lanstin

At various times over the years I have had access to long lists of real names, membership lists for different orgs, that sort of thing, and one thing that stands out is that the real variety of names exceeds what I expected. So many weird and funny names. I love looking thru the lists; even move credits are long enough to have some gems in them. People, perhaps especially during pregnancy, have some very idiosyncratic thoughts.

Off topic, but this makes me realize one of my grandfathers was born in the 1890s, which is possibly getting rare. Time passes swiftly by. This very day your life is shorter by one and all that.

I won’t forgot when my small child clarified that I was born in 19 something not 18 something, two equally remote times to him.

On the list my middle name was listed as a name going from male to female - I think the first time I have seen anything about this name out in print in public.

And all that needs automation, whether by LLM or something else. Software done right should always be solving novel problems.

Manual work is not unsatisfying - the problems have to do with social disrespect, low pay, and lack of a safety net if your physical abilities decline.

People in the hacker news sphere underestimate the value or all labor. There is nothing inherently superior to coding - we are all just lucky recipients of the money and acclaim that this obscure skill has rewarded for the last couple of decades.

I took a few years off of programming to raise toddlers, clean, cook, volunteer in preschool and church, and it was a lot of fun and certainly challenging in the best sense of having to learn strategies and tactics to improve my outcomes and so on and fully engaging my whole person.

We may currently allocate resources to people one way but there’s not really a law of physics that condemns us to keep that same allocation if conditions change in the future.

Someone somewhere thinks this is a good idea.

I think the people in Europe tend to be happy with a chosen system with a more balanced and more steady life outside of work at the cost of less billionaires and GDP growth. And they invent plenty of things, they just, like Salk, don’t seek as obsessively to extract maximum profit from it all.

Results are not that important. Learning tools and techniques to solve other problems is also fantastically important. Understanding deep essences so you can eliminate great swathes of possible areas to worry about for a solution is also fantastically important. Over time, being able to share these tools and understanding to other people is fantastically important.

And you can see this in the desire to eliminate humanities (and math departments) in the current wave of anti-intellectualism sweeping the United States. My own life was greatly helped as a young person by reading existential philosophy, and my son has found his own intrinsic desire to be in school thru a combo of cool old geology professors, cool young philosophy grad students, and real analysis.

It is the same lack of depth of people saying math should just give results and not seek beauty or a life should be to get rich instead of daring to be deeply involved with people and seek to make life joyful and interesting.

It is super common during a course of study of maths to experience great enjoyment on encountering certain proofs or ideas.

I hope that works well for you. For me a sort of selfless pursuit of delight, for me and for others waiting on my work, has been more than sufficient. As CS Lewis (and Kim Stanley Robinson) described, a sort of accelerando of delight and mutual fulfillment.

I do agree that this satisfaction doesn’t work as a static goal - it works as a method of gradient descent, a process, a way to distinguish possible paths to take thru the moment.

That last value is what has unleashed the knowledge and power under the prosperity capitalism depends on.

This advice is so contrary to good outcomes that I am astonished. Even aside from the amazing utility of funding super smart people to follow their curiosity about the world, maths, species, string theory, neural networks, etc., just keeping it to coding, you don’t want engineering to just implement specs, you want curious people to dig under what is being said; the space of potential solutions in software is so great that you can’t waterfall your way into the best solution; it is a search, and one where the quest for elegance and abstraction and beauty enable not a ten X coder but a solution that catapults the company 100 or 1000 fold over the competitors with less elegant solutions. It’s the whole ideal behind Paul Graham’s beating the odds. It’s the story of companies that grew 70% a month while their competitors tried to make plans. Maybe you all are too young but companies that innovate and constantly delight the community are possible and systems that implement the software can be amazingly more elegant and expandable than expected. on the outsourcing, the places I have seen outsourcing succeed it is because the company can find and pay more minds either that precious gift of abstraction and simplicity and created or renovated systems so well that the outcomes based teams were just scratching their heads in wonder, if they had enough wit.

I have seen inelegant minds generate big balls of crap with AI and I have seen people wield them like scalpers thru the space of possible solutions.

I don’t disagree with using LLMs, but some puritan call for industrial efficiency as the answer is really missing the story on the last forty years of software innovation.

