I've no idea what the c-word means (consciousness), so I'll leave that aside; everything else checks out as absolutely sensible to me.
Your last sentence strikes me as particularly validating.
"My way", this framework, was meant to give a mechanistic description of our individual, subjective "inner world." Much like physics speaks of the outer, shared world; and in compliance with all objective 'hard' sciences.
Indeed, it lends itself particularly well to be exploited by AI, notably in terms of architecture and domain-selection (by whatever core we call 'sapience') within a "Mixture-of-Experts" paradigm of sorts—which biology seems to have done: dedicated organs or sub-parts for each purpose, the Unix way to "Do one thing and/to do it well."
To elaborate a bit, I think there are layers in-between raw IQ and practical proprioception, for instance. Balancing one's body involves the full neural chain, down to origin (which is the end-cell, the sensor/motor device), and quite evidently can be trained to orders of magnitude more accuracy.
So to think like a tech stack of sorts, from the meat (purely biological, since the first unicellular organisms) to the highest-level (call it 'sapience', 'wisdom', whatever; that which is even above IQ), you'd find something that goes
good-enough bodily genetics
+
trained sensor & motorneural precision
+
high IQ for good aim and strategy
+
sapient decision-making
in order to best navigate complex spaces.
Case in point: cliche nerds (not your best dancers/athletes), unwise yet very intelligent people, bad draw at the genetic lottery for negative examples; conversely a very gifted "natural born" athlete or musician (which doesn't mean that without training they wouldn't get beaten flat by any seasoned professional) doubling as a strategy prodigy, or zen master, whatever 'wise-r.'
If we admit that space[time] is the "language of the brain" (what IQ actually tests), and therefore that even social spaces—like love, business, or politics—are navigated from the same core skills than physical spaces like sports.
(That much perhaps is a stretch, it may be more complicated; but perhaps partially true for 'core functions' as it were. Perhaps like 'speech mastery' alone is a core function that contributes to a slew of more complex tasks/goals).
I'm sorry I couldn't reply sooner. The sibling comment took all my free time last week (lol).
I've taken great interest in Harrold. It'll be some time until I can deep dive into anything besides work, but he's made my top 10 list of thinkers to know and potentially assimilate into my research framework (I treat theoretical signals not as data but as methods, essentially, a panel of "ways to think about the data" itself).
Thank you very much for the suggestion (and for that write up, it really helped).
This is salient enough that I think you intuitively understood my comment. I won't pretend I can fully explain pending hypotheses either, it's more about research angles (e.g., connecting tools with problem categories).
Thanks a lot for the recommendations. That's what I love about HN. One often gets next-level great pointers.
> Objects of consciousness can't be definitively separated from their "external" causes, and can be considered the ongoing activity of those causes, "within" us.
Emphatically yes.
> […] spatiotemporal imprint that is identical with and inextricable from the activity of "outer" events that precipitated it
Exactly, noticing that it includes, and/or is shaped, by "inner" events as well.
So there's the outer world, and there's your inner world, and only a tiny part of the latter is termed "conscious". We gotta go about life from that certainly vantage but incredibly limited perspective too. The 'folding power' of nature (to put so much information in so little space) is mesmerizing, truly.
I like to put it down to earth to think about it. When you're in pain, or hungry, or sleepy—any pure physiological, biological state,—it will noticeably impact (alter, color, shade, formally "transform" as in filters or gating of) the whole system.
Your perception (stimuli), your actions (responses), your non-conscious impulses (intuitions, instincts, needs & wants…), your emotions, thoughts, and even decision-making and moral values.
I can't elaborate much here as it's bound to get abstract too fast, to seem obfuscated when it's everything but. I should probably write a blog or something, ha ha. You too, you seem quite astute at wording those things.
Anecdotal (but deep) research led me to postulate that our entire "inner world", for lack of a better word, is an emergent construction based on a fundamentally spatiotemporal encoding of the external world. This assumes that feeding and motility, i.e., a geometric interpretation of the external world, is among the first 'functions' of living organisms in the evolutionary order. They subsequently became foundational for neuronal systems when these appeared about 500 million years ago.
The hypothesis was informed by language notably, where most things are defined in spatial terms and concepts (temporal too, though more rarely), as if physical experiences of the world were the building blocks of thinking, really. A "high" council, a "sub" culture, a "cover", an "adjacent" concept, a "bigger" love, a "convoluted" or "twisted" idea, etc.
Representations in one's inner world are all about shape, position, and movement of things in some abstract space of sorts.
This is exactly how I'd use a 4D modeling engine to express a more 'Turing-complete' language, a more comprehensive experience (beyond movement: senses, intuitions, emotions, thoughts, beliefs…): use its base elements as a generator set to express more complex objects through composition in larger and/or higher-dim space. Could nature, Evolution, have done just that? Iteratively as it conferred survival advantages to these genes? What would that look like for each layer of development of neuronal—and later centralized "brain"—systems?
