davidivadavid

It's almost like there's a(t least a) startup idea in making "human made" certificates for those things.

I've read the article. It exposes a well-known point of view in philosophy of science that has been debated at least a hundred years. It doesn't begin to cover that question at all.

Notably, the idea that a new theory simply takes existing "observations" and adds to them is historically unfounded. Indeed, many theories start as thought experiments that contradict observation and later turn out to be better models, not the other way around.

You also may or may not be familiar with the concepts of theory-ladenness and the commensurability of theories. If not, I suggest doing some reading about that so you can appreciate why those questions aren't as straightforward as you seem to believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commensurability_(philosophy_o...

> we can put boundary boxes around what is possible

Based on our incomplete knowledge. So we really can't. What would a proof that something is physically impossible look like?

What bothers me most is that the picture he paints of success itself is some handwavy crap about how it could "create value" or "solve problems" or some other type of abstract nonsense. He has displayed exactly 0 concrete, desirable vision of what succeeding with AI would look like.

That seems to be the curse of Silicon Valley, worshiping abstractions to the point of nonsense. He would probably say that with AGI, we can make people immortal, infinitely intelligent, and so on. These are just potentialities with, again, 0 concrete vision. What would we use that power for? Altman has no idea.

At least Musk has some amount of storytelling about making humanity multiplanetary you may or may not buy into. AI "visionaries" seem to have 0 narrative except rehashed, high-level summaries of sci-fi novels. Is that it?

That begs for supporting evidence. I doubt most software is open-ended research.

Makes it abundantly clear they should have spent $100 on a branding consultant to prevent them from making newbie mistakes.

"Tell me you're a cookie-cutter angry programmer with no taste or understanding of design without telling me you're a cookie-cutter angry programmer with no taste or understanding of design."

Huh? Of course they can. Is the person shipping what they're supposed to be shipping?

But if the managers were programmers, suddenly everyone would magically want to work instead of fucking around on HN.

Jeff Bezos might disagree about the "low reward."

“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

I have no dog in the fight above but you're getting downvoted for explaining that orwellian language is bad. Pretty surreal.

I gave this post a pass because it's not as arrogant as most HN-variety STEMlords, but yeah, it's pretty embarrassing.

So technology is good for the Company / Country / Person who builds it first and evil for the one who doesn't. Something being good for some people and evil for others doesn't make it "neutral."

> But software is not "tech". It is the explicit expression and projection of cultural objectives and values onto a particular type of tech. You can take the exact precise hardware we have today and reprogram a million different worlds on it, some better, some worse.

But all of them with computing as a cultural artifact of some kind — and certainly not a "neutral" one. I've basically come to think of the idea of "general purpose computing" as basically a trojan horse for the naive "tech is neutral" POV. "Making things computable faster" is not a "neutral" change of the universe, it's a step in a specific direction, it defines the boundaries of a particular future cone at the exception of many others.

The purported neutrality of technology is an old saw that people who are practitioners of technology ought to discard. The fact they haven't shows how terrible a job we're doing educating them.

Technology is not neutral and never will be because the nature of technology is to be a means to an end, and as such, to be inseparable from its end.

Technologies enable certain future outcomes.

That some of those outcomes are deemed "good" or "bad" just depends on whether they're compatible with the ends that were pursued initially and the worldview that supports them.

Some technologies have unexpected outcomes, but that doesn't make those outcomes independent of those technologies, either.

I don't disagree that this was a risky bet, and yet now I can't imagine the book being written any other way.

By that logic everyone should use the minimum zoom level to cram as much information in their screen as possible.

Yeah it's almost like people are collectively waking up to the fact that VCs are not actually that smart because their whole business model is predicated on being wrong 90+% of the time (which to be fair they've been explicitly saying forever). Now they're connecting the dots and realizing that the other 10% are just luck (and a well timed bull market).

Hate to be pedantic, but as a Frenchman I can't help but point out it's actually from Rabelais: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel

I honestly don't get how people like Sam Altman still have any semblance of reputation after investing in that crap. Could something look any more transparently dystopian?

So basically all products are shit. Gotcha. Seems like a sound model.

"If you want to make your wares visible in my sphere, find ways to make these appearances interesting, original, inventive and sufficiently unobtrusive"

Yeah, that's also called advertising. Sorry.

Hacker News people being overly literal? Can't be.

Jesting aside, yes, I would echo this and a couple other comments: the point is to nudge yourself to think a bit more about diction, and spotting the word "very" is an easy trigger to do that.

Most replacements for very + something will be more precise, more evocative and just sound better. Of course, while more precise, they may be more inaccurate. You trade the shotgun of "very" for a sniper rifle, and that requires more careful aim.

Depressed, miserable, gloomy, etc.

As someone who was a math and physics major at one point, that's what I consider the biggest missed opportunity in physics education. I was always taught physics as a set of theorems that you apply to some set of random problems. Zero effort given to the context, actual applications, and physical insight.

That kind of put me off physics, and I've been longing ever since for someone to build a course that essentially covers physics historically, starting from the problems physics helped us solve, and that puts modelling and experiment at the center, instead of just teaching recipes.

I feel the like incredibly common idea that all applications derive from theory might be one of the must harmful misconception in education.

If the brief is vague enough to omit things like "don't rebrand everything" that falls mostly on the person leading that project, in my book, although a more seasoned designer might have challenged the scope definition more.

You're coming at it from a different context than the original article, which is more about what an agency would do, where there won't be PMs and designers have to figure out requirements themselves (often precisely by challenging what the client is asking for).

The second point is that most people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Designing what you're told only works with people who have done the exploration themselves, which tends to be a tiny minority (because it essentially requires the design skills that they're expecting from the designer themselves).

You're proving my point for me:

"At age ten, he stumbled across a Latin copy of Euclid; and at twelve he studied Newton's Arithmetica Universalis. He moved on to read the Principia, and by age 16 he had covered much of it, as well as some more recent works on analytic geometry and the differential calculus." (from the Wikipedia article about Hamilton).

Making predictions within a framework, however extrapolated from the beginning, and coming up with a framework is precisely the qualitative difference that separates them and that is not being taught when people ask for recipes instead of understanding.

The term "covered" does a lot of work here.

The thing with science is that it's generally considered more practical than philosophy, and people are content with learning a bunch of pre-packaged recipes to solve pre-packaged problems (use F = ma to solve that inclined plane problem).

But try asking the average student what F = ma actually means a bit deeper than just how they would apply it and you'll see how much the topic is "covered."

Consider that the concepts of force and mass themselves are mostly left unexplained. Or that people have no idea what "energy" is.

They're models of reality that are not taught as such, because we're happy with teaching future engineers a bunch of recipes to learn by rote as long as they "work".

So I remain unconvinced of the proposition that philosophy should be taught the same way. In that respect it's closer to science and the inherent doubt that comes with the scientific method — even though, similarly, there's a lot of dogmatic "philosophy" (think Marxism).