As an academic, I concur with the findings. However, some points for discussion:
1. I don’t believe iPad doesn’t offer the same benefits of writing with pen on paper. I mean iPad writing can be made to be almost as realistic as pen on paper with good accessories. It can be slow, doesn’t waste papers, you can edit, color code it, annotate in a way that’s backed up. I definitely like writing on paper, but I don’t see too much of a difference with iPad.
2. I absolutely love using Pilot V5 RT pens, and haven’t found something that is as smooth and satisfying when put on paper. What are your favorite pens? Are they available on JetPens for trying? Thanks!
Yes, of course mathematics is a tool to model nature as accurately as we could. That still doesn't mean mathematics is as trivial or frivolous as manipulating symbols.
That view is incredibly reductionist. It really is an efficient encoding of how nature behaves. It might be a human construct, but given how best it allows to understand nature (through principles of physics), it is uncanny to be any different from the language of nature.
Reminds me of Wigner's Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences [0].
As a scientific adventure, SpaceX is a worthy company full of awesome people. But the management and VCs is another story, as usual. To price it at a market cap of $1.8T, somewhere double that of Walmart is insane.
I'm tired of these types of articles making it to the HN frontpage. None of these articles can say anything definitive; all they could do is speculate. We are trading away the old HN which was full of really interesting links that used to send me on rewarding rabbit holes for hours.
I liked the idea, but this literally could have been a list. The AI-generated pages with filler text create a stark contrast in utility compared to the influential nature of the listed papers.
It is insane to me that Apple couldn't build its own source of RAM given its 250B war chest. Could have bought some RAM company at an opportune moment.
That makes a lot more sense when you put it that way. Nevertheless, it is ever more harder to prove something is legitimately one's own work. That is worrisome when it comes to science where credits matter more than for glory; job markets only value publication outputs which may have been cheaper to obtain with LLMs now and harder to distinguish what's yours and what's not.
Given the advent of LLMs, I don't know if plagiarism is ever a thing anymore. Nobody is stupid enough to include verbatim unless citing those works. Feed into an LLM to get a paraphrased version conveying the same meaning.
It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.
Often this is the conundrum in research as well. What should one spend their life working on? Especially if you want to make an impact. Choosing the right problem is often harder than coming up with a relevant solution.
$10M is also perhaps asking for too much to live a modest life even without working, but I hear you with rising costs and healthcare. In any case, $10M is 100x smaller than $1B.
First question: why? Why should I (or anyone) earn a billion dollars? PG made it seem like that's the ultimate goal somehow. Also, why only a billion dollars, PG? You see your infinite cancerous growth machine doesn't stop?
This article did not sit well with me. I have found myself rereading Beyond Smart, How to Write Usefully, The Need to Read, Life is Short. But this one is harmful; nobody needs a billion dollars.
Whatever you do, there is a level of trust that is assumed when census takes place. The trust that this data is then not identified in a way that could be targeted for scams, frauds, and other such evils. But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment.
Differential privacy is absolutely necessary, and the social scientists being unable to reconstruct the data at an individual level is intended. A macroscopic description is rather enough for most purposes, and anything more is asking for a surveillance state.