accidentally created a bed version of the wrong chalice from raiders of the lost ark, but I think it's fine.

you forgot the logic to strip the final digit and assign it to v.

processing the whole number is absurd

Counterpoint, what if it's not

..and most people problems are communication problems.

Calling them 'people problem' is a convenient catch-all that lacks enough nuance to be a useful statement. What constitutes good communication? Are there cross purposes?

> Non-technical people do not intuitively understand the level of effort required or the need for tech debt cleanup; it must be communicated effectively by engineering - in both initial estimates & project updates. Unless leadership has an engineering background, the value of the technical debt work likely needs to be quantified and shown as business value.

The engineer will typically say that the communication needed is technical, but in fact the language that leadership works with is usually non-technical, so the translation into this field is essential. We do not need more engineers, we need engineer who know how to translate the details.

I realise that, here on HN, most will probably take the side of the rational technologist, but this is a self-validating cycle that can identify the issue, but cannot solve it.

IMO, we need more generalists that can speak both languages. I have worked hard to try and be that person, but it turns out that almost no-one wants to hire this cross-discipline communicator, so there's a good chance that I'm wrong about all of this.

This piece feels like an AI-generated effort because it’s not so much an exploration of leadership challenges, but rather a series of surface-level observations that lack depth. It's not just a general overview, but a collection of familiar tropes without any original or nuanced analysis, and the sentences aren't just simple, but lack the complexity and emotional depth that would make the piece feel truly human.

My idealistic part says that a combination of AI-driven technical orchestration (much more than just coding) and orbital/langrange manufacturing facilities could, perhaps, get somewhere in the not ridiculously distant future (centuries rather than millenia)

A more pragmatic me would point out that the required energy and materials needed would mean we would need breakthroughs in space-based solar capture and mining, but this is still not New Physics.

I think the solution will come from exponentially advancing self-assembling machines in space. These can start small and, given the diminishing cost of getting things to space, some early iterations of the first generation could be mere decades away. There are several interesting avenues for self-assembling machines that are way past napkin-sketch phase. Solar arrays are getting bigger and we have already retrieved the first material from an asteroid.

The quality and reliability of AI agents for processes orchestration and technical reflection is now at a stage where it can begin to self-optimise, so even without (EDIT) a "take-off" scenario, these machines can massively outperform people in manufacturing orchestration, and I would say we are only some years from having tools that are good enough for much larger scale (i.e. planetary) operations.

Putting humans there is a whole other story. We are so fragile and evolved to live on Earth. Unsurprisingly, this biological tether doesn't get much of a look-in here. Just being on the ISS is horrible for a person's physiology and, I am guessing there would be a whole host of space sicknesses that would set in after a few years up there or elsewhere. Unless we find a way to modify our biology enough so we can continually tolerate or cure these ailments, and develop cryo-sleep, we're probably staying local - both of these are much more speculative that everything above, as far as i can tell.

the clustering isn't surprising? are you saying that it is an artefact of the higher level representation? special - perhaps not by itself, but when the same strategy is also expressed by single cell organisms, at least intriguing

trouble is, i'm more engineer than mathematician, so while i appreciate that this is an entirely solvable problem, assembling it from scratch would likely mean many errors, and less fun

the 3d plot is nice but not what i would call "spatialised", since it's still a flat render, and I'm exactly thinking about the meshing of the thing. i am familiar with delaunay and marching cube strategies, at least enough to get a machine to hook them up to a spatial plotter

Taking it a step further, how would simple algorithms behave when viewed in this way? Rather that just the outcome, we could observe a possibility space...

Michael Levin has talked about interesting dynamics with the bubble sort algorithm, which is only a few lines of code, that have parallels in biological processes, suggesting there is a more nuanced logic to nature that we are not seeing

My first thought was "how can i do this in 3d and walk around it in VR?"

I can do the VR part - any chance you can share the algo, so I can get the machine to lift it? I can imagine a 3d graphing tool would need spatialisation in order to be properly appreciated.

when he asks you about his new idea for an app, just pretend you didn't hear him. if we all do it, eventually he'll leave

are we allowed to have any colours, though?

but really, every person i've seen who "activates" a lifestyle like this one only ever seems to wear black. i suppose it's the choice of any committed rationalist, but i think it's dull

also, fine so long as you don't need to go any where that requires a different type of shoe

different kinds of inaccuracy

I found this page that describes a variety of search parameter: https://susodigital.com/thoughts/the-mystery-of-the-google-u...

then i got the machine to write a front-end that visualises them and builds a search query for you: https://pastebin.com/HNwytYr9

enjoy

This is late, probably too late, but if you really want to get into the weeds of this, here is a better summary that what I can produce, from a paper that explains it better than I can:

"The model is a work of fiction based on the tacit and false assumption of frictionless barter. Attempting to apply such microeconomic foundations to understand a monetary economy means that mistakes in reasoning are inevitable." (p.239)

https://academic.oup.com/cje/article/48/2/235/7492210

I was also intrigued by the machine's reference to it, especially because it posed the question with full recognition of its machine-ness.

Your comment about the generation of emotions does strike me a quite mechanistic and brain-centric. My understanding, and lived experience, has led me to an appreciation that emotion is a kind of psycho-somatic intelligence that steers both our body and cognition according to a broad set of circumstances. This is rooted in a pluralistic conception of self that is aligned with the idea of embodied cognition. Work by Michael Levin, an experimental biologist, indicates we are made of "agential material" - at all scales, from the cell to the person, we are capable of goal-oriented cognition (used in a very broad sense).

As for whether machines can feel, I don't really know. They seem to represent an expression of our cognitivist norm in the way they are made and, given the human tendency to anthropormorphise communicative systems, we easily project our own feelings onto it. My gut feeling is that, once we can give the models an embodied sense of the world, including the ability to physically explore and make spatially-motivated decisions, we might get closer to understanding this. However, once this happens, I suspect that our conceptions of embodied cognition will be challenged by the behaviour of the non-human intellect.

As Levin says, we are notoriously bad at recognising other forms of intelligence, despite the fact that global ecology abounds with examples. Fungal networks are a good example.

I appreciate your optimism, however your position seems to point a willful blindness to the agenda that oil producing countries have maintained. What is hidden to one person may be apparent to another, and completely missed by a third.

I absolutely think that their approach is disingenuous, though the line between this and dishonesty is not something I would claim to understand well. You may say that taking a position that is fundamentally self-interested is valid, but I would point out that, given the scale of the impact that arises from the attachment to this stance, good-faith negotiation must include some form of integration of information regarding the consequences of holding this position.

At this point, where the negative impacts of plastic over-production, micro-scale pollution of biological systems and climate impacts of manufacture are so well documented, clinging to a "what about me" argument is tantamount to a child repeating the same question over and over in order to avoid listening to the response. So, yes, maybe not classically "bad-faith" but certainly a calculated strategy that prevents progress.