atomicnature

Proof != evidence. In evidence, we corroborate, collate, add more sources, weigh evidence, judge. Proof is a totally different process. Only in the mathematical do one prove something, everywhere else we build up evidence, corroborate, etc.

The leading indicator of future market impact is programming and software engineering productivity increasing by 10x on the producer side.

The effects of these productivity gains will take time to materialize on the consumer side.

Try finding PhD Students and see if you can help with their programming or experiments. You'll learn more about how to do research from a PhD student in months, rather than struggling on your own. Once you have the "learning to learn" chops, you're free to study anything you want at incredible depth.

It's amazing.

I've wanted a small prompt-manager chrome extension for a while.

Was procrastinating.

Was able to build one for myself with Firebase studio in 30 mins.

Here's my PromptPal - built in just 30m (disable ad-blocker to avoid issues - there's some interference for some reason):

https://9000-idx-studio-1744253706406.cluster-fkltigo73ncaix...

No frustration whatsoever

Their prototyper is awesome

And code mode also great

I was able to push to github as well with no problems. And the tool generates nice commits for every single change one makes.

Go's CSP model works well, if you first take the time to study it up a bit. The only drawback with the docs is they don't focus on correctness and potential concurrency bugs sufficiently. In the very least the stdlib could mark whether particular functions are goroutine safe or not. If you stay guarded for such things, you should be able to get a lot done with very few mistakes.

I have limited experience with Rust, but the ownership model and the borrow checker help with avoiding concurrency bugs as well. And personally for me, Rust slowed down the speed at which I could proceed solving the problem at hand. If you have time on your hands or you're very fluent with it, rust may give better results.

LLMs are usually used to describe goals or to provide feedback (correction or encouragement) towards its implementation.

Programming is about iteratively expressing a path towards satisfying said goals.

What LLMs are doing now is converting "requirements" into "formalizations".

I don't think Djikstra is wrong in saying - that performing programming in plain-language is a pretty weird idea.

We want to concretize ideas in formalisms. But that's not what any human (including Djikstra) starts with... you start with some sort of goal, some sort of need and requirements.

LLMs merely reduce the time/effort required to go from goals -> formalism.

TLDR: Requirements != Implementation

If I may ask - how are humans in general different? Very few of us invent new ideas of significance - correct?

Design must flow from customer demand/desires.

And 90% of design is just "correctly assigning priority" to elements and actions.

If you know what is important (and what is less important) you use...

- white space (more whitespacce = more important)

- dimension (larger = more important)

- contrast (higher = more distinct)

- color (brighter = more important)

... to practically implement the decided priority.

How to validate you have implemented priority correctly?

Just ask a few people what do they see first, second, third, etc in a page.

If you designed it right - their eyes will see things exactly in the order you expected them to.

In short - "design is guiding user's senses in the most prioritized manner to the user in achieving their goals"

In our startup - we call this the "PNDCC" system (priority, negative space, dimension, contrast, color).

There are a few more tricks to make it even more powerful - but as I said - just getting these right puts you in the top 10%

In software - rarely do you know beforehand that you're building a chair.

Even when you're building in an existing category of products (say, databases), there are still lots of variations and trial and error needed to get "what we need" defined clearly.

I'd say "vibe coding" is just a new name for "exploratory programming" or good old "prototyping"

Don't have the time to make a long rebuttal, but my points are:

- For the past 50+ years, really intelligent people, including Turing award winners have believed in this dreams - In fact, getting computer to solve problem on their own is the more intense path IMHO. The lazy path is sitting content with the way things are.

OK - how many practical declarative goal-based languages have been successful in the past 50 years? Only option I can think of till now is SQL. Maybe there were some Operational Research optimization stuff as well. All of these were quite limited in terms of the kinds of goals we could specify, and the range of impacts they could have on the world.

The possibility of pure goal-oriented systems are at an inception now. So it's a totally different game, different mechanisms, and so on.

Software was telling computers what to do, to get those things done that we wanted done. This still remains software.

With AI, the new evolution in software is to skip the "telling what to do" part and directly specifying the goal - "telling what to get done" and let the system figure it out.

No surprise that Galileo made enemies while some of his thoughts on math are spot on, he really underestimated Sersi throughout the work, who himself was a math professor.

On the nature of comets - looks like Sersi was nearer to the Truth compared to Galileo

Galileo was definitely a hostile/belligerent character.

Plus, a lot of his claims turned out to be pretty wrong, yet he stated them with such absolute confidence, which didn’t help his case at all.

In comparison people like Da Vinci, Newton were more politically/socially savvy. They knew how/when/where to communicate (relatively speaking)

off-topic: Love the username :)

I've read Grove's work, and I agree with the "output" aspect being important. But I wouldn't consider "output" the only thing that connects to wisdom. I've heard of people I consider to be "wise" criticizing many of Andy's approach as well (I tend to agree). For me - say someone like Lee Kuan Yew - was quite a wise and practical man. Highly developed intellectually, socially, both pragmatic and respecting of scholars, etc. Wisdom can be considered a cluster of qualities if you will, of which "ability to get results" is a big factor.