If the parent and grand parent represent common attitudes, no wonder so many companies are constrained by ugly software.

We treat pure curiosity, about maths but also about basic science of all kinds, as a self-sufficient goal for a portion of our civilizational effort, because it has paid us back handsomely in ways that some centralized planning approaches would have missed. Suppress curiosity and fall behind. Give some of those bored geniuses freedom to work on their chosen problems and win. Not to understand this is to not understand your technological society.

I have 160G of screen captures from Tumblr from my then angsty teenage kid. I think my spouse takes a few Gig of photos for each outing we go on. Several people dress for fancy thing via a process involving many clothes changes and even more selfies.

Because if you read a lot of 20th c sci fi, you can easily imagine using the current DNA printing technology and virus databases to design something that would kill in the billions of people (e.g. The White Plague: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/93448.The_White_Plagu... )

And they all seem to have been fans of 20th c sci fi (albeit sometimes with profoundly poor comprehension).

Finite includes some very large numbers.

What my phone will be able to remember what I use it for at different times and places with better than 50% accuracy? The real tech miracle today is mRNA and solar panels. Not sure why you think being able to generate theory will help u leash the material goods needed to put people on Mars. Even if we get the singularity, would it regard human exploration as worth while compared to to machine exploration?

Having QFT formalized rigorously means a ton of mathematical apparatus can now be applied to it. Where that might lead to is difficult to say, but this gap was a problem in claiming we understand how the universe works, in detail.

Having a sub exponential but super polynomial limit to complexity isn’t that much different than having an exponential limit - in analysis you have excruciatingly fine degrees of asymptotic growth all of which are kind of morally equivalent but not mathematically equivalent.

I am not sure about the harmonic analysis stuff - I was actually working on constructing sets of positive Fourier dimension a few years ago but never really got a big picture feel for it.

Well in the books the nano particles come into your home and show you dream virtual realities of your dead relatives and then offer to transform your mentation into some god like entity in the now ubiquitous compute stratum.

A bigger deal to mathematicians who like physics to be mathematically sounds and precise.

Responding to GP, I know people that de facto work this way and absolutely hire on those rare occasions they are looking. They create substantial value as a byproduct of their quest for beauty in complexity.

On the git thing, it turns out LLMs write better systems when constrained into the same patterns that make human teams write better systems - git and the chance to safely experiment en route to the ultimate solution being key. As well as modularity, iterative design and implementation, tests, documents, etc.

I have taken the golden rule to be a sort of absolute standard: whether or not people treat you well, you still treat them well. This one makes it a sort of utilitarian argument but where you don’t fix your own identity, but assume different people are in the same boat, and then make the decision about which outcome is best. I haven’t read Kant

No it’s flower.

My young (12?) son left his wallet in a pack pack near the bus stop while he and his friends ran around. He had a student debit card which was taken and used to buy cigarettes. A useful lesson in caution.

A rarely talked about solution to ethics: when you decide what to do yourself, analyze it as tho a chunk of other people will make the same decision, and then choose which would is better. Works very well in practice - especially if an answer can be probabilistic - pick up trash on the beach you didn’t put there five percent of the time, not never like asshole selfish people and not always like annoying do gooders.

Like AI will give us the solution to global warming: stop burning carbon and releasing methane. Who knew?

What if step one of the cure is don’t heat up your tissues and fill them with little spikes bioreactive chemicals?

sudo is pseudo for the readers. A fake desire of freedom.

For some content, it isn’t just freedom the requires self-awareness, any sort of sustained action requires self-awareness to have any sort of coherence. I mean some things don’t need coherence, you could just instinctively take care of others without much deep semantics.

You can respond in a way you find fulfilling to each moment without knowing some grand unified sense of calling, or with only a vague description, “enjoying existence and helping others as you can to enjoy existence.”

Or familiarity. I tend to pick one or two favorite food places where ever I live (always in big cities) and go there till I know them and vice versa (locally owned, not chains) and when I forget all my payment methods they always say to pay next time. (Probably helps to be a self-deprecating white guy in this scenario, of course.)

When I was a young adult in Washington DC, I left my check book with my drivers license on the Metro. Some kind soul mailed it back to me. I at least depend on the kindness of strangers; I suspect we all do.