davidivadavid

With RefactoringUI and Erik's course, I think the 3rd I would use to complete my top 3 is Shift Nudge (https://shiftnudge.com/).

There's a fair amount of overlap between all of them, so if you want to Pareto minmax it, I would recommend starting with Refactoring UI, which should help provide practical solutions to many situations and get rid of the most egregious horrors you might commit.

Of course, UI design goes much deeper than anything those courses can teach, but they're a great start.

That sounds like the most complicated cash grab of all time. As a fan of the original games, I couldn't be happier with what Larian did with the IP.

But it's not so much a "story" considering the reasoning is still motivated by cost savings. I don't really care to condemn "greed", to be honest. I'm mostly baffled by how terrible those rich people are at spending money.

Why doesn't a billionaire like Charlie Munger want to be remembered for building the most lavish building with the most incredible experience ever on the campus, instead of the one that optimizes for a problem with constraints that are mostly made up ("it might cost too much money for Charlie Munger")? It's just straight up dumb.

No one's saying it's not relevant — what's surprising is not the recognition, it's the endorsement.

"Of course" the kind of investing Buffett and Munger do/did is the point here, not investing in general. Y Combinator is 1) early stage 2) tech. Neither of which are what Buffett and Munger cared about. You could make a good case that Buffett and Munger are the most "anti-tech" index around, almost a perfect YC hedge.

Yup, the shitty dorm is indeed the one thing that stands out, of recent memory. Not sure that helps his case. That he made one uncharacteristically risky bet isn't exactly proof of anything, either. I'll happily grant you that my language was hyperbolic, however.

If the spec is cool, it's cool. If it's trash, it's trash.

That tells you about as much as you need to know about the guy, doesn't it?

Incredibly successful, and yet a penny pinching tasteless bore until the bitter end. At least "robber barons" of the past built things that looked good.

That he's worshiped around these parts of the internet is truly embarrassing and sometimes makes me question how I ended up here.

When is it that "hackers" and people into doing risky businesses started getting so into in the most boring, most conservative investor of all time?

That tells you enough about how this whole segment of the population jumped the shark and just started worshiping the same version of success as Wall Street.

The day HN shows a black banner for him, that site is officially over.

These are two sides of a rather naive understanding of technology that is yet surprisingly common in "tech".

Technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral.

Its value is relative. Technology is a means to an end. If you find the end good, and the technology helps towards that, it's good for you. If you find the end bad, and the technology helps towards that, it's bad for you.

Some amount of additional complexity comes from unpredictable consequences of technologies — while someone develops a technology to reach a certain end they wish for, they might inadvertently lead the world towards a different end they don't want as much or even are actively against.

But technology is just a modality of change, a way change happens. And change is neither "good" nor "bad." Some people in technology endorse a "progress" narrative according to which technology is good. It just means that it goes towards an end they like.

That something can be used to do both good and bad doesn't make it "neutral", either. That would mean it has no valence (and probably no influence). Instead, it's both good and bad at the same time for different groups of people.

The atomic bomb, which can arguably be used for "good" and "bad" isn't "neutral." It creates strong path dependence. Now humanity is in a timeline where atomic bombs exist, which is different from ones where they don't. And we can't ever go back to a different timeline (barring some weird time travel shenanigans).

Is it a better timeline? Maybe, maybe not. It seems like it's a more interesting one, in the same sense that people wish others "may you live in interesting times."

I think this will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of Silicon Valley when people woke up from a collective slumber and realized most people hailed as great "visionaries" and "technologists" actually had nothing whatsoever to offer in that department. It will be seen as hilariously ironic that those very people in fact had no idea what technology even is — a means to an end, not an end in itself, and that they had literally nothing to offer for what to do with all the technology they built. It's a conceptual dead end, sprinkled with badly digested sophomoric references. Truly embarrassing emperor has no clothes moment.

Hacker News really is like clockwork. Random "tech" industry problem? Gotta be "managers" or "designers." Engineers can do no wrong.

Looks like something that could easily result from autocorrect.

That's the point of the article — the quote is supposed to be a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a simplistic view of game (or utopia) design.