Excellent point. That's why the truly wise people use "results" in terms of judging wisdom. If your thought is coherent, when you put it to practice - it works. And if it works - the desired result is produced. Doesn't mean all thoughts that lead to practical desirable results are borne of wisdom, but empirical success is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

My definition of wisdom (after many years of study & consideration): "Getting desirable results most of the time for themselves AND most people around them throughout their lives"

The most important aspect of wisdom to me is "making it work" in many areas, in many situations, for yourself and others - throughout your life.

Interview with Senior Rust Developer in 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGfQu0bQTKc

(not really)

I agree that "lived experiences" in highly regimented environment can be extremely harmful.

But my point is on the efficacy of it. I think regimentation doesn't work well in fields where there's complex problem-solving involved.

That's what practicing a profession stands for - that you cannot be dictated by laymen, etc and that you're held accountable to results.

I mean, hospital management cannot come in and dictate how the surgeon should wield his knife (but they can & must keep track of his success rate, and question if they see red flags). Or lay administrators cannot come in and dictate how a dam should be designed or what calculations are to be performed to get a working engine.

Regimentation works only for the simplest of things. Beyond that - it's hopeless.

I think the author gets it utterly wrong.

My argument would be - greater the complexity, higher level of personal initiative and responsibility is needed.

This is not an arm-chair assertion. For example - read the works of Admiral Rickover - https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm - in buidling and managing nuclear facilities

You'll see the enormous focus on individual initiative and personal responsibility.

Heavily regimented processes are too brittle for dealing with complex problem-solving end of the day.

In fact, one way I differentiate sophisticated leader from a less sophisticated one is via the understanding of this fact: do they value individual initiative or not?

If they do not, they're not in a great position to lead complex initiatives.

For me - it is a visceral thing, I don't try too hard to remember anything.

But I end up retaining some associations, a kind of mood, and I also tend to grasp the tendencies and attitudes of the author.

So in a way I read between the lines a lot. I am able to read with a kind of generosity of spirit (forgiving, listening, giving charitable interpretations, etc)

This way - I end up forming the most profitable kinds of memories - something that may help me live my own life and solve problems of interest better.

Reading transports you to a different reality than your present (in psychological/experiential dimension).

Which is very important for invention and such.

Amen to that. Over-organization is often a sign of high turnover in teams.

If you can retain engineers long-term, then the amount of repetitive paperwork/reports/status updates, etc reduce significantly.

You can have low frequency, low effort yet high bandwidth communications along with rapid execution.

So you are saying Alan kay is 100% bullshit? Or 50-50 sense/bullshit? 25-75? What is the percentage that makes someone a crank or not? Because newton has a 30/70 score by this metric.

In my book Kay makes lots of sense most of the times, if you put in the effort. Maybe you see it totally differntly.

Another thing - with Newton for ex - I think the way he studied these other subjects - was still very honest, very sincere, and he made great efforts to get things right. So I'd say Newton has maintained methodological integrity throughout regardless of results (quality of efforts > quality of results). My view with Kay would be the same - I think he has high levels of integrity. I can cite why I think so, but then this thread is taking too long already.

Newton spent 1/3rd of life pursuing Alchemy, another 1/3rd pursuing biblical prophecies. Paul Graham once said that Newton wasted so much of his life (basically PG thinks he knows what's worthy work and what is not - I mean exploring the factuality of "God" must obviously be nonsense - right?). Maybe you'd call Newton a Charlatan too - because hey - what biz did he make successful.

I don't think either PG or most people on this forum are fit enough to judge what Kay is saying is of value or not. And I say this with utmost humility. These are scholarly researchers, who operate at the edge of human knowledge/insight. Who am I to judge Newton or someone of that calibre - question why he's interested in Alchemy? Or Kay says particular things which seem far-fetched to you or me.

Continuing with the Newton analogy - I think one aspect with CS/Software is that it is a new field - you should not apply the definition of a "Charlatan" you'd use in a more established field such as Physics. Kay's agenda is to advance a nascent field. Just like Newton was dabbling with Alchemy before the establishment of the modern field of Chemistry.

Why'd anyone judge Alan Kay on making any particular biz succeed? He's been a big contributor to the "ideas ecosystem" as a researcher's researcher.

It's like asking Bezos to care about the Internet as a technical concept ("Internet? Schminternet? I don't care as long as it delivers the best customer experience!").

Kay was and still is a dedicated researcher - and he has had great influence on people like Jobs/Bezos as well - behind the scenes. There are very few parts of modern technology untouched by his ideas. He's a Turing Award winner for a reason, you know.

Re C++ - Kay's job as a researcher is not to defend whatever sh*t humans have figured out & are content with but to paint a picture of the future, build teams around it and demonstrate prototypes. He has done that exceedingly well I'd say.

What do you think of the Internet? Has it worked? Has it scaled? Is it reliable?

Remember that Alan Kay, his team and his colleagues had a lot to do with this thing you are using to rant here :)

That's an interesting example, thanks for sharing.

Reminds me a bit of the old smalltalk GUI. It had this sort of "object editing" capability IIRC. Actually, smalltalk could connect different data types, such as code, images, videos, presentations, docs, etc into a cohesive whole. Not as polished as your demo of course , but that was the core idea.

Interesting stuff!

What's the product if I may ask? Or at least the general category of products you operate in - if you don't mind mentioning it.