> the role of diverse experiences and cross-pollination of ideas
Add to this: giving room for ideas to grow: the more you wait, the more diverse and numerous the life experiences, all of them having the potential to shape those uncrystallized ideas.
382 karma · joined June 6, 2023
Add to this: giving room for ideas to grow: the more you wait, the more diverse and numerous the life experiences, all of them having the potential to shape those uncrystallized ideas.
The teachers provide you with some code templates, a bunch of tests, and a progressive way to implement it all.
If so, then people reacting so strongly — even negatively — would play into his hands. Hence the old age saying, "thou shall not feed the troll". He might even get one of those "very generous one time donation" thanks to all that attention.
[0]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/functions/o...
I'm trying to come up with other examples, but as the parent said, it then depends how pedantic we want to be e.g. take Poincaré's spacetime, but he'd still be working from two pre-existing ideas, "space" and "time"; the idea of combining the two is (feels?) quite novel and unexpected.
Going back some more, the notion of "space" (or that of "time") feels more primitive, less explainable in terms of other notions.
> Mass–energy equivalence states that all objects having mass, or massive objects, have a corresponding intrinsic energy, even when they are stationary. In the rest frame of an object, where by definition it is motionless and so has no momentum, the mass and energy are equal or they differ only by a constant factor, the speed of light squared (c²).
I think this is highly underestimated: there seems to be some sort of a duality between learning & teaching, where you can't really practice one efficiently without the other.
This has been observed in part by guys like Feynman[0]; paraphrasing: "learn a topic by teaching/simulating teaching it to a child", which in addition to the above, demands for the topic to be explained in simple terms.
E.g. the following in JS will always print the confirm message. But in a lazy language like Haskell, as the x parameter is never used, it'll never be printed.
(function(x) { return "bar"; })(confirm("foo"));
[0]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.20.0.1/docs/Prelu...
It's always somewhat possible to express what are typically considered imperative features in a functional fashion (e.g. monad), or bend imperative languages to behave somewhat like functional ones: I think the differences become clearer once we reach out for the underlying theoretical models.
Getting awk in your head (fully) takes about an afternoon: reading the (small and exhaustive) man page, going through a few examples, trying to build a few toys with it. Perl requires much, much more effort.
Great gain/investment ratio.
Over-engineering is a common cause: simple solutions can be deceitfully difficult to find. That being said, additional indirection layers are usually justified by the overall architecture, and — assuming they're reasonable — can't always be appreciated locally.
« I'm always delighted by the light touch and stillness of early programming languages. Not much text; a lot gets done. Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a debate with a compiler. Who'd have guessed sophistication bought such noise? » (Dick Gabriel)[0]: https://github.com/adonovan/gopl.io/blob/master/ch8/chat/cha...
Here's a recent example which made me laugh: 2 months ago, a "shortcut" for reverse search was implemented in acme[0], a 30 years old text-editor. It's not even qualified as a "feature" yet, rather, as an "experiment"[1].
Every little decision is carefully weighted; every square inch of the software is carefully and precisely designed. Japanese wooden planes are similarly designed: they don't look like much, especially in comparison with more modern, shinier tools, but they're surprisingly well-thought.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)
[1]: https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/commit/0c79c32675e83ff3d8...
This, but also: "can you make an effort to conform yourself to others instead of forcing others to conform to you;" Inexperienced people often lack the visibility of their elders, so it really makes sense to see whