llamaz

> But given the above, I have not understood their importance as kernel functions or use for GP.

If the author has a CV attached to their blog, the purpose is to signal competence and the target audience is future employers .

There are levels to morality, from the abstract (e.g. climate change, energy usage, veganism) to the concrete (murder). Time are unstable, but there are multiple ways to make money. If you are established in your career, you can probably find work in a similar field, but the worst case scenario would be to drive a truck.

The way you frame it, you make it sound like an engineer at OpenAI has no choice but to work there or end up on the street. But an engineer at OpenAI is not going to end up driving a truck, they're going to remain and engineer.

A position shared by both Lenin and Thatcher

It's a university project, so it wouldn't have been expected to be perfect. I had to do something similar as an assignment, but if I had the choice, I would have chosen anything else because the project was anything but fun.

Everything was implemented using transistors, so it involved a lot of calculations, and simulation in LTSpice.

You're talking about genocide and religious discrimination.

Wikipedia: Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" in the 20th century,[110] referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history".[111]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism

The credit for the labour theory of value goes to Adam Smith, specifically the Wealth of Nations. Whether it was true or not is a separate question, but it was based on empirical data available at the time. Marx is usually credited with it because he altered it, and saw a flaw in Adam Smith's version. The idea that "what something costs is what people are willing to pay for it" was something Adam Smith was familiar with and addressed in the Wealth of Nations.

> Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things.

The Gnostics and followers of Hermes were one of the most hounded and persecuted groups throughout history. The Cathars were wiped out, and Giordano Bruno, an early proponent of the Copernican model of the solar system was burnt at the stake by the inquisition. It seems to be the other way around.

> Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds.

I don't think this is correct, but I can't prove a negative.

Excellent game. I also suggest adding instructions that words can only be top down or left-to-right.

I was trying to fit right-to-left in some cases initially.

"Do you know what it’s like? What it’s like when you get the feeling that you’re about to die? And that you were ready to collapse at a moment’s notice?"

It sounds like the author had a bad experience with energy drinks. Everyone reacts differently to substances such as caffeine, or a combination of substances.

Some people are lactose intolerant, or gluten intolerant. The author is energy drink intolerant.

I didn't know, thanks for the correction :)

The Arabs must have switched it around then

This is intentional. They're called Arabic numerals for a reason - when they were imported to Europe to replace Roman numerals, they weren't flipped. This is why mental arithmetic is harder than it needs to be.

Leibniz did that from memory, although the stoics deserve the credit for propositional logic (which can be reduced to a collection of truth tables). and contrary to popular belief Boole actually extended Aristotle’s syllogisms (reduced the conventional syllogisms to computation using matrices of 1s and 0s) rather than create a today’s binary logic.

I get what you're saying, but this is not immediately obvious.

For example, control systems also adapt to data and are often robust to noise, and they're understood mathematically very well.

I don't necessarily disagree, but you would need some more justification.

No, I’m fact the best female chess player, Judith Polgar was known for her aggression while the best male chess player Magnus Carlsen is known for his conservative style. They are different generations, however, but there have always been aggressive and defensive players.

I'm not a Foucault fan, and I used to hold the same opinion as you. But now I realise the exchange was, as you say, a "waste of time".

Chomsky doesn't seem to have read up on the issues Foucault is talking about, and he admits as much in an interview on the topic, about how he was surprised that he could not find /any/ common ground from which to build a conversation with Foucault.

This is more of a failure of communication on the part of French intellectuals, who use verbose language helps keep their radical tradition so insular.

So... it's what you would expect an exchange between the analytic and continental philosophers to be like. Chomsky takes the enlightenment humanism tradition for granted, and assumes he can find common ground with Foucault there, but Foucault had been working in a tradition where the humanism vs anti-humanism debate (e.g. Althusser) was front and center.

In fact, Foucault himself was on the anti-humanist side. (anti-humanism doesn't mean "evil", it's just an unfortunate tongue-in-cheek terminology). What you end up with is Foucault trying his best to introduce Chomsky to the basics of a core part of the French intellectual tradition, more-or-less unsuccessfully.

What the debate highlights is the extent of the divide between continental philosophy and analytical philosophy. It doesn't make new ground.

How do you know truth is objective? Without a doubt it's true in hard science, e.g. chemistry and biology.

But by the time you get to social science, economics, politics, and ethics I think we're closer to the dark ages than we like to admit. In the dark ages religion was taken as objective truth, but in the present that doesn't work because people think religion exists to "trick" them or gain political power.

It's possible that we extend the authority that science has in the fundamental sciences to areas where it is not as effective without justification. The free marketeers always touted their view of objective science as dispassionate, objective science. Similarly, everything from the marshmellow test to the left-vs-right brain (creative vs logical) has been debunked, or at the very least been called into serious question due to a reproducibility crises in psychology and similar disciplines.

