woopsn

"Mixed" versus "augmented" reality have no real meaning, which is why there is confusion about which of the two modalities you're referring to.

My question is why avoid the terms overlay, superposition, display and even vision? Why instead purport to have altered reality?

Traditionally in aviation and the military they said "heads up display", because they can't afford to be obtuse. The display allows the pilot literally to keep their head up, instead of pointed down at their instruments. And I'm sure there was no truck for anyone who would have called it mixed or augmented reality.

In business you would traditionally call that sort of arrangement "outsourcing". The Internet of Things is okay -- it could have been worse, The Omninet or something.

I understand. I read Snow Crash. Besides the Metaverse there was also a nuclear powered dog.

My point is this -- by allusion to some concept with which an inventor wishes to form an association in the consumer's mind, their products are to be thought of as something different than they are, something too grand for plain language. This doesn't serve anyone but the inventor.

The "Internet with head-mounted display" is actually pretty cool technology, I'm not against it. My concern is that it shouldn't be sold or even referred to as an alternate form of reality. For the benefit of product sales, or else the egos of certain technologists, language becomes muddied and the very idea about what makes someone "a person" is bastardized. I think this is wrong and very short sighted.

People seem to think I have trouble understanding what the terms refer to. That's not my point -- you're right in that they are not complex.

But why is virtual reality associated with small screens and head tracking? Why wasn't Everquest on a CRT "virtual reality"? A lot of software calculates probabilities over some distribution, why isn't all that "artificial intelligence"? Why isn't my Subaru's cruise control and lane keeping technology "autopilot" or "self driving"? Why isn't the elevator controller an "agent"? Why aren't my own servers "clouds"?

I don't need the terminology explained, I'm just tired of it. And I do think in many cases it's meant to be dazzling and marketable rather than mean anything.

I do. I've said it before too -- I like that they called it a "generative pretrained transformer" aka GPT.

I know I'm fighting the overwhelming tide here, but what the hell is "mixed reality"? What is "the metaverse"? For that matter what is "artificial intelligence"? Stop trying to dazzle and just use words, if the technology is revolutionary then it will be. An automobile is not the magic carpet, a cell phone is not a soulmate, etc. Otherwise fuck it -- TV is virtual reality, getting high augmented reality, TI-84 calculators are artificial intelligence, libraries are the metaverse, ...

The lead up to calculus is brutal. I did poorly in high school math, got my requirements finished by the grace of BYU online. Never took precalc. Then in college I crammed for the placement exam and got directly into the upper level calculus track - and from then on I loved math. Unfortunately in the traditional track, calculus is the first and only class that "makes sense", as in someone would want to take it. But it takes years of preparation (supposedly). In the meantime like you I took some interest in programming.

Look at drone tactics deployed in Ukraine. It's shocking. Not in the future but right now, modern warfare is a swarm of <$100 jerry rigged recycled devices flying around delivering a few ounces of explosive whatever head or body can be accessed.

The toilet on the ISS cost $20,000,000+. One of them. "I guess you're fine with the whole species dying" is extremely unfair (and ridiculous) rhetoric. Rather, the assumption that we won't kill ourselves first is completely unjustified, and to many people merits more concern and immediate action than the ultimate death of the sun.

I am not a physicist, my sense though as a layman is that GR explains the motions with which it is concerned more effectively than QM or QFT do. As in, with Schrodinger's cat, what causes the poison's release? And why does that happen? The "shut up and calculate" thing I'd assumed referred to quantum theory.

Or differential equations -- that grueling and irrelevant subject physical scientists waste so much time on. :)

What Bostrom said is that he completely repudiates these remarks and that they were disgusting. Leave it at that.

Joseph Pulitzer's retirement letter from 1907 (referencing St. Louis's metro paper):

I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

It was he of course who had previously declared:

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.

