Sometimes I think about how so many of us look up at the stars and wonder “if there really are aliens out there, why aren’t they colonizing the galaxy as fast as possible, as any intelligent species would naturally do?” like it’s the thing just anyone looking at the stars might think. we might be the horrifying biomechanical paperclip maximizer that the other aliens in the galaxy have to band together to defeat or face extermination.
Yep, I think the accepted English pronunciation of “Euler” is as a homophone of “oiler”, so the award would be “the oilies”. I never heard the name out loud as a kid so I pronounced it “you’-ler” until well into adulthood, until someone made a big deal about me not pronouncing it correctly. I remember the occasion very clearly 🙃
We can call it the Euler Award for Excessive Achievement in Science. Or the Eulies if you’re in the industry. And we can make a big deal about it if anyone pronounces it “the yoolies”
That tracks. It felt like someone at the show really liked the first version but someone at the network made them change it, so they were like “fuck it, put a tambourine under it idk” and called it good enough.
Ooh, I never get to ask this question: Do you have a preference between the initial version and the season 3 version? I always felt like they changed it because they got the feedback “fans don’t like the song” but they didn’t really know what to do with that feedback, so they wound up with a rewrite that sounded almost, but not quite, exactly the same. But I am in the group that never really vibed with either so I find it hard to draw comparisons. Curious to get a perspective from someone who liked the intro.
I hope it happens. And by it I mean VR / AR equipment that I can comfortably use for a few hours at a time without getting sweaty, fatigued, or motion sick. When I’m using a computer I like to have a bunch of displays, and it would be really convenient to have a comfortable headset that I can wear instead and live my dream of coding in VR / AR and spin displays up or down on a whim, or better still use some as-yet-undreamed VR native UI that takes advantage of the platform. That dream is still a way off, it seems like, but I still want it.
I don’t think it has to be, or even should be the case really. I mean, as a general rule I don’t think it’s a great idea to let kids download stuff off the internet and run it without a knowledgeable adult at least reviewing what they’re doing, or pre-screening what software they’re allowed to use if they’re younger than a certain age. You can introduce kids to open source software and teach them computer skills while still putting limits on what they’re allowed to do, e.g. not allowed to install software without asking a parent, or only allowing them to test software on an old machine that doesn’t have sensitive data on it. I know I got thrown to the internet as a kid but I don’t think that’s the best way for kids to learn stuff.
That said, I don’t have kids and don’t plan on having them, so I don’t know how realistic that is for kids nowadays. I don’t know if they’re still as far ahead of the adults as we were when it came to working the internet so I recognize the possibility that that all may be clueless childless adult nonsense.
Or dystopian sci-fi writers understood the possible ramifications of increasingly powerful corporations, abundant surveillance tech, and manipulable information networks, and wrote their works to warn the world “hey, this hasn’t happened yet but it totally could so, you know, don’t let it”. And we all nodded and said “yep, that sounds super bad, sure would be bad if that happened lol” and now we’re all shocked to see it unfolding.
Brown is navy orange
Oh my god yes. It’s amazing to me how much art we produce where the artist is adamant that no one ever see it. Like, Kafka wanted all of his works destroyed on his death, and his art is so weird and different that it got it’s own word to describe it, because there’s nothing quite like it. Makes me wonder about how much of that art happens every day, and we’ll never know because, for whatever reason, we can’t bring ourselves to share it.
I mean look at them. To quote Raymond Gillette, nobody’s that gay.
I don’t share your concerns about the profession. Even supposing for a moment that LLMs did deliver on the promise of making 1 human as productive as 5 humans were previously, that isn’t how for-profit industry has traditionally incorporated productivity gains. Instead, you’ll just have 5 humans producing 25x output. If code generation becomes less of a bottleneck (which it has been doing for decades as frameworks and tooling have matured) there will simply be more code in the world that the code wranglers will have to wrangle. Maybe if LLMs get good enough at generating usable code (still a big if for most non-trivial jobs), some people who previously focused on low-level coding concerns will be able to specialize in higher-level concerns like directing an LLM, while some people will still be writing the low-level inputs for the LLMs, sort of like how you can write applications today without needing to know the specific ins and outs of the instruction set for your CPU. I’m doubtful that that’s around the corner, but who knows. But whatever the tools we have are capable of, the output will be bounded by the abilities of the people who operate the tools, and if you have good tools that are easily replicated, as software tools are, there’s no reason not to try and maximize your output by having as many people as you can afford and cranking out as much product as you can.
What amuses me about this take is that the jokes about the song being played all the time fall prey to the exact same overexposure mechanism that made people dislike the song in the first place. As the song gets more commonly perceived as being overexposed, the idea of its overexposure itself becomes more and more popular until it is itself perceived as overexposed. Like a memetic echo.
I’m just making stuff up, but your comment made me look it up and of course it’s also the name of a controversial youtuber who blew up, coincidentally, around the same time the trebuchet did. Learning all kinds of internet history today.
The CPU malloceth, and the CPU freeeth, according to the divine Program. And lo, the virtuous array shall enter into the ofstream and be saved, while the wicked shall be dereferenced for ever.
I’d expand on your last thought to say that all art is a compression tool for meaning. Got an idea in your head you want to communicate? You’ve got your body and your environment to work with, good luck. Words, images, dance, sculpture, they’re all noisy channels we use to try and get information from one brain to another.
I think if we’re ever going to find an answer to “Why does the universe exist?” I think one of the steps along the way will be providing a concrete answer to the simulation hypothesis. Obviously if the answer is “yes, it’s a simulation and we can demonstrate as much” then the next question becomes “OK so who or what is running the simulation and why does that exist?” which, great, now we know a little bit more about the multiverse and can keep on learning new stuff about it.
Alternatively, if the answer is “no, this universe and the rules that govern it are the foundational elements of reality” then… well, why this? why did the big bang happen? why does it keep expanding like that? Maybe we will find explanations for all of that that preclude a higher-level simulation, and if we do, great, now we know a little bit more about the universe and can keep on learning new stuff about it.
Yes, kind of, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a point against it. “Why are we here? / Why is the universe here?” is one of the big interesting questions that still doesn’t have a good answer, and I think thinking about possible answers to the big questions is one of the ways we push the envelope of what we do know. This particular paper seems like a not-that-interesting result using our current known-to-be-incomplete understanding of quantum gravity, and the claim that it somehow “disproves” the simulation hypothesis is some rank unscientific nonsense that IMO really shouldn’t have been accepted by a scientific journal, but I think the question it poorly attempts to answer is an interesting one.
the realpolitik is in Corrections
It really depends on the advice, and my relationship with the advice giver. I generally give advice at least a thought, even if it was unwanted, unless I have a reason to mistrust the advisor. As for how I respond to the person, if it’s a friend I’ll usually have followup questions, for people I know less well it’s usually a cordial variant of “hmm, interesting perspective” and then I have to think on it for a while before I respond, if I respond at all.