EXAPUNKS, Automation, Virtual Circuit Board, Turing Complete, ShenzenIO, among others.
That being said, I would rather use these problem solving skills in an actual product than a game that at least in theory will have some financial returns.
> the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values
This is an incorrect and cynical statement. I understand why you feel this way (for one thing, it's the exact type of language coming out of many of each party's idealists) but it's simply false.
One party supports gun rights while the other supports gun control. Those aren't values. Democrats want to pursue safety from guns. Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny. Both sides care about personal safety.
Abortion rights is about personal liberty. Gun rights are also about personal liberty. Both sides care about personal liberty.
The competing talking points aren't always conveniently about the same issue though. For Democrats their border policies are about compassion and human rights. For Republicans their border policies are about domestic prosperity.
Do Republicans care about human rights? Yes. Do Democrats care about domestic prosperity? Yes. To pretend otherwise is to willfully push apart the tribes in your own mind, and to trivialize the perspective of the opposition.
The real problem is the one you are contributing to: the unwillingness to empathize. Empathy is the only way to come to a compromise. With a little empathy you might even find that you have to compromise less because you might actually convince someone of your argument, for once.
I get there’s disenchantment with the status quo, and a desire to try something new because all the old tools just seem to break the machine even more than fix it.
But what’s always troubled me is that there’s no real difference between a rich man and a poor man other than the random consequences of their births. At its core, nature is the same across the socioeconomic strata, and across cultural boundaries. So, I think if the poor man was born rich, and vice versa, and you did that with all the poor men and rich men everywhere, the world would still be the same. Why shouldn’t it be?
The average western citizen or student is taught some framework of enlightenment ideals, so maybe they’ve somehow fooled themselves into thinking that making people equally rich, or switching the positions of the rich and poor, will result in some material difference to morality and ethics of the world. It definitely didn’t happen every time people tried that in history, like in Italy, USSR, or even China. So what will you do now that will result in something different? There’s some need for reflection here.
There’s no justice without acknowledging the truth, and there’s no truth in a world based on realpolitiks. Sadly, idealpolitiks are just another political trick. The moral relativism needs to be shed first to make some progress towards truth-seeking.
Just about all the best and most amusing April Fool's pranks I've genuinely enjoyed over the years have nearly all been BBC "hoaxes". A while back they did an absolutely convincing little documentary short about the discovery of a little gang of flying penguins that you can probably still find floating around YouTube and other video sites to this day. Truly hilarious stuff.
If you are fascinated by this sort of thing, In US architectural practice, Architectural Graphic Standard has been the standard for the sizes of things for nearly a century. Even the old "Student Edition" is a rabbit hole book.
Nonverbal communication is the transmission of messages or signals through a nonverbal platform such as eye contact (oculesics), body language (kinesics), social distance (proxemics), touch (haptics), voice (prosody and paralanguage), physical environments/appearance, and use of objects.
Does this mean that bacteria in the middle of the cable live off the electric potential alone (and, I suppose, whatever nutrients they can find at their position in the wire, even if they are not energy-given)? If so, one could build biochemical factories for producing glucose polymers that use solar panels instead of leaves. Leaves are more practical by almost all accounts, except that they are not easy to deploy in space's vacuum....
I was thinking "wow, how do you do that?" but then I forgot you're not dealing with any possible value between 1 and 2048 in a cell, only the powers of 2, so significantly fewer possible board states. Very cool.
I feel people often miss opportunities to map between (potentially complex, high entropy) state spaces into simple linear sequences of possible states and then either use those sequences to store the complex state data as a simple number or use the state of a system to encode data of some kind.
Like, if you use a limited 7-bit character set encoding for text and map that to a number in a sequence of possible orderings of a deck of 52 cards, you can store 32 characters (conveniently sized for passwords you might not want people to know are passwords).
Honestly I think more, smaller, monitors are better than fewer big ones. Given my choice I'd happily take 3 22" monitors or even 2 21" monitors + 1 19" monitor if push came to shove. I can usually see all the code I need in one 21" monitor just fine, but usually need another one for reference of some kind: docs or watching debug output, etc. The 3rd would be for collaboration: chat windows & email. If you can isolate distractions to their own monitor, they're easier to ignore while busy and require less window management and never cover up your real work.
Also in general it's more helpful to talk about monitors in terms of resolution rather than size; it's entirely possible to end up with a 27" monitor that is the same resolution as a 24" monitor, which means it doesn't actually have any more usable space, everything is just bigger, and that isn't very useful unless your devs are visually impaired.