I do remember in my computer architecture class being a little disappointed we only studied educational ISAs, and ran them through emulation rather than "on the metal". Then in my first engineering job after college, I ended up programming mainly the TSK3000A soft processor, for about a year. Then ARM, some other more weird systems, and finally moved up to module/driver development on the server side. Back on x64, in kernel space no less -- but that was the one instruction set in the whole stack I never had to deal with.

So, intending no snark here - seminars in confidence and writing, emotional regulation, leadership, language tutoring, anger management, other interpersonal/soft skills.. I imagine a future where these are available to all on tape and CD. LLMs could really make a difference for the effectiveness of "self-help", but the picture that has formed of trust, transparency and ownership in the online data broker industry is pretty ugly. Have you ever heard in any kind of session "what you share in this room will stay in this room"? Or "this is a safe place to make mistakes/say something dumb"? That seems to be effective and necessary part of working with someone else on your growth.

I agree overall. But a note - every orthonormal basis partitions the frequency spectrum. It doesn't go away, if you are using e.g. polynomials then you're building functions up out of their frequency components too. The Fourier basis has every element correspond to a specific frequency, which is special in some sense. I would say rather.. they are each designed for a purpose. A basis change can rearrange the spectrum in such a way that analysis of it is complicated. Then you're analyzing something else (eg smoothness). Most functions of interest do have distinctive spectra, even if the Fourier basis doesn't answer all the questions.

It can be lossy and not just because of truncation. Convergence is somewhat finicky in Fourier analysis and was not well understood mathematically before the 60's. Engineers made great use of it anyway.

Remember that it is an integral transform. Basically, any data on a set of vanishing measure can be lost or corrupted. Unfortunately it can even be the case the deviation around some points is unbounded.

So for example, do programs 1 and 2 compute the same thing? In general this is quite difficult and unsolvable. But then, if so, is the complexity of 1 less than 2? What is the minimum complexity of any program that computes the thing? These are relevant problems we want to solve. They involve considering isomorphism, orderings, limits, etc. - structuralism - but in many cases the maps are not there to support it, or there is no way to find them. The relationship between two complexity classes, or even two binaries.

At an elementary level what we deal with are representations. In CS this problem is severe, for example almost all boolean functions have exponential circuit complexity - but we cannot offer even a single example up. It's an open question how powerful graph isomorphism even is.

I don't mean to knock the structuralist insight, it is a powerful "imperative" as the article says. There is just incompleteness everywhere, in less mature fields especially, where they work in spaces that can barely be classified as of yet. The knowledge is generated there, and then organized within a higher scheme. Topology sprung partly out of Euler's attack on the Königsberg bridge problem (I suppose structuralism overall does to). It is a revealing perspective, but it seems the insight comes after the large amount of work, not usually before.

This is really an important point for mathematical philosophy. It is a single enterprise going back to ancient Babylon, China, India, Greece, Egypt, and before. The elementary meta-theory needs to be syntonic to mathematical activity and knowledge predating (or otherwise practiced without) formalism, structuralism, categoricity, platonism, etc.

In a sense computer and electrical engineers/scientists did largely map out the base layers, over ~150 years from the 19th century through the mid 20th. I think equipment (broadly speaking) is foundational for mathematics. The "stack", as far as I interpret it, is something like

1. Being

2. Communication

3. Equipment -- a device you can put marks on and read off of

4. Discipline -- ability to reliably and skillfully manipulate the device

5. Submission

The stage is set at this point for some "elementary mathematics" -- think back to elementary school.

6. Symbolism -- the equipment is not just equipment. Mathematical relevance springs here.

7. Geometry -- from vision we see area and edges, objects of perception, they are interpreted as mathematically relevant and hence symbolized.

8. Algebra -- manipulating our equipment with discipline, an equivalence is perceived between different sequences of operations.

9. Proposition -- conviction the relevant facts of geometry and algebra can be formulated clearly in declarations of the sort "if ... then ..., and ... (... and etc)".

Higher level mathematics

10. Refinement 11. Proof

12. Application 13. Theory

14. Computer science, engineering, and design

...

