I actually love the idea of totally new naming schemes for experimental software.
Certain name types are so normalized (agent, worker, etc) that while they serve their role well, they likely limit our imagination when thinking about software, and it's a worthwhile effort to explore alternatives.
I do too, but you can take things too far, which I'd argue has happened the moment "figuring out what the names mean" becomes enough of an intellectual challenge to provide a dopamine hit; at that point, you've (intentionally or otherwise) germinated a cult. It's human nature: people will support the design not on its merits but rather as loss aversion for the work they put into decoding it.
Excellent movie. Worth noting that it was written by Tony Gilroy, who created Andor and cowrote The Bourne Identity, so if you enjoyed those you're likely to enjoy this.
My brother once suggested that there are probably bits of code/algorithms that would be world changing if they were released in academic journals, but instead were written by some unknowing programmer in an afternoon for their job coding embedded systems for refrigerators.
This particular example may be unlikely, but it's a very fun idea.
Iirc, Heisenberg reinvented Matrix calculations to solve a problem in quantum physics. Not being a mathematician, he wasn't aware of the concept. Born recognized what Heisenberg had done and introduced him to his own reinvention.
Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries, often in clunky roundabout ways. I imagine some of them figure out things not known to math, but it's far more likely to go the other way.
Primarily because the learnings you make are the same as the original “discoverer”. Without those learnings, you might not be able to arrive at your true destination.
> Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries
I remember reading, about a year or two ago, about a medical doctor that published a paper rediscovering calculus (I just looked it up, it happened in 1994, there’s been many articles and videos about it)
It's not clear from the Wikipedia article linked below whether she was rediscovering part of calculus or knowingly rebranding it. Do you know more details?
it's a fact of geographical and social independence.. so far there's no way to know what everybody did or is doing (well there's twitter but it's configured on noise rather than signal)
I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.
The only way to convincingly make the case for new information is with pretty rigorous technical arguments, which is fundamentally at odds with a lay audience. If someone has those rigorous technical arguments, they'd be making them in journals to a technical audience, and the results would slowly become consensus.
Obvi there are counter-examples, but as a general rule I think this is far more true than not. Which is why if you learn from Forbes that someone is close to cracking AGI, you can almost outright assume this is untrue.
Michael Hobbes, host of IBCK is guilty of those inaccuracies too. Here's him being fact checked regarding claims in the Maintenance Phase podcast: https://spurioussemicolon.substack.com/
I enjoy If Books Could Kill and I used to like You're Wrong About when Michael was on it. However, I have found on If Books Could Kill that they sometimes take the least charitable interpretation of something to ridicule it when a more charitable interpretation might find that there is more nuance than they are presenting.
I haven't listened to Maintenance Phase because it isn't really a topic that I'm all that interested in.
Yeah, I’ve seen those criticisms before and been convinced-enough that it’s contributed to my not bothering with that podcast. IBCK has been accurate enough when they’ve covered books I’m familiar with that I’m less worried about that being a problem with that show (though I’m sure they do sometimes get things wrong)
I think you're headed in a helpful direction, but I'm looking for ways to narrow the phenomenon a little more. For example, yesterday I heard from my mom, who is not into technical things, that a lot of the Internet was down. She had heard it on the news. I didn't believe it at first because that information was surprising and clearly targeted at laypeople, but soon I learned it was true: AWS us-east-1 had major issues. So my doubt was unfounded. I'd like my doubts to be more accurate.
The statement "most of the internet seems to be down" is somewhat easy to verify without too much research.
Complex statements requiring lots of specialist knowledge available to very few human beings that are difficult to disprove is where the challenge lies.
So many things are actually concentrated on the "cloud" providers now that significant chunks of "the internet" can all go down at the same time for everyone in a way that was supposed to be impossible with the many-fault-tolerant mindset the internet was originally engineered with. Laypeople don't need to understand any technical topics to understand "a bunch of websites/apps broke for everyone on Sunday". Some are even noting that this is happing more often and affecting more apps at once.
anyways, more on topic with TFA, of course lots of people are looking for excuses for why they aren't what they want to be, and it sounds like this book flips the causation, so that people can say e.g. "I was perfectly healthy until I went through some difficult stuff and now I'm disabled" rather than much more sober but accurate "I was born with some relative weaknesses that make things more difficult for me than others." It looks like he keeps trying to claim that bad experiences leave reliably measurable marks in some way but it simply never holds to the claimed reliability under scrutiny.