That reminded me of an interesting Yudkowsky article [1] about how a utopia requires "high challenge" :

"So this is the ultimate end of the prophecy of technological progress—just staring at a screen that says "YOU WIN", forever."

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29vqqmGNxNRGzffEj/high-chall...

There's fair criticism to be made of most translations.

The fallacy begins when one assumes that there is some kind of perfect ideal translation that exists somewhere, that translations can be compared to. Translation, especially literary translation, always involves some amount of arbitrary, artistic parti pris.

Wilson's translation involves a lot of formal (preservation of the number of lines, iambic pentameter) and rhetorical (modernization of the vocabulary) constraints that require sometimes wide deviation from the original. That's inevitable.

What's interesting however is to look at those deviations as an opportunity for conversation, not as an opportunity for correction, which is just nonsensical in the context of a translation that doesn't aim primarily at accuracy. Except for clear mistakes, most of the choices Wilson made were made in complete awareness of the trade-offs they involve.

The Twitter discussion fantasizes about a translation where no such trade-offs exist, which tells you enough about how much translation experience the authors have (none).

Whitaker's review is a good academic review that doesn't at least fall for those beginner misconceptions and recognizes trade-offs explicitly: "Both Green and Verity use a long, six-beat line. This has the advantage for them that they can translate almost every word of the Greek original. But it also, sometimes, leads to a wordiness, a certain turgidity in their versions that makes one sigh for the concision of Wilson."

"Completely ignorant of the topic" is more accurate than "a bit biased." Most of those threads are partisan BS with absolutely no knowledge of (or real interest in) Ancient Greek, Homer, poetry or translation in general. Abysmal idiocy.

Book does seem interesting, came across this article a couple days ago, for those who want a bit more information about it: https://www.noemamag.com/finding-awe-amid-everday-splendor/

I mean, "humans with AI" replaced "humans without AI" the moment AI was invented. Is that what passes for "insights" at HBR these days?

Except these Grandes Ecoles provide easier access to Ivy League institutions to their students so they can go there and enjoy their prestige.

While correct you're being downvoted because you're equivocating on the term "theory." People are assuming you're talking about a fully baked, documented theory couched in precise language and equations. What you're actually talking about is tacit assumptions / models that are built in observations.

"Theory comes first" is particularly unfortunate wording because it seems to imply the naive point of view that people first come up with a thorough mathematical model of some phenomenon before testing and validating it with experiments. That's obviously not how science has worked throughout history.

Saying "all observations/measurements imply an underlying theory" would have been maybe more accurate.

But Sam Altman doesn't have a hint of vision. He just vaguely waxes poetical about how "the price of intelligence" is going to go down and then... what exactly? What's so interesting that's going to happen? He has no idea. His endeavors aren't driven by any kind of articulated vision. Probably uses a cop like "well things after the Singularity are unpredictable!!" Oh so that means they're going to be good, right? Right?

Took me years before I discovered you have to append "name:" at the start of your search for Spotlight to actually be useful when you know what you're looking for (i.e. the keyword should be in the filename). The default UX they went for is really puzzling.

I have to say the experience of reading the comments here (and all similar stories) gives a lot of Stockholm syndrome vibes.

"The city's actually really safe if you completely ignore this whole area that sits in the middle of it otherwise all bets are off" isn't exactly an endorsement.

I'm sure he did. It's a terrible ending.

That ending was such infuriating sophomoric "meta" bullshit it only cemented my perception of Curse as being the best MI game.

Still remember randomly coming across his book "Representing and Intervening" when I first got interested in philosophy of science. Pleasantly readable and illuminating. Great companion piece to other works by Cartwright or van Fraassen.

I had the misfortune of coming across a bunch of tweets lamenting how "inferior" that translation is supposed to be — unfortunately, it seems to invariably come from people who can't read Ancient Greek, don't understand poetry, and don't even know what constraints Wilson adopted for her translation.

As a (once) professional translator with some familiarity with the language, I'd like to reassure potential readers that it's a fine translation with a unique parti pris. It's in spirit probably closer to the original than some translations that may be more canonical, e.g. Pope's, but that have been criticized just as harshly (or more) in the past.

Is Football an Unsolvable Problem?