We really live in a HP lovecraft-esque world, where we understand almost nothing, and are controlled by powers beyond human understanding and control. This idea is something that naturally repels the human mind, and those who profess such a view are treated as being deficient if not mentally ill (external locus of control, anxious/depressive).

The reason Nietzsche is so revered but Schopenhauer is not, is that Nietzsche offers a hopeful "way out" of this crisis with his nonsense idea of the overman, while Schopenhauer is more disciplined and stops at pessimism. The latter is attacked as bourgeois, and as being a hypocrite, while the male chauvinism and other negative character traits of Nietzsche are overlooked.

there's a few gradations of difference between Trump voters and neo-Nazis...

parent is talking about the latter

Interestingly enough, this is exactly how one of the world chess champions, Jose Raul Capablanca, was said to have learned chess as a child.

It may be true, or perhaps it was a story concocted in order to emphasize his innate talent.

dietary cholesterol... sure

But saturated fat is legitimately bad for you. You should consult any introductory university biology course rather than blog posts (even if they are endorsed by decorated MDs or PhDs - science in consensus based).

I guess another way to put it is that, not only is there not necessarily any progress. But that as a result of a fixed human nature, the mistakes of the past will almost certainly be repeated. As John Gray states “politics is a succession of temporary and partial remedies for permanent and recurring human evil.”

In other words, the political traditions we have currently should not be torn down in the name of progress. Further, we shouldn't try to overthrow dictators like Saddam or the authoritarian rule in China (the opinion on Saddam is that of John Gray). This is because, as is apparent in Iraq, anarchy may rule. And when it does, it's very difficult to reach some level of civilisation and peace.

TL DR: It is easy to tear down a spider web, and very hard to rebuild it.

> Gray's view is not that there is no progress but that the idea of natural progression, unstoppable, inevitable progress is wrong and dangerous.

What I mean to say is that his view is that there really is no progress. Scientifically, sure, but morally we've been the same for thousands of years. He has quite a nihilistic view that leads to political indifference. Here's a talk of his that explains his position in more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmRBHCclzZk

In short, however:

e.g. "Gray does not deny the reality of scientific, technological, and material improvements. He only insists that the things we mean when we call such improvements “progress”—that gains, once made, are not lost but built upon, that setbacks are rare and temporary—has no analogy in morality or human affairs: “Knowledge increases at an accelerating rate, but human beings are no more reasonable than they have ever been.” - https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/02/21/john-gray-atheis...

You misunderstand Gray and somehow believe him to hold the exact specific position that he's arguing against, namely, the humanism of Dawkins/Pinker/Chomsky. You can't get this from the article above, but read other books he's written, or listen to any of his talks on youtube. He's not a humanist and he's anti-enlightenment. His entire claim to fame is that he rejects the humanist idea of progress despite "minor setbacks".

You certainly seem to have a good understanding of how provocative his philosophy is.

He doesn't believe that history is leading anywhere, that there's moral progress. He believes that in the future slavery might return because history is cyclical and a result of a corrupt human nature that has not changed for thousands of years. That means genocides, racism, etc are here to stay and whatever progress we've made is a coincidence.

Yes, and the United States regressed back towards those countries. I don't think the United States is the "bad guy" or the root of all evil, I don't think the West is either. I just don't think that they're the "good guy" that routinely exercises restraint, unless you compare it to an imaginary hypothetical.

I don't support China either - I don't believe in the "good vs evil" narrative that was alien to the Ancient Romans and Greek pagans. The idea that there's historical moral progress culminating in the values of the United States is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. In Hegel's philosophy of right, which was fashionable in Germany, he believed that history culminated in the values of the Prussian constitutional monarchy.

It's unlikely that China will become a superpower. The United States, in the next few years, will no longer hold world wide hegemony, as it seems to be distancing itself from Europe among other countries. It's also unlikely that we'll return to a bipolar world, similarly to the period of the Cold War. It's more likely that we're moving towards a multi-polar world.

This is the same narrative of the civilized Europeans that colonized the rest of the world and led to the genocide of the Native American (Indians) and the Australian aboriginals. Our side is human and anyone that falls short of your values is less than human. I'm not a moral relativist, we need only look at the physical and mental health of animals raised in different zoos to see that there is an objective morality and a basic minimum decency for how to treat our fellow humans. But if you are going to violate this ethical minimum, then you're narrative is the _only_ one that's ever been used. We're the good guys, they're the bad guys.

This goes back to the debate between Augustine, a former good vs evil Manichean, and Pelagius. One believed that "everyone is bad" and warned against excessive hubris, while the other believed that those who choose to do evil do so out of their own free will.