Of course, knowing exactly what specific "weaknesses" one actually has compared to a statistical average is the hard part, and jumping to conclusions in that area is just as much playing with fire.
Someone could write a book about "bad experiences give you bad memories, which can bring down your mood when you remember them and demotivate you", but everyone already knows that, and leaving it at that doesn't give the reader the feeling of understanding why they feel less than whole.
But it's not really true, is it? "The Internet", as in the network, was doing just fine. A large number of services that chose to build their business on the back of another were down, of course, but "a lot of the internet is down" is different than "a lot of websites are down".
If, say, Level 3 and Tata and Telia had a simultaneous outage, that would qualify for "a lot of the internet is down".
To be fair, from a functionality standpoint, AWS hosts like 1/3 of the value that a layperson gets from the Internet, which is all that a non-technical person really cares/things about. ie "the Internet" essentially refers to the top 10-30 services they use.
Which is uncomfortably pragmatic. Many people can go weeks while only directly interacting with a handful of Internet-based services, most of which are presented as apps.
I'm waiting for the day that the lines blur even further and people start saying "my Apple doesn't work" when AWS goes down and 1/3 of their iPhone apps stop working. Or the day that ISPs stop acting as carriers and the Internet truly factions.
>I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.
Don't forget the red flag of "Makes me feel better about myself or my situation." Especially if it implies one's superiority over others.
I've often had the experience of reading an article and thinking, "This says people with quality X are, against common sense, actually better at Y. Hey, I have quality X! Aw, rats. This is probably bunk and I'm too flattered to see the errors."
I agree, and one place I've observed this is in quantum physics. The double slit experiment is an experiment where you shine light through two slits, and instead of the expected two bands, it makes a wave-like interference pattern. This single experiment changed how we view all of physics. However, nearly every source targeted at laypeople claims that there is a variation where you can put a detector on one of the slits and it will show two bands. This is false.
One clue is that these claims never detail on what this "detector" is. There are various types of detectors, and instead of showing a two band pattern they show a single slit interference pattern. By not giving specifics, the claim becomes much harder to disprove. This may not be malicious though, as the source of the faulty claim is likely the miscommunication of a thought experiment proposed by Einstein. Einstein proved by thought experiment that any detector couldn't show an interference pattern, which is easily twisted into the incorrect claim that it does show the two band pattern that people initially expected.
Even with all that, it's simply hard to refute. Like you said, it requires rigorous technical arguments, specifically as the faulty claim didn't specify what kind of detector they use. So the layperson has to choose between <some detector makes shape you'd expect> and <multiple complex existing detectors makes different shape>.
In the end, to a layperson, it wouldn't even seem to be all that important. And yet, almost all of the misunderstandings people have about quantum physics come from this one faulty claim. This claim makes it seem like some objects have quantum behavior, and some don't, and that you can change an object from quantum to non-quantum by detecting it. When in reality, all objects have quantum behavior, we just don't usually notice it.
Until I learned about the Bohmian interpretation of QM (though a comment here on HN) I found QM mathematically sound but physically muddled. BM changed all that. Now I think it's physically sound too. It's remarkable how a change of perspective can shift understanding.
Now you understand where the "Wise man under the mountain" trope comes from.
Beside the burden of knowledge and understanding, there is an even higher burden of bringing your knowledge to the laypeople, which is the most thankless, dangerous and tedious undertaking possible.
Yet it is also the most noble, as it drives civilization forward.
> I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.
This is my general perspective with history books - most mass market history books simplify the complexity dramatically. You have to get into books with piles of citations before the complexity & nuance level starts to approximate something perhaps like a correct take.
This gets more and more painful the more 'hot' the topic is.
This could be the premise for a fun project based infra learning site.
You get X resources in the cloud and know that a certain request/load profile will run against it. You have to configure things to handle that load, and are scored against other people.
By this point, we should assume that all companies with sensitive data that could theoretically help solve crime will be accessed by the government as a rule.
That's just being a realistic technology user in 2025.
The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. Expecting consumer choice or regulations to prevent that data from ever existing is mostly a fools errand IMO, there's just too much of it and it's everywhere.
I’d prefer to see a solution provided by technology that negates surveillance. Could be a very lucrative industry to start selling Bond style tech to the masses.
Based on what? There's no constitutional right to privacy, while courts have consistently expanded the scope of government powers and immunities and consistently hollowed out the Bill of Rights. It's gonna require a new legal paradigm.
