There's a lot of art out there that is totally uninteresting, at least to me, because it feels like the artist put little effort or thought into it or or maybe even into honing their skills.
But if the art instead beems with intention and effort, chances are that it will be interesting. And in order for anyone to create something so brimming with signs of effort, they must have cared about the piece, the message, the artform, or something along the process. This post talks about effort and attention, but you could phrase it as a question of reciprocal "caring". If you want me to care, show me that you even care yourself.
It is getting harder and harder to suss out what is genuine though.
This reminds me of why I despise certain works/styles of art and artists. I feel cheated if I'm made to spend more time and effort interpreting a work of art than the creator put into it themselves.
Does each service really need to collect this data from the user directly? They could instead have the user authorise them by e.g. OAuth2 to access their age with one of the de-facto online-identity-providers. I would be surprised if they didn't implement an API for this sometime soon, cause it would place them as the source of truth and give them unique access to that bit of user data. Seems like a chance and position they wouldn't want to lose.
> ... six of the fundamental concepts in mathematics ... and how they connect with our real-world intuition
While the connections are interesting, I would be as interested in the disconnects, as there's a bunch of cases where our human intuitions can fail us in subtle ways. This is actually one of the lessons I treasure from mathematics: it has helped me grow a healthy set of alarm bells for those unintuitive cases. Especially for probability and statistics.
> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth.
No. That is quite literally exponential growth, basically by definition. If x(t) is a growing value, then x'(t) is it's growth, and x''(t) its acceleration. If x influences x'' , say by a linear relation
x''(t) = x(t)
You get exponentials out as the solutions. Not hyperbolic.
I always thought of the exponential as the pole of the function "amount of work that can be done per unit time per human being", where the pole comes about from the fact that humans cease to be the limiting factor, so an infinity pops out.
There is no infinity in practice, of course, because even though humans should be made independent of the quantity of extractable work, you'll run into other boundaries instead, like hardware or resources like energy.
It is understanably hard to stay vigilant with respect to individual everyday purchases, but services and subscriptions are an easy and continuous win.
That's a long list of numbers that seem oddly specific. Apart from learning that f-strings are way faster than the alternatives, and certain other comparisons, I'm not sure what I would use this for day-to-day.
After skimming over all of them, it seems like most "simple" operations take on the order of 20ns. I will leave with that rule of thumb in mind.
> Brainf*ck is the antithesis of modern software engineering. There are no comments, no meaningful variable names, and no structure
That's not true. From the little time I've spent trying to read and write some simple programs in BF, I recall good examples being pretty legible.
In fact, because the language only relies on those few characters, anything else you type becomes a comment. Linebreaks, whitespace, alphanumeric characters and so on, they just get ignored by the interpreter.
Modularity and separation of concerns can extend into other domains than software.
For me, it seems so much simpler to keep the two separate. You won't be forced to wash the heating element every time you wash the cup. Can't heat a different cup while the other is in the dishwasher, unless all your cups are self-heating. Normally, the only way for a cup to break is if it shatters, but with an inbuilt heater there's electronics that can break too. And should the cup shatter, now the heater is unusable too, or vice versa.
I don't think that intuition is entirely trustworthy here. The entire space is high-dimensional, true, but the structure of the subspace encompassing linguistically sensible sequences of tokens will necessarily be restricted and have some sort of structure. And within such subspaces there may occur some sort of sink or attractor. Proving that those don't exist in general seems highly nontrivial to me.
An intuitive argument against the claim could be made from the observation that people "jinx" eachother IRL every day, despite reality being vast, if you get what I mean.
I swear this is how I've gotten good at most of my hobbies. Playing guitar for 20 years has gotten me to a great level for a hobbyist, but not at all because of any virtues like discipline, self control, or routine.
Rather, every day whenever other more important chores or duties loomed, I'd notice one of my guitars laying around, in my couch or my bed or leaning next to my desk. And most times, I'd give in. There's always a new skill, technique, lick, or song that I'm working on, or something I've recently mastered that gives me joy to play.
If anything I think discipline would have hurt my guitar skills over the years.
The bank will probably let you order a new card to their offices instead of your home address, so all you need to do is survive for a week or so. In my case, that was very easy thanks to the friends I was visiting.
As for the meantime: I still did have my bank's ID chip with me as a backup, so I could have used online banking to make a transfer to myself with something like Western Union, and crossed my fingers that my bank wouldn't require verification by phone for this suspicious transfer. That would have gotten me some cash at least within the course of the next day, but my friend helped me out, so it didn't come to that.
Without friends around, though, and one or two more unfortunate circumstances piled on, I really don't know. It's unsettling to realize how little it takes to be forced to sleep in the streets.
These past couple of years I've gotten into plenty of trouble on multiple occasions, as a result of what I would describe as a cascade of misfortune initiated by a single unfortunate event (for which I will take some responsibility, but nevertheless...).
These "cascades of misfortune" I've run into happen largely because of how we've placed certain institutions at the center of our lives and our society, or perhaps more precisely because of the "convenient" solutions of theirs that we've all been coralled into adopting.
I'm thinking of social media networks, smartphone companies and their app stores, banks and their electronic payments, etc. Everyone's opted in, and we don't realise how much we've given up as a result, with all these "convenient" alternatives, now made mandatory to replace the old and inconvenient solution.