Think as in geometric algebra, maybe; e.g., think how the metric of a Clifford algebra may simply express valence or modality, for those neuronal patterns to trigger the proper neurotransmitters. In biological brains, we've already observed neural graphs up to 11 dimensions (with a bimodal distribution peak around ~2.5D and ~3.8D iirc… Interestingly for sure, right within the spatiotemporal ballpark, seeing as we experience the spatial world in 2.5D more than 3, unlike fishes or birds).
Jeff Hawkins indeed strongly shaped my curiosity, notably in "A Thousand Brains" and subsequent interviews. The paper here immediately struck me as very salient to that part of my philosophical and ML research—so kinda not too surprised there's history there.
And I'm really going off on a tangent here, but I'm pretty sure the "tokenization problem" (as expressed by e.g. Karpathy) may eventually be better solved using a spatiotemporal characterization of the world. Possibly much closer to real-life language in biological brains, for the above reasons. Video pretraining of truly multimodal models may constitute a breakthrough in that regard, perhaps to synthesize or identify the "ideal" text divisions, a better generator set for (any) language.
The first demo Jeremy put out was called "Build Applications For LLMs in Python",¹ as part of the "Mastering LLMs" conference by Hamel Husain and Dan Becker.² (You can see a few PoC demos by the end of that video when Johno takes over, it looks a lot like what Gradio or Streamlit can do).
So I think your .ml angle is definitely part of the original ethos of FastHTML (which isn't surprising coming from the founder of fast.ai & answer.ai, among other things).
The FastHTML team explicitly recommends would-be contributors to consider making reusable components, the likes of Gradio's, to facilitate all the things notably relating to AI workflows.
----
About WordPress & CMS
That part is admittedly much larger in scope. I'd expect it to rise in correlation with the success of FastHTML itself in the Python web ecosystem writ large (beyond data / AI) but no sooner—unless someone makes a killer case for a FastHTML-based Python CMS that becomes a driver of popularity, but that's admittedly a much taller and wider order than 'simply' becoming the go-to #1 Python/ML prototype-to-market-at-scale one-stop shop. I mean, just that is huge, and yet nowhere near WordPress.
But tbh, I really like your idea, and I think it may eventually prove true, having used FastHTML first-hand for a few weeks now (and web dev being far from my turf). The fact is can ship with FastHTML, fast & well-behaved web apps, more than I ever could. If I ever get the time I'll play a bit to see what a legacy-free FastHTML CMS could look like. But no matter how good the engine, the plugin ecosystem is what makes WP, and no single dev or company can replicate that alone. It's an alchemy with the times, there are windows. Not sure one is open now.
Pico CSS¹ essentially works like that, so you can hard-override any of its exposed variables² to suit your needs.
I discovered it through FastHTML (it was the CSS Jeremy and Johno Whitaker used in their first-ever demo³ early June), and find the 'dx' simple, stupid, in a great way.
Really impressive indeed, but I do get the interest. I, for one, will give 1% of my yearly income now that they're on my radar. It instantly ranks among the top 3 most important open-source projects in my opinion.
In terms of SWE, it doesn't get harder than an OS in my book (and not even from scratch). So them coming from success in that space is more than enough to convince me they can deliver a world-class browser core engine.
Naive guess: their shopping activity (leads, funnels, conversions/sales…) if/when in Ladybird would likely be tracked only by Shopify itself, at the exclusion of other big tech (most notably Google). This makes Shopify's dataset more valuable (differentiated by unique entries), which can be used in-house strategically to grow, or resold at a better price.
Indeed. With limited budget and manpower, they [Ladybird] should focus on a rock-solid core engine with great extensibility, then let the community—if any—create all the things around said core.
It's the best (perhaps only) "small project to stratosphere" 101-recipe I've found. [Note that for browsers, even 1% of market share is stratosphere-level.]
Historical music/media apps were a great example before browsers (Winamp, Foobar2K, XBMC…). Tiny teams + key community contributions made for amazingly complete and rich software fit for all use-cases, beating any commercial alternative by far.
(The fact is that to this day, these 2000-2010 solutions gave you far more user-power & customization, not to mention discoverability and meta-knowledge, than current Netflix or Spotify UIs.)
A project like Ladybird should take that general road, IM(very but educated)HO. That's how they can eventually catch up to big names feature-wise.
1. Read biographies of people who did it. (Re-read those books sometimes; you'll know when.)
2. Read business books by people who consistently lead/advised at that level.
3. Find your philosophy. (Hint: this happens within, in your inner world.)
— You only need two or three great books in each category to really get going. Date of publication doesn't matter much; try to vary across backgrounds and decades, centuries.
4. Exercise a minimum on a weekly basis.
5. Eat well. Sleep well.
And train that voice within to become a perfect friend.