In the pre-9/11 world, there was the idea that torture was a relic of the past, and we had made moral progress beyond such barbarities. But it was the leading liberal democracy in the world, rather than some third world dictatorship, that reintroduced the practice.

The United States trained the guerillas that eventually became the Vietcong in Vietnam, and the country went to war under the Gulf of Tonkin false flag. Similarly, the United States invaded Iraq under the WMD charade. In Afghanistan, it promoted the Islamist fundamentalism of the mujahideen, in order to fight the USSR friendly government that the Afghans themselves elected. The mujahideen became the Taliban, and a similar story of is true of ISIS and al-qaeda (US trained them to do their dirty work then lost control of them)

I don't think the United States is the root of all evil. But it's important to realise that the Chinese don't think of their country as an evil dictatorship, the same way that you don't view your country as "the bad guys". Rather, as St Augustine put it in his doctrine of original sin, we are all "the bad guys" and we need to reflect on the worse demons of our nature.

We have forgotten the Augustinian lessons, indulging in excessive pride and hubris, and failing to reflect on the same pattern that has been occurring cyclically for millennia.

I agree, but I'd argue that most education is similar, unless you live in Finland or went to special technical school for e.g. math or physics.

In university I had a few lecturers that tried to be different. They tested knowledge rather than hard work, and how many times you've drilled past exam papers. Generally these courses made the students feel out of control of their fate, stressed/anxious, and they hated the course. If I'm being honest I was one of those students.

Ultimately, the kind of "smart" you're talking about is not useful or valued. There are a small percentage of students, who are not only smart, but also good at "gaming" the system. A small percentage of this subset might end up in research and development, and the students who would be good at R&D don't get the chance to prove themselves.

For most students, being good at "gaming" the system, following instructions, and learning by rote is good enough. To be a doctor or a lawyer, you need to know by rote the basic fundamental knowledge. Thereafter it's constant practice and experience in actually practising medicine/law, and the associated accumulation of knowledge of all the "little tricks" and intricacies, that makes you a good professional.

2 year PhDs? That sounds like a Master of Philosophy. Maybe in Europe PhDs are easier because you require the extra step of habilitation.

Democracy requires informed consent, and an education on the facts. A truly free people are trusted with the facts, and it is the ethical duty of journalists to provide this education, and as such Assange has acted to the highest ethical standards.

I don't claim there is some higher power (e.g. the direction of history, science) from where democracy as a societal telos (i.e. end goal) gains its legitimacy. I just think most people desire democracy as a telos for society, and this collective desire is a basis for ethics.

The version of ethics according to which Assange is unethical is a jurdical view of ethics, where the laws created by the state are taken to be the laws of ethics. But the moment you accept that this juridical ethics is a transcendent source of objective truth, you've taken an extremely one sided partisan political position i.e. that of the elites, who wrote the laws, and created the laws of ethics that reinforce the status quo.

It was severely punished in all societies until recently. Islamic societies have not developed yet, and its not entirely clear that it's because of Islam. First you have to accept that ideas, rather than the material conditions, are primarily responsible for changing society. That's not obvious, and it's not obvious that the material conditions primarily change society either. Both culture and material conditions are responsible, and things are unimaginably complex, to the point that we as humans collectively can't control the direction of history.

Have you been reading John Gray too?

The moment you clarify the statement you end up in a contentious political debate, so the ancestor post is trying to bait others into saying the elephant in the room without putting words in others' mouth: That some groups/ethnicities are more successful than others. The actual discussion will begin when you ask the question "why?"

In response you're arguing against a strawman. No one has _ever_ claimed that everyone must be equal in all possible ways. That's of course ridiculous. The discussion plays out more or less the same way over decades, so to save time at the risk of putting words in your mouth, I'm going to take the liberty of presenting both sides.

Let's return to the question of "why are some groups more successful than others?" If it's because of either direct oppression, or systemic oppression (i.e. policies that favour some groups over others), then affirmative action is justified. This is the position the ancestor comment holds. Once you move past the rhetoric, there's no difference in reality between affirmative action and "oppressing Asians and whites," but the framing as just vs unjust depends on your idea of justice.

The conservative counter-narrative is decades old. It's not exactly racist, but it claims that cultural reasons are primarily to blame for disparities in success. Undoubtedly cultural reasons are partly to blame, and its possible for cultures to be improved. But a narrow focus on cultural reasons detracts from a long history of oppressive laws whose effects are still felt today.

Now we get back to what "justice" means. Does justice mean merely removing the oppressive institutions and returning to a natural law Lockian universalistic liberalism? Or does it mean correcting for past injustices.