If I were in charge of a package manager I would be seriously looking into automated and semi automated exploit detection so that people didn't have to yolo new packages to find out if they are bad. The checking would itself become an attack vector, but you could mitigate that too. I'm just saying _something_ is possible.
I think it's probably a little bit about Goodhart? At some point soon after stars were widely in use but prior to them being connected to any particular incentive I bet they were actually a great signal of... something. But then once someone started using the signal to give attention or dollars, the signal was compromised.
I think it's more like a sign post in the text. At the start of any paragraph (or sentence, really) the text may go literally anywhere--could be a new thought, a continuation of an implicit list, an explanation of what came previous, or anything else.
If you say something weird or apparently unsupported, the savvy reader at that very moment is going to be thinking so. So it's helpful to orient them like:
> Here's a wild sentence. Here's why it's not actually that wild: reasons
Without the connecting phrase, the reader has to figure out from context that out of all the possible things the following text could be doing, what it's actually doing is explaining the previous claim.
You can rightly counterpoint that it's not strictly necessary, that a savvy reader can figure it out. But I think the moment right after a wild statement is a hotspot for readers getting ready to jettison, and having a little assurance is likely very helpful.
I think as many other people who replied to you have said, it's a mixed bag. It's better in some sense, with abstractions and frameworks that sand down sharp edges, and libraries that can do everything. But it's also crushingly more complex. Back in the day you had to know and care about memory allocation and ASM, but all the knowledge you needed was in a manual or two that you owned and could actually know the contents of.
My tldr: people see what they want to see according to their political commitments.
The abstract:
> “Cultural cognition” refers to the unconscious influence of individuals’
group commitments on their perceptions of legally consequential facts. We con-
ducted an experiment to assess the impact of cultural cognition on perceptions of
facts relevant to distinguishing constitutionally protected “speech” from unpro-
tected “conduct.” Study subjects viewed a video of a political demonstration.
Half the subjects believed that the demonstrators were protesting abortion out-
side of an abortion clinic, and the other half that the demonstrators were protesting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy outside a military recruitment center. Subjects of opposing cultural outlooks who were assigned to the same experimental condition (and thus had the same belief about the nature of the protest) disagreed sharply on key “facts”—including whether the protestors obstructed and threatened pedestrians. Subjects also disagreed sharply with those
who shared their cultural outlooks but who were assigned to the opposing experimental condition (and hence had a different belief about the nature of the protest). These results supported the study hypotheses about how cultural cognition would affect perceptions pertinent to the speech-conduct distinction. We discuss the significance of the results for constitutional law and liberal principles of self-governance generally.
It made immediate sense to me, since the painted statues do, in fact, look gaudy and horrible. I think he was evoking a widely held feeling that is bot in common knowledge.
I think the concern is that if the system is susceptible to this sort of manipulation, then when it’s inevitably put in charge of life critical systems it will hurt people.
I experience and wonder the same thing, but literally yesterday I had to help my grandmother recover from a phishing scam that actually (very nearly) worked on her. So there you go.
I don't have any particular knowledge about oxide's cooling, but think about how bloated and inefficient literally every part of the compute stack is from metal to seeing these words on a screen. If you imagine fixing every part of it to be efficient top to bottom, I think you'll agree that we're not even in the same galaxy as the physical limitations of moving electrons around at high speeds.
When I was doing a bunch of learning about linguistics, situations like this were very interesting and confusing to me. I still don't have a good working intuition for how this is possible. I don't understand what maintains the sound differences in the face of the continuous exposure to substantially different accents. It's empirically possible, but it's never made sense to me. Why don't you and your brothers end up talking the same after a while?
I think you can mostly fake this by waiting until the player reenters the range to generate what happened since the last time they interacted. If it's a complex simulation it won't work without more effort, but if it's flavor text like "Bob told me last week you killed the dragon, nice work!" then it can be done like 5ms after the player enters the simulation radius of the NPC.
I think it's just the first, most obvious thing to teach people just starting in pathfinding. It works in real life, it's easy to visualize and compute. Therefore all the tutorials are about it :)
I agree, although in a way that mirrors my opening statement from OP: I think people who don't have this disadvantage tend to underestimate how real it is, and those who have it tend to overestimate how real it is.
I think in conversations like these most people on the successful side underestimate how valuable the starting advantages were, and most people not on the successful side overestimate how valuable the starting advantages were. Meanwhile almost everyone misunderstands what the advantages really are.
People will talk about the $300k loan Bezos started with and think "boy golly, with 300 THOUSAND dollars, I could do anything!" meanwhile millions of people with much more than that fritter it away on nothing, even if they are trying not to. It takes something more to be Bezos.
Whereas the proverbial Bezos will think about the grit and determination it took to march for decades through treacherous financial and political swamps, and think "would I have let a lack of an initial 300k stop me from even starting? Would I have failed to secure the capital and cooperation without that seed? Given the heroics I've pulled over the years? Hell no, that wouldn't have stopped me."
But here's the part that most people misunderstand. The 300k is a small advantage, it might have made a difference, and some cases might make THE difference, but it's only the most concrete, obvious advantage. The real thing is like this:
In my earliest memories I was pretty poor, but also in those memories both my parents were going to university, while my dad was packing fiberglass at a factory. Then they graduated and he got a job and we became suburban middle class, my dad staying at his big corporation for the rest of his life, while my mom more or less stayed at home although she went back to school and ended up about half way through a PhD program. I would think about what career I wanted as a child, and what school I might go to, that sort of thing.
Fast forward to my first wife who I met when I was 17. She is self described "british ghetto trash," and she emigrated because she couldn't escape her accent, in a phrase. She taught me what I didn't know about privilege, at a time before that was a term anyone was using for this purpose. The reality she knew in the council housing (ie projects) where she grew up was that her dad was a scam artist flake who floated in and out of her life without regard for the many promises he made, and whenever he pulled off a big one he'd show up and splash a little cash around before running off again. He was far from ashamed, he was a "2 types of people in this world!" type scammer. Her mom wasn't much better, basically scamming the government for benefits, working whatever angle she could but never actually "working working."
My ex never thought about careers or schools or anything. She thought about what scam she could pull to make it to next month. It was a weird series of events that brought her across the pond, and into university and beyond.
That's what Bezos had that my ex didn't have. He thought he belonged inside society, he thought he could do things and that people would let him. He thought that so very much that never even had to think it consciously. The same for her but opposite, the idea of participating in society at all, never mind changing it was utterly foreign to her experience.
I think it was crushingly more important than the 300k in terms of pivotal advantages. It sucks to start with bad cards, but it's much tougher to not be in the game in the first place.
I think there is a real conversation to be had about “data” in a post LMM world, but I actually don’t care about debating definitions here, I care about whether the product works within a reasonable margin of error.