(Funny to think you only have to will it to get that in life, just… inside.)
That's the TL;DR.
The rest will be self-evident on your journey, and involve a lot of luck. But if you're like most people, were you to reach a few % of that wealth, you'd probably stop right there and no longer worry about money, for the rest of your life. Incredibly few have the will to 10× that, then 10× again, because it's exponentially harder and comparatively useless.
~5 years. Medium-sized team in-house + hordes (hundreds, thousands) of engineers in the field helping clients on-site, writing code for them directly upstreamed to drivers, core libs, etc. (iteratively optimized in-house, ship feature, rinse and repeat). Story of the PlayStation SDKs, of DX too, but above all CUDA (they really outdid this strategy), now for cuDNN and so much more.
It takes incompressible time because you have to explore the whole space, cover most bases; and it takes an industry several years (about one "gen" / hardware cycle) to do that meaningfully.It helps when your platform is disruptive and customers move fast.
Maybe 3 years at best if you start on a new ideal platform designed for it from scratch. And can throw ungodly amount of money fast at it (think 5K low-level engineers roaming your installed base).
Maybe 10+ yrs (or never) if you're alone, poor, and Radeon (j/k but to mean it's non-trivial).
I don't mean to take away from Intel's underwhelming management.
But regardless, Keller's Athlon 64 or Zen are great competitors.
Likewise, CUDA is Nvidia's massive achievement. The growth strategy of that product (involving lots of free engineer hours given to clients on-site) deserves credit.
(-; Indeed always warming to the core to see productive emulation between parallel lines! I'm sure after all their achievements, neither of them wastes time pondering woulda, shoulda, cuda…
Time to buy cheaper 7's and older. Smartphones have all but been functionally commoditized at this point for me. I'll admit I'm still a heavy desktop OS user. I'm always amazed at mobile semiconductor progress, though; it's insane to think what software models we'll be able to run on tiny devices by this decade's end. Many sci-fi/childhood's dreams are about to come truer than anyone ever thought possible.
Dan McKinley's innovation model is solid. If you're familiar with entrepreneurial literature (eg. HBR), or financial analytics, or even the prosumer DIY scene, you'll land on the same general principles.
"Boring" is essentially a synonym for "reliable," a principle that holds true across sectors, especially in tech-adjacent fields. Nintendo's success is a case in point for the power of commoditizing reliable tech.
Google's polyglot approach (Go, Kotlin, Dart…) might seem like an exception, but it's more likely a symptom of being "too big to notice friction." This will eventually manifest as either tech debt or a talent bottleneck.
As for sectors that defy the "boring is best" mantra, they're rare. Even buzz-heavy areas like crypto and Web 3.0 often rely on tried-and-true languages like Java or Python. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are the real game-changers, bridging monoliths to human-centric solutions. The only sector that genuinely benefits from "non-boring" tech is cutting-edge R&D—think languages like Julia.
"Boring" is subjective, and even objectively defined it can't be measured. Therefore yes IMHO, F# qualifies as 'boring' for you.
However, unless you're an isolated entity (e.g., SOHO) or fully remote, your business environment also factors into that equation. Node.js might be 'boring' in the USA but anecdotal (read: edgy) in entire subcontinents.
Economically speaking, a 'boring' tech stack is one that generates the least 'friction' for its devs. (friction may be construed as added cost beyond base material requirements, eg. time or complexity added by bureaucracy, or cognitive toll induced by steep-n-quirky learning curves, as opposed to the fastest road to MVP / RC / shipping).
Most discussions around depopulation get bogged down in emotional or ethical arguments. To clarify, ethical considerations aren't distractions; they drive the pragmatic actions of all parties involved. It's even feasible to consider the most ethical—perhaps fully democratic—means of implementing such plans. However, it's worth noting there's a historical tolerance limit beyond which future generations may not be kind to the architects of such initiatives.
The real crux isn't whether some advocate for lower populations—clearly, many do—but the operational aspect: who executes, under what authority, and how? For instance, if a group of biologists and engineers aim to reduce Earth's population to 4 billion by 2400, the implications—like fewer children and potential space colonization—are vastly different than a group of anthropological philosophers striving for the same population count by 2033, which could necessitate more drastic measures.
These logistical issues, whether it's stealth tactics versus open methods or the necessity of opportunistic partnerships, remain conspicuously underexplored.
Your last sentence strikes me as particularly validating.
"My way", this framework, was meant to give a mechanistic description of our individual, subjective "inner world." Much like physics speaks of the outer, shared world; and in compliance with all objective 'hard' sciences.
Indeed, it lends itself particularly well to be exploited by AI, notably in terms of architecture and domain-selection (by whatever core we call 'sapience') within a "Mixture-of-Experts" paradigm of sorts—which biology seems to have done: dedicated organs or sub-parts for each purpose, the Unix way to "Do one thing and/to do it well."