Very cool project! Reminds me Chiang's great short story 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling':
> “If you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. Thatʼs why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?” He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused: Anyom a ou kuma a me?
> “But you speak slowly because youʼre a foreigner. Iʼm Tiv, so I donʼt pause when I speak. Shouldnʼt my writing be the same?”
I quoted from the middle of the article what I found interesting. I don't submit on here much and I just put that in the title field without thinking. I'm glad that comment provides proper context on this.
Very interesting to hear two technologists at a tech business conference say things along the lines of: "our tools do not merely extend us, they transform us", followed up with "we've become numb to the devastating consequences of technology".
(I know I'm somewhat selectively reading but still)
Interesting because games are exactly the kinds of RL environments that models can effectively learn - but the catch is that they must do this learning on the fly in test-time. Very exciting to see this.
Right, like in math, not all infinite sequences contain every finite subsequence. For example, a non-repeating sequence of 2's and 7's contains no sequence "4". The further condition is that the number be normal[1].
Also, TIL we don't know whether π is normal thus the popular claim that "every string of numbers eventually occurs in π" is not known to be true
Nice post. With respect to maximizing future options, I find the ideas expressed in the following quotes are interesting counter-points.
From '4,000 weeks': "Not only should you settle; ideally you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or having a child. The irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude -- to carry on believing that it might be possible not to choose between mutually exclusive options -- is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they're usually much happier as a result."
From 'Zero to One': "When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. ... A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it "well-roundedness," a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it."
I had similar thoughts on this. It looks polynomial because he classified errors into certain groups and spread them across an axis which we implicitly think is a dimension. But it's not... as he says, "Along any one dimension we might have a combination of issues (i.e. multiple implementation bugs)". So looking at the grid and thinking you're at a single point is wrong... but so is thinking you could be any configuration of locations (you couldn't be at points (1, 1) and (2, 2), you also need to be at points (1, 2) and (2, 1), i.e. the set of points you're at is transitive). Thus this is a bad way to "enumerate the failure cases" and makes his notion of "adding a dimension" pretty unintuitive. It makes more sense to see every point of his dimensions as itself a dimension. Each of these dimensions could be either correct or incorrect, 1 or 0. So you're configuration could be visualized as a string of 1's and 0's. Thus, the number of possible configurations grows exponentially (2^n).