Amazing to see this. I just landed after a week in Japan where we discovered this word and instantly recognised how it applies to our team. Made heavy use of it when pitching to explain our passion for what we do.
B2B SaaS founder - Direct sales (contacts, LinkedIn, in-person industry events). Client advocates voluntarily promoting the product within the industry.
This take is less than generous to Penrose. In a recent debate (which was less than fruitful as debates go), Penrose said this regarding this paper:
> Moderator: ... saying that these effects are now experimentally established, so I thought Sir Roger must now be triumphant, the experiments are now in favour, so I'm very curious where you now are with your theory.
> Penrose: Well, as far as experiments are concerned, I think one has to be a bit cautious about it all, so I'm not an expert on experiments, but I certainly have a colleague who, although the recent experiments to refer to seem to be supportive of the point of view, I'm putting forward, he was a bit skeptical, thinking it might be a bit wishful thinking experiments, so I just have a neutral position on this, I can't really judge the experiments.
> And exactly how one might make experimental observations to see whether the argument would have to be that one has quantum effects in microtubules, these little tiny parts of cells, and this has been the argument for quite a long time, ever since I had a communication from Stuart Hammeroff.
Source: Quantum Consciousness Debate: Does the Wave Function Actually Exist? | Penrose, Faggin & Kastrup @ 5m55s (https://youtu.be/0nOtLj8UYCw?t=347)
This evokes some strong nostalgia. My formative years were spent playing Doom IPX on LAN (DOS), Trials of Battle (OS/2) on LAN, and Galactic Civilizations, learning to code with REX, and spending time on internet chat rooms. We had an Windows NT 4 box in the house which was for my dad's work, and I didn't touch it much as DOS games either didn't run or were a real PITA to get working, so OS/2 Warp 3/4 and DOS were where I resided most of the time.
We bought a new primary car last April, it was a toss up between an electric and a petrol/diesel, and we opted for a diesel car in the end.
Reasons: range anxiety, and war anxiety.
I want a Tesla, but the problem is that an electric car becomes a giant paperweight in an emergency.
We have a secondary, small electric car and we use it for short local trips. There’s been more than a few instances where a lapse resulted in not being able to use it because it wasn’t charged fully. And don’t get me started on the state of public charges, it’s a mess.
Don’t get me wrong, I like electric, but edge cases are real and important and so they must be planned for.
This is incredible. Not just because of the engineering that went into such a long lived machine, but also because of the ingenuity of the teams that have looked after this mission and those currently working on it.
Half a century of operation. Bits of data, like gold dust, peppering our radio telescopes with telemetry from the edges of our protective solar shell, and beyond.
Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated, but the pushing of boundaries of our understanding is awe inspiring. It carries the symbolism of some of the best parts of humanity’s desire to explore.
This sort of news, at least for me, is an antidote to the darker side of our species. It reinvigorates my hope in what we can achieve when working together.
Thank you to NASA and the scientific community at large.
I understand that this comment probably wasn’t meant in this way but it comes off as condescending of people from only a few thousand years ago and it feels like my friends were being spoken about (personally!)
We have to remember that it’s humans we're talking about here, and that this wasn’t exactly that long ago. They would have had the same cognitive potential as us, if not more simply because we’re lazy ungrateful creatures living in a level of comfort that royalty of old could not even imagine. The cost of a mistake in their “real world” was often death, and they _had_ to get it right so that their family didn’t die.
People can spontaneously self organise and achieve all sorts of things “on the spot”, kids in the playground do this daily- making up fun games without any parental input. I don’t believe you need a whole level of social development beyond “I won’t kill you, let’s be friends” to achieve great things. This becomes complicated as groups grow of course, but I would imagine most of us have experienced this on some level.
Necessity is the mother of innovation. Doing something the hard/impossible way a few times will force you to be creative, especially when you need to feed your family/group.
It IS dangerous. You must apply critical thinking to what’s in front of you. You can’t blindly believe what this thing generates! Much like heavy machinery, it’s a game changer when used correctly, and likewise it can be extremely damaging if you use it without appropriate care.
The real time applications are a game changer. I haven’t dabbled with that yet! Pasting things from emails and summarising - then keeping in my notes app. Also for planning out days when on holiday.
I’ve been actively using it and it’s become my go-to in a lot of cases - Google is more for verification when I smell something off or if it doesn’t have up to date information. Here are some examples:
• reviewing contract changes, explaining hard to parse legalese
• advice on accounting/tax when billing international clients
• visa application
• boilerplate django code
• learnt all about smtp relays, and requirements for keeping a good reputation for your IPs
• travel itinerary
• domain specific questions (which were 50/50 correct at best…)
• general troubleshooting
I’m using it as a second brain. I can quickly double check some assumptions, get a clear overview of a given topic and then direction on where I need to delve deeper.
Anyone who still thinks that this is “just a statistical model” doesn’t get it. Sure, it’s not sentient or intelligent, but it sure as hell making my life easier. I won’t be going back to the way I used to do things.
How incredible is it, that I'm writing software on a laptop, connected to the internet over wifi, all while being 38,000 feet in the air. And all this enabled by billions of tiny transistors made from sand. And to make this all the more surreal, I'm sitting next to someone who knew him.
A couple of years ago I was on a walk with my wife and she asked me “what’s the point of Siri? it can hardly do anything useful outside weather and timers.” I told her a tall tale of how these things are essentially going to become our personal assistants in the future, they’ll know about our unique situations and can act accordingly. Just like the rich and powerful have people who specialise in organising their lives so they get more done in less time, so AI through natural interfaces will all of us many of those same benefits.
Progress… This is the first time I see a product that fits that description.
The auction is meant to find a stable price and can have some wild prices coming in, because no matching happens at the point of entry, the market will naturally find a level before trading commences. In this case, those wild prices were matching, resulting in crazy trades no-one would have expected.
You'd be surprised how many manual processes there are in places like this. It's a combination of legacy systems / processes, and a general paranoia around automation going wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if they always have someone there to shepherd the system along.
This brings back some memories. Long ago worked at BIGCORP which utilised JIRA for everything, including time logging in non-revenue generating teams. It was a time consuming activity everyone had to suffer. We spent around 30mins at the end of each day doing this, most of that time spent on selecting the right drop-downs.
It was some PTSD inducing work and I couldn't put up with it any longer so I wrote a CLI utility in python where I'd track my work throughout the day, a simple one-liner of the work I did with some hashtags for routing to the right project/client. At the end of the day I would "process" my entries by typing one command which ran chrome+selenium automation to do the work for me. [edit] From memory, API use wasn't allowed which is why I had to take this route - it was also a great conversation starter for anyone passing by while it ran.
I saved a tonne of time and aggravation, others noticed, so I set them up with the same. A nice byproduct of this: all the entries were also kept in a local sqlite database which allowed you to quickly search and find answers for follow-ups without touching JIRA, all with a few characters in the terminal.
This brings back some memories! The world was using Windows 95 and we were using OS/2 at home, with a sprinkle of DOS and Win NT 4.0.
Anyone remember the old Stardock games for OS/2? Entrepreneur, Galactic Civilizations, and of course multiplayer Trials of Battle on LAN.
Had my first foray into scripting with REXX, and Gopher was still a thing. First time I wrote some HTML was also on OS/2. Fun times as a kid in my dad’s lab.
If you enjoy Matt @ Spacetime, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Kurzgesagt, and are into astrophysics, I would highly recommend Anton Petrov’s YouTube channel: