> Because they are vibrating, a lot of that energy is being wasted in brownian motion. So the denser it is, the more your average vector is going to be toward more dense brownian motion as the particles interact and induce more brownian motion ... Seems pretty intuitive to me.
Loving math is not necessarily a problem. But if you want others to love it too, you have to explain it in a way that makes them see the light.
A lot of STEM education is more along the lines of "take the rapid-fire calculus class, memorize a bunch of formulas, and then use them to find the transfer function of this weird circuit". It's not entirely useless, but it doesn't make you love the theory.
I don't get why EE education emphasizes problems of this sort. The infinite grid is an extreme example, but solving weirdly complicated problems involving Kirchoff's laws and Thevenin's theorem was a common way to torture students back in my day...
Here, I don't think it's even useful to look at this problem in electronic terms. It's a pure math puzzle centered around an "infinite grid of linear A=B/C equations". Not the puzzle I ever felt the need to know the answer to, but I certainly don't judge others for geeking out about it.
> Gary Marcus isn't about "getting real", it's making a name for himself as a contrarian to the popular AI narrative.
That's an odd standard. Not wanting to be wrong is a universal human instinct. By that logic, every person who ever took any position on LLMs is automatically untrustworthy. After all, they made a name for themselves by being pro- or con-. Or maybe a centrist - that's a position too.
Either he makes good points or he doesn't. Unless he has a track record of distorting facts, his ideological leanings should be irrelevant.
The complaints about licensing seem a bit weird given that the company actually accommodates hobbyists. They have a $100-something perpetual home license that doesn't require internet access.
Most other vendors of niche "pro" software just give the middle finger to hobbyists and want you to pony up thousands of dollars for an annual subscription.
I think it's perfectly OK to say "I don't need this, open-source tools work for me". Just like you can use KiCad instead of Cadence for PCB design. But getting angry at Mathworks for wanting money from commercial users seems weird.
> Formal Methods in general are underrated in the industry. Pretty much no large companies except AWS (thank you Byron Cook!) use them at a large scale.
At least Microsoft and Google poured a lot of money into this by funding well-staffed multi-year research projects. There's plenty of public trail in terms of research papers. It's just that not a whole lot came out of it otherwise.
The problem isn't that the methods are underrated, it's that they aren't compatible with the approach to software engineering in these places (huge monolithic codebases, a variety of evolving languages and frameworks, no rigid constraints on design principles).
The original post asserted the article is nonsense; you're trying to justify that by saying you don't like the author's writing style. Two separate things...
The article is mostly correct, although it makes some weird claims (e.g., the Shellshock bug had nothing to do with the class of bugs the article is complaining about - it was a vulnerability in the shell itself). It definitely has a "newcomer hates things without understanding why they are the way they are" vibe, but you actually need that every now and then. The old-timers tend to say "it was originally done this way for a reason and if you're experienced enough, you know how to deal with it", but what made sense 30-40 years ago might not make much sense today.
The main reason system() exists is that people want to execute shell commands; some confused novice developers might mix it up with execl(), but this is not a major source of vulnerabilities. The major source of vulnerabilities is "oh yeah, I actually meant to execute shell".
So if you just take away the libcall, people will make their own version by just doing execl() of /bin/sh. If you want this to change, I think you have to ask why do people want to do this in the first place.
And the answer here is basically that because of the unix design philosophy, the shell is immensely useful. There are all these cool, small utilities and tricks you can use in lieu of writing a lot of extra code. On Windows, command-line conventions, filesystem quirks, and escaping gotchas are actually more numerous. It's just that there's almost nothing to call, so you get fewer bugs.
The most practical way to make this class of bugs go away is to make the unix shell less useful.
There's a ton of hobbies like that. There are people who collect out-of-print comic books, sports memorabilia, old militaria, etc. What's the point of any of it? It's the joy of having a hobby and being a part of a community, not the utility of the gear itself.
"Extremist" is just a pejorative variant of "radical". I assume they're using it tongue-in-cheek.
When it comes to speech, it's really not hard to imagine positions that would have been controversial at any point in the history of the US. That doesn't mean you can't hold them, but others don't need to agree, and that's how you end up with labels of this sort.