How is that working out for you? It can't stop your data being sold or grant you any kind of privacy when you appear in public (eg being filmed continuously when you leave your home).
Same as everyone else, not great. We've very few politicians that support the 4th Amendment in a meaningful way. Which I suppose is a reflection of voters harboring a fierce disinterest in the 4th.
And, in my estimation, all of that flows from generations of news orgs who rarely notice the 4th Amendment, nevertheless treasure it on behalf of the public.
The curious part is that for every ideological group (and Americans adore their ideological groups) that has a theoretical boogie man, 4A violations are key and core to the rise of that nemesis.
Examples are
- bulk warrantless surveillance is critical for any aspiring anti-christ
- a surveillance state is the largest possible government
- omnipresent surveillance ensures gov revenge for having guns/abortions
Yet adherents from each of those groups are super comfortable with sweeping, pervasive surveillance - the continual monitoring that captures them and their descendants for perpetual subjugation to govs/corps/etc.
For all the hate that Google (rightly) gets for some of their work in other domains, I appreciate that they continue to put major resources behind using AI to try and save lives in medicine and autonomous driving.
Easy to take for granted, but their peer companies are not doing this type of long term investment.
I think it's important that people know this. Despite what the other AI companies claim or put out as occasional PR, they have absolutely no real interest (through internal work or funding external researchers) in using AI to benefit science and humanity as a whole. They just want their digital god. As such, there is simply not enough funding for AI research with scientific applications. Consequently, many people in machine learning are not working in scientific applications, even though they really want to.
Someone has to do it. Big pharma has a lot of money and if AI can reduce their costs in human resources, they will be willing to put some of their profits aside to further the research in AI space.
Money wells are drying up across the trch Industry and ai companies will have to look for funds from adjacent industries like biotech and medicine.
I agree with the sentiment, but sadly even in its watered down form, SB79 was the result of a brutal legislative battle over the course of years, and even then it barely passed.
Getting Prop 13 overturned is about as likely as California seceding from the US.
I think getting Prop 13 repealed along the lines of Prop 15 (basically for investment property) may actually happen. I think the pro group is much more organized today than they were in 2020 and so it will stand a much better chance of succeeding.
That said, I fully agree with you that Prop 13 repeal for homeowners will "never" happen. The backlash would obviously be massive. But if they could keep it for homeowners and repeal it for all other types of property, including land, then that could be a major improvement because property owners would have to improve their properties to a "highest and best use" or sell it to pay the taxes.
Prop 13 is getting repealed practically speaking through time, as the main beneficiaries of the low taxes die; and the taxes they dynastically transfer to their kids get capped; and as those kids choose to sell those homes and move to New York.
There is no one simple solution to e.g. poor performance of US public schools. Repealing Prop 13 isn’t going to close the achievement gap, it’s not even going to slow the fall of performance since 1993, let alone the pandemic.
So not only is Prop 13 sort of being phased out naturally, the repeal would simply put a bunch of renters against rising costs from landlords in the places that actually matter like LA and SF, and you know, as much as I hate Prop 13 in principle, everything has settled on a delicate homeostasis where the people who want to get it repealed fully - which will never happen - will get way more than they bargained for.
I'm not sure how you're coming to this conclusion. When the property is transferred it is reassessed and the new buyer pays the full tax, but after that the taxes effectively decrease annually (increase at a rate lower than inflation). Everyone who owns a property more than a year or two in California benefits from Prop 13.
Nothing is phasing out and it has no sunset clause.
Okay… even if things worked exactly as you say. Is the repeal going to fix education? Is it going to result in home prices going down or up? Will the change in home prices that you predict cause more or fewer homes to be built? I hate Prop 13 but I hate it for reasons of justice and equity, not because I think it will have effects that it will not.
I'm working on 1:6 size furniture. There's not much woodworking I can do outside of the shop, so I've been trying to shrink full joinery techniques down to dollhouse size.
To sidestep the partisan side of this, I encourage everyone here to read about other regimes in the past century and how they came to power in order to build up your pattern matching ability.
But you camt sidestep partizan side. This is fully partizan.
It is not that conservative voters dont know where this goes, it is that they like where it goes and want to get there. You and I perceive the regime you allude to as bad, they dont, wink wink, actually.
Certain name types are so normalized (agent, worker, etc) that while they serve their role well, they likely limit our imagination when thinking about software, and it's a worthwhile effort to explore alternatives.
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