golemotron

The premise is wrong. Kevin Bacon was never meant to be unique in this way, just an illustration of a point in a small-worlds network.

We shouldn't forget the sun either. Without the sun none of us would be here.

I don't think you can lay naming at the feet of capital. Euclid, Ramanujan, Galois, Poncelet.. The list goes on. The Marxist lens is feeble.

Reputation and desire for recognition are an incentive system that have gotten us a long way. They are a way of celebrating and honoring the human reach for excellence. If you like humans, that's a good thing.

I like the UK's archaic system of measures for the similar reasons. It has the stamp of humanity. For those who think about such things it reminds of who we were. Without historical context we think less of ourselves.

That's a cultural artifact. Culture comes and goes. Read about how hiding mathematical discoveries was commonplace in Fermat's time and before.

There will still be a place for posing problems and noticing how breaking assumptions can create something new. The history of Non-Euclidian geometry is a good example.

A lot of progress comes from taking assumptions and breaking them. There was a time when everyone assumed that locked checkouts were absolutely necessary for version control, for instance. You could argue that AI could learn how to do this well but humans have context that machines won't. This is just an extension of the fact that things with independent existence will have different impressions of the world. If they didn't they would functionally be one thing.

It's hard to get humans to agree to things that are in their collective interest but many not be in their individual interest. It is at the root of many problems. Look up "collective action problem."

Unfortunately, it is a collective action problem. Whenever I hear "we" I flinch.

It's so bad for me that I often drop down into Terminal, find there (with 'find') and then use 'open'. I'm very used to doing this.

I've just assumed that Finder is fine for non-technical user so no one complains. But fair point. It can be fixed.

When you say "X proxy" the 'X' stands for the thing that is being proxied not the thing that is doing the proxying.

Imagine what happens when human readability is discarded as a goal. LLMs are already very good at inferring meaning with little context. If the objective function is reduction of token consumption, it's hard to know where we will end up.

I wonder when we'll see articles on the lost civic life of social media? With increasing AI use, it is happening.

Reminds me of Elon's answer to the question of what various countries can do about StarLink: "They can shake their fists at the sky."

I'd just be happy if companies were required to call them licensed and forbidden to call them sold or owned by the buyer.

The subtle thing in all this is that it externalizes labor costs. You are the one doing the work. I was thrown by this a while ago checking into a hotel with kiosk. I was out of my time zone and literally half asleep. Typing my name was real labor at that point.

I don't think that "root[ing] for mathematicians to go away" is the problem. The problem (if there is one) is that the process by which that occurs is economically determined. No amount of complaining will stop AI from being useful in mathematics or erase the incentives to make it better. It's automatic process, like photography sidelining painting or shoe factories sidelining cobblers. We go through this with every technological advance and the outcomes are pretty much determined. No cheerleaders are needed.

It seems like California is the furthest country in the EU.

Those old stories may have been full of crazy stuff, but look at children's programming over the past 30 years. SpongeBob characters, under the ocean, jumping off a diving board into a pool, again, under the ocean. It isn't violent, but it is crazy.

I think that children's authors primarily amuse themselves knowing that it will pass right over the heads of their target audience. It sure seems true of Collodi.

I'll never forget his theory about the origin of the heart symbol.

The Gompertz function strikes again.

That's true, but it can be a trap. I recommend always generating a few alternatives to avoid our bias toward the first generation. When we don't do that we are led rather than leading.

Yet we see directors as artists. Kubrick, Coppola (both of them), Hitchcock, etc.

Look at it this way. The carver doesn't have to grow the tree. Using an LLM for coding is a lot like being a carver. You can take broad or small strokes and discard what you don't like.

I'm in the conserving camp. It's more truthful than the narrativization that accompanies attempts to restore. We should remember that we all had a reptilian vision of dinosaurs for decades (centuries?) before the latest feathered view. We would have been better with neither. Just display the bones: what we have. Everything else burdens the public with guesses.

It's nice to see a passion project.

I would go so far as to say that it should be illegal for AI to lull humans into anthropomorphizing them. It would be hard to write an effective law on this, but I think it is doable.

Great article but disappointed that the monkey with the camera did not make an appearance.

And now 'physical' becomes as hyperbolized as 'violence.'

Sure, you can trade but it is a choice. Claiming that free trade is universally good is saying that there is only one right choice - no barriers.

There are many arguments but the most straightforward one is that a country may decide that preserving particular industries is in their security interest. That can be extended to culture as well.

Japan closed itself off from the world for centuries during the Edo period. One could say that they suffered economically due to that, but on the other hand, they ended up creating one of the more unique cultures in the world, developing in ways very different from others. It's an interesting kind of diversity.