Back in the olden days, pressure-treated wood contained compounds of arsenic and chromium. This made it pretty terrible to cut, sand, burn, etc.
The warnings persist in part because older wood still has that problem, so "reclaimed wood" projects can be risky. That said, since mid-2000s, wood in the US and the EU is treated primarily with much safer copper compounds. Copper isn't hugely toxic to humans at the levels you're likely to be exposed to from wood.
To be fair, the treatment often also includes an organic fungicide (the "azole" part in "copper azole"), which is probably not understood as well as copper.
The point of the SI system is not that one meter is "better" than one foot. It's that we picked one subjective point of reference and then made almost all the other units related to that in a straightforward way and scaled with a common set of prefixes.
In everyday life, the metric system offers no big benefit, except for consistency for international standards and trade. But if you're doing anything engineering-related, your life is simpler if you don't need conversion factors to move between liters, meters, joules, watts, amperes, volts, ohms, and so on.
And FWIW, even to the extent that US engineers sometimes use inches and Fahrenheit, almost everything else they do is anchored to SI.
I know it's a running joke, but we had a decade (+) of Linux in many other consumer use cases, such as smartphones. The problem is that if you're selling a consumer computing platform, you're subject to the same exact incentives as Microsoft. You want to be Microsoft! You want their revenue, their profit margins, their nice offices, their talented engineers.
Android is Linux, but your typical Android phone ships with invasive AI features, has a locked bootloader, a variety of components that collect data about you... and unless you jump through hoops, it only lets you install apps from the company store.
The old internet is still there, it just hasn't scaled as quickly as everything else. And frankly, we have a role to play if we want to preserve and nourish it. You say you liked the site. Drop the author a thank you note. Amplify it beyond pressing the "up" arrow on HN. It's not just about the author: show others that this kind of stuff is valued.
Today, the signals young content creators get is that they can make dumb videos on YouTube or TikTok and get 10M subscribers and ad revenue, or set up a geeky blog that will get 100 views a month. But it's not Google or TikTok that did this: it's the content consumers.
I think the article describes a real problem in that AI discourages thought. So do other things, but what's new about AI is that it removes an incentive to try.
It used to be that if you spent your day doomscrolling instead of writing a blog post, that blog post wouldn't get written and you wouldn't get the riches and fame. But now, you can use AI to write your blog post / email / book. If you don't have an intrinsic motivation to work your brain, it's a lot easier to wing it with AI tools.
At the same time... gosh. I can't help but assume that the author is just depressed and that it has little to do with AI. The post basically says that AI made his life meaningless. But you don't have to use AI tools if they're harming you. And more broadly, life has no meaning beyond what we make of it... unless your life goal is to crank out text faster than an LLM, there's still plenty of stuff to focus on. If you genuinely think you can't possibly write anything new and interesting, then dunno, pick a workshop craft?
More generally, prior to LLMs, you were competing with 8 billion people alive (plus all of our notable dead). Any novel you could write probably had some precedent. Any personal story you could tell probably happened to someone else too. Any skill you wanted to develop, there probably was another person more capable of doing the same.
It was never a useful metric to begin with. If your life goal is to be #1 on the planet, the odds are not in your favor. And if you get there, it's almost certainly going to be unfulfilling. Who is the #1 Java programmer in the world? The #1 topologist? Do they get a lot of recognition and love?
There's a lot of folks doing financial calculations in this thread, but keep in mind that this produced an unstable isotope of gold with a half-life measured in seconds. This has been done before. Even before you get to any economic calculus, you need to find a way to make that one stable isotope (out of about 40 known).
If Signal becomes financially dependent on government contracts, the govt gains a lot of leverage over the app. I'm not sure that's a great position for this particular platform to be in.
I don't want to be judgmental because I know these are extremely difficult situations with no easy answers, but what strikes me about this article is that the author blames the profit motive after what can be uncharitably viewed as taking an elderly parent and paying a third party to make the "problem" go away from your life.
This industry is driven solely by demand and there are highly-developed countries where it doesn't exist, or doesn't exist on this scale, simply because of different social norms and taboos.
What's the outcome we're hoping for? We're talking elderly folks we'd rather not care for ourselves and that we don't want to watch declining and dying, and we're dumping them into a large-scale... well, death facility.