We don't realize, that is, until you're standing at the bank teller in a city away from home, passport in hand but otherwise robbed of phone and wallet, hoping to withdraw some cash to keep you alive while you sort this mess out - only to learn that the bank is no longer able to do that for you. You can't just get your own money. You could withdraw at the ATM, but with a card of course, and that for a fee with a pretty low upper limit. But banks don't serve that purpose anymore. They're now software institutions that we are forced to have a relationship with and operate through in order to make monetary transactions.
Suddenly society has shut down. You can't log into anything without your phone and 2FA, so you're stuck without access to your favorite online services until you get a new SIM card and a fresh device. But even then, there's no riding public transit, because you don't have access to the apps they all operate through. Not that you'd be able to pay in those apps anyway, after cancelling your payment cards. And besides, you don't have anywhere you'd like to go anyway, because, aside from having basically no money to spend on food or events, there's no way to learn what's happening in this city without access to Facebook and all the company pages and events published there.
I forget now all the myriad ways that life grinds to a halt, but I do vividly remember feeling like nothing was possible. And that only because I lost one or two things which should be entirely optional in life! You shouldn't be required as a human, nor even as a member of society, to have a Facebook account, or a smartphone, or even a bank account (that last one is perhaps my most extreme take, but I stand by it).
I get it! Years ago my obsession was Classic Tetris, and it was common knowledge that watching skilled players at work would improve your own stacking and strategy. A lot of the pros openly admitted to watching their competition while starting out in order to get good
I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it worked like a charm.
Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what have you. And I progressed super quickly.
First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was very much my starting point.
The danger is when solutions that are convenient, but require giving up some sort of freedom, are made mandatory even for those who would like to stay free. I hope this is a lesson we avoid having to learn the hard way.
I have done some backpacking these past two years, and it is worrying how easy it is to get into big trouble if you lose your phone or payment cards.
As an example, my debit card got eaten by an ATM on my way to Argentina, and after my 6 month travel, the backup credit card I had brought was about to expire.
Despite my card working as a means of payment, I was starting to feel the effects of this corner case in every aspect of modern life. I could not use our equivalent of cashapp, I assume because my card was about to expire. I could not ride public transit, or trains, or do things like book a yoga class with my friends, all because all these institutions basically only let you interact with their service through their apps, where I had no way to pay.
I spent some time visiting friends in the capitol on my way home, and tried to sort the situation out with my bank. They thankfully were able to order some new cards to their office, rather than to my home address. But immediately after my talk with them I found that my one remaining card had been cancelled.
Then I tried bringing my passport to withdraw some cash, but the bank teller almost laughed at me, before explaining that you can't just do that anymore. The bank isn't even allowed to let you get your money in cash and leave. You can get bits of it in bills at the ATM for a fee the price of a coffee, but also that requires a card, of course.
Electronic payment solutions are so convenient, for the public and for institutions, for law enforcement and control, that we've forgotten how much we need to give up in order to use them, and now they're being made mandatory as we trudge along into a cashless society.
Now I couldn't even get food or shelter, if not for my friends. I remember half stumbling out of the bank with my passport in my hand, half dizzy with shock and anger. This, along with lots of other small mishaps like losing my phone and encountering trouble, kind of radicalized me on these topics.
It used to be that every time I heard about some problem with training AI systems, I would be struck by how much the challenges line up and parallel the challenges involved in raising human children, and how humans learn more generally.
However, researchers are able to say and find out a lot more about the way LLMs work and learn than they can about human brains. It might be to take the metaphor too far, but I sometimes like to think about how and whether at all these sorts of findings about AIs can apply in any way to us.
This particular case makes me wonder if there is anything to the human instinct to dismiss and ignore people entirely once you learn they're not morally aligned with you on some core issue. In particular we might ignore entertainers and content creators that have views we strongly disagree with, even if they're well reviewed and highly popular, and even if they seem to stay off those sensitive topics in a specific episode/movie/podcast/stand-up-special. We don't want to risk subliminally learning their corrupted values.
Edit: Not to say it is wise to "cancel" and ignore people you don't agree with. Frankly I think it is bad if you value discourse and keeping your mind open to new and differing opinions. Rather, I'm arguing here that it makes sense that this instinct of ours came about at all as we evolved, since it is probably beneficial to stick to your values.
It may get resolved on its own. These days people study to get good grades in order to prove to future gatekeepers (like employers, or higher rungs of academia) that they know the material well. Post AGI, however, the gatekeepers may not be so interested in humans anymore, and we might not need grades at all. Studying anything could become something done exclusively for ones own interest, and the only point of a grade would be to give one-self a goal to achieve.
Alternatively, if we still want to cling on to this ritual of measuring the performance of students, you could give each and every one of them oral examinations with AI professors.
But if the art instead beems with intention and effort, chances are that it will be interesting. And in order for anyone to create something so brimming with signs of effort, they must have cared about the piece, the message, the artform, or something along the process. This post talks about effort and attention, but you could phrase it as a question of reciprocal "caring". If you want me to care, show me that you even care yourself.
It is getting harder and harder to suss out what is genuine though.