A community of giants. Winner takes all is not fair, but it is very motivating to the vanity of human nature. i.e. untrue, but effective
778 karma · joined January 1, 2023
At the same time, they are keeping the door open for mass-market over the long-term.
e.g. Kepler needed Tycho's observational data; Einstein needed measurements showing the speed of light was constant in many directions.
38% vs 6% Android/Apple is a big difference.
IMHO abundance solves itself, as population grows past carrying capacity, leading to famine, war, conquest and death. (The cycle being eventually broken by TV then reddit).
Division of labour is only necessary to create time in an economy detached from survival.
Yet, sending is easier than receiving, just as generating is easier than parsing.
Maybe an advantage of an explanatory theory is in revealing more of the "black box", giving more ways to check the theory. (But I'm not sure how this could apply to Newton's gravity, since the only observations were outcomes. And no plausible way to "experiment".)
> If it wasn't for the ancients stumbling and fumbling in the dark for millennia
Is there any evidence that the epicyclic models helped scientific understanding, even indirectly? Later theories didn't seem to build on it. I wonder if it actually detoured understanding, with its misleadingly impressive accuracy, so that understanding would have progressed more quickly without it.
Thinking of pg's "great work" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36550615): to be the Newton of neural nets would seem the most ambitious aspiration of our times. But it took a bunch of geniuses just to get to Newton... and it seems an even harder problem than planetary motion. Though a difference is neural nets are based on actual neurons (loosely!).
It's looking like working human-level AI will precede understanding... perhaps by those 2000 years?
I'd like to think explaining means giving a model simpler than the observations. But this also can be true of a purely predictive model, that offers no "why". Another commenter pointed out that epicycles do simplify - so they do "explain" in this sense.
What defines an "explanation"? What makes something a "why"?
A problem with epicycles is they are harder to falsify. If the model doesn't match new observations, just adjust it, or add another epicycle. In contrast, Newtonian gravity can hardly be tweaked at all. So when Mercury's orbit was slightly off, they knew something was wrong.
I'm not quite clear on how I feel about this. Geocentricity is a theory, in broad terms. It seems disrespectful to say adding epicycles makes it "not a theory". As you say, there was a theory that the planets actually moved in epicyclic motion. It wasn't just calculation to them.
(I want to stress that the idea of epicycles, the mechanical craftsmanship, and actual prediction of the planets are all amazing genius.)
Yet, having more parameters than data means the model doesn't explain in simpler terms, only restates. In this sense, it's "not a theory" (by Occam's razor). It seems enough epicycles can model anything: (3Blue1Brown Fourier Series) https://youtube.com/watch?v=bL0LV0Huj1s OTOH the epicycles did predict planetary motion, so they did capture some regularity... not sure what to think.
RE Chomsky: You can see it's like epicycles: with enough parameters, an LLM is like a numerical method for curve fitting, that doesn't explain the data (any more than a fourier transform does). Curiously, they do seem to predict very accurately... yet also generalize strangely ("hallucinate"). What to think?
But it seems it's got to help! Even if only as a device, like a telescope. Also, from this interview with Terry Sejnowski (https://youtube.com/watch?v=XKC-4Tosdd8 3 hours!) there's instances where a technique was developed for a problem with Neural Nets, and an equivalent was found in the brain.
He also gives a Chomsky-like view: if you duplicated the human brain and it worked perfectly, you wouldn't have done any science if you didn't understand anything.
BTW Chomsky's point E (which I'd never heard of), the last and most minor, was based on Gold's work.
Newtonian mechanics has a model, beyond curve fitting.
BTW: I made this analogy between LLM and epicycles as a joke, but it's looking strangely isomorphic...
It's funny, because epicycles used to be the poster-child for ad hoc, overcomplex models with no conceptual basis... which is an exact match for LLM... but I don't recall the analogy being made. Not even in https://norvig.com/chomsky.html
However, to discover something new (not just new to you) does require contact with established knowledge. And if you don't publish, you can't be very sure that it really is "new"; and it does not become part of established knowledge - it has not been discovered.
i.e. the concept of discovering new knowledge means it cannot be done on a desert island.
There's a point of view that if you haven't done it correctly, you haven't done it at all. There's another point of view that you just fix bugs as they found.
Should you force yourself to learn that field for years to get to the good stuff?
Or, stop at the extent of your aptitude and interest?
BTW I read somewhere they are adding a top strap.
If they've got it crisp, how big a deal do feel that would be? For yourself, and for others who've been interested?
To me, the question is whether Apple has actually made this work.
Apple's image announcement is just for future positioning: this really is a "Pro" device, for specific market segments and use-cases - niche. It's how apple won desktop publishing years ago.
Segment 1: creative professionals keep buying more and bigger screens. Vision Pro (VP) can eat that budget, and provide as many displays as you want. (The technology appeal is that a display must be high resolution everywhere - but VP only needs to be hi-res where you're looking, giving arbitrarily large "displays"). Apple carefully and specifically claims text is crisp. The engineering question is if Apple has actually done this: is it as good as a physical display? (or close enough)
Segment 2: creative professionals who make 3D objects: industrial designers, architects (but not yet engineers - they have different priorities). Also directors: cgi sets and set extensions have long been standard, and directors (and production designers etc) use an ipad to "see" the fully dressed cgi set, overlaid on the practical set. This is a better version of that. I can see James Cameron and Denis Villeneuve ordering any many as they can use - if it actually help. (aside: maybe for actors in rehearsal, but interferes with mocap).
Creative professional collaborate, hence Apple's huge efforts on the eyes being visible. A real question is will it be enough, for effective and natural communication, in a real-worlx work-flow situation? Will Jim be able to ordsr people around, or will he have to rip it off?
By announcing it after years and years of work, Apple shows they think they have enough of it, for it to be worthwhile for some people.
Provided they can get a genuine foothold, in actually making people more productive (real ROI, not jus enthusiast prosumers), then this has endless upside. If they can, users, usages and sales will grow fantastically for decades....if
Background: market price went from $17 to $41 per bushel; the farmer didn't have it on hand; a crop failure possibility was later mentioned. [Maybe why the price increased?]
Note: the thumbs-up is just for assent - the parties still need to agree on terms etc (as they did here). In fact, the farmer argued that the flax contract differed from their previous durum contracts, because he didn't have it on hand, and usually required an "act of god" clause to cover crop failure - but crucially, the buyer didn't know this, so objectively, it would seem the same.
BTW: It's not binding: there's two higher courts in Canada. But the judge refutes the technical legal objections to this form of assent.