The insurance scam is, classically, someone getting a policy on an asset they know is worthless, going to catch fire, suddenly die, etc. -- and you do pay higher rates as a result.

I'm with you. I started moving away from Google a few years ago. That's what I mean I guess -- when something becomes so full of it, what can you do but turn it off? It's Google's own conceit that without it we'd be in the dark, Facebook's that without them we are lonely and alienated, missing out, etc. In actuality they are entirely dependent on you and are terrified you'll look away. They are enormous media companies and nothing more.

Again, it's good that you call bullshit on it. Things are not as set in stone as they appear -- the tech is finicky and expensive, and we still have the wealth of "legacy knowledge" online and offline. There is enormous investment being made in this sector currently. Remember the huge amount of bullshit that was spread all over during the height of the cryptocurrency craze, uberization, social media, war on terror, etc. As I said, "AI" is a new part of the complex. Turning these things off is a way to stay sane, no more or less.

The information age is nothing new (for us), neither is media culture generally, or even silicon valley. AI will now be some new part of the complex.

It seems obvious to me that a significant step to combat this effect would be not calling the thing "artificial intelligence". I like the term gpt because it is descriptive and accurate. Gpt doesn't suggest in any sense that we can rely on the thing or are comparable, in the same way "cell phone" doesn't. Imagine if we really bought into the idea that phones are truth receivers, or called them the closest friend. But that seems to be the idea with AI.

Keep speaking up too. Just calling bullshit on the thing implicitly gives people permission to turn it off. The tech will not cause knowledge collapse among a population that doesn't need it. I do use it by the way, eg GitHub Copilot which is nice.

Burying those lines is not practical. Inspecting and repairing them is. The problem is significant deferred maintenance. Buried lines cost much more to maintain, in addition to installation costs even where they are feasible. It's better to make sure (1) the towers don't fall down (2) into a forest ready to ignite. That can be done, but we have to pay.

No, over a million meteorological observations are collected each day by commercial airplanes, and these are a principle source of data for weather models. Weather balloons and other sounding instruments (satellites are capable of this) also make significant contributions, of course.

It's been proven for decades, the big problem with weather simulation is that the dynamics are chaotic. They continue to be, even as we collect more data from the surface and above. Our forecasts improve, slowly (by a day per decade or so, historically), but simulation cannot be accurate and precise in the same sense.

A good introduction is "Weather Prediction: What everyone needs to know"

Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity

Edit -- also, earth due to its internal heat, and perhaps fossilized remains of those organisms that benefited from geothermal heat/vents/etc during its time (nuclear power), will one day do our work on the sun

It's a gimmick. When the nonprofit was organized in 2015, the name certainly did not mean open for business. It meant (loftily) undertaking the quasi-religious quasi-humanist mission "in the spirit of liberty" to generate a new kind of super wealth as "broadly and evenly distributed as possible".

As in prepare for the end... THE END OF HIGH PRICES!

> to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return

- https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai

Employees benefit incidentally, buybacks are a manifestation of corporate and capital interests alone. What's "fucking broken" is innovation in the monopolized market.

Apple is unconcerned with the efficient allocation of capital. Hence their shell companies in Ireland.

Money spent on innovation is returned to the market efficiently, and ratchets science and technology forward across the marketplace.

A problem is that we can't measure how efficient a computing architecture really is, we can only compare them, and not to a hypothetical machine yet to be devised.

When AWS can run their datacenter operations 20x more efficiently, which sounds "reasonable to me", they obviously will. Are you criticizing their customers? Or their customers' customers, the ones who like autocomplete? Literally the computer engineers, by whose work these applications have been enabled?

I think this is why you were perceived as calling for central planning. Ironically because you took aim at every level but the investors.

Growth is aggressive because of the huge investment in the sector currently. Literally because investors want a return. For better or worse there is nobody in the chain who interprets "worthwhile?" in the same sense, and the applications are not essentially relevant to the people in command.