Whenever I hear critiques of MBAs I think of this anecdote from a paper [1] by Yanis Varoufakis:
In the parlance of signaling theory these [MBA] transcripts are known as screening devices. One personnel manager (of a financial services company) explained this to me candidly: “I have no doubt that economics courses, MBAs, etc. teach nothing I need my employees to know. If anything I need to reprogram them on the job. The courses they have taken encourage bad thinking.” “But then,” I asked, “why do you prefer to hire college graduates?” “Because,” he answered matter of factly, “if these kids were willing (and able) to pay large sums of money in fees; if they submitted boring assignment after boring assignment without fail, and did not complain vigorously in the process; then there is a good chance that they are the kind of people who will appeal to my customers and do as they are told.”
- I started to see LLMs as a kind of search engines. I cannot say they are better than traditional search engines. On one hand, they are better at personalizing the answer, on the other hand, they hallucinate a lot.
- There is a different view on how new scientific knowledge is made. It's all about connecting existing dots. Maybe LLMs can assist with this task by helping scientists discover relevant dots to connect. But as the author suggests, this is only part of the job. To find the correct ways to connect the dots, you need to ask the right questions, examine the space of counterfactuals, etc. LLMs can be useful tool, but they are not autonomous scientists (yet).
- As someone developing software on top of LLMs, I am slowly coming to a conclusion that human-in-the-loop approaches seem to work better than fully autonomous agents.
What the hell is going on this week?!?!? (asking positively, with a smile on my face)
I have seen at least 3 interesting/mildly promising breakthroughs on ML just these past two days! I mean, a Google research team just discovered that you can combine NNs with CLAs using digital logic gates as a medium, so you could potentially reduce many kinds of non-linear problems to a simple, efficient digital circuit! And it was on the HN front page, TODAY![1]
I keep seeing more mind-bending stuff related to neural nets and logic/intelligence in general, my mind has been running wild with speculation about the future and just how close we could (or could not) be to truly understanding how intelligence works from first principles.
the visceral realization that something feeling incredibly deep and meaningful doesn't necessarily mean it's actually incredibly deep and meaningful, can, itself, be incredibly deep and meaningful. an opportunity to reset and recalibrate what you feel you want out of life.
1. Train crows to push a touchscreen for reward of food.
2. Next set up two touchscreens back to back. Make it so touching one screen only dispenses food on the other side.
3. Next make it so food is dispensed on the other side only one crow is perched at each terminal.
4. Next make it so food is only dispensed after a crow says something to the other crow on the other side.
5. Next display a picture on one terminal and give the other crow the choice of four quadrants. The food is dispensed if the picture on the far side matches the displayed picture.
radial dendrograms are great for looking at differences between clusters of relationships in trees. thanks for this tool, making viz tools accessible will refine their use cases. one of the challenges with viz is matching the message with the viewer.
re some of the viz comments here, most sankey diagrams can be pie charts (any one with less than a few nested categories) and most people who make pie charts don't reason about trees so all the junk sankey diagrams that flooded in after the birthday party chart aren't a reflection of their use or value.
messages I've used viz for in the past were to solve problems like:
- these things are similar and different (heatmap)
- this is a bounded domain (digraph/ontology)
- these things are related, but only relative to these other things (graph clusters, radial/linear network diagram, boxes+lines/nested boxes)
- the complexity is more here than there (graph clusters)
- the taxonomy hides an inconsistency or gap (sankey
diagrams)
- either everybody sees this or nobody does (graph clusters)
- these variations cause combinatoric explosion (sankey diagram)
- this is a hierarchy (dendrogram, radial dendrogram)
- these are categories of things (dendrogram, radial dendrogram)
- these things are the same (heatmap)
- start with these to have the most effect on those (cluster graph)
- solutions are in the form of this grammar (sankey diagram)
- these things happen in order (state machine/flow chart, gantt chart)
- these things happen together (gantt chart)
The statements may seem naive, but when you're working on a viz, you have to think about who it is for and whether it is the right representation and whether the message is valuable. I've made a lot of viz mistakes and they came down to not framing one of these messages correctly or misunderstanding how telling someone this would make them feel. the radial diagrams are pretty, and very useful for showing contrast between patterns and density of relationships.
Im always curious how we will send messages to future civilizations. How will we ensure we’ll be remembered or even noted in 10,000, 100,000, 1 million years? How can we prevent the same disaster(s) that eventually wipes our civilisation out from repeating again in future intelligent generations (human or otherwise)
Could environmental markers like these be the way? After all, it’s how we look at the past today
If you’ve ever tried to make a mathematical animation (think 3Blue1Brown), it’s a real pain. I was using manim for awhile to make animations for my YT channel, but the whole iteration process felt very slow and repetitive. So I thought I would recreate manim over the weekend, except with a GUI and real-time feedback. It’s been a year and a half and I’m hoping this weekend will be done soon so I can move on and start making videos again.
So far, it does a lot, but it still needs a lot of polish and refinement. The readme gives some gifs and a better idea of the feature set right now.
EXAPUNKS, Automation, Virtual Circuit Board, Turing Complete, ShenzenIO, among others.
That being said, I would rather use these problem solving skills in an actual product than a game that at least in theory will have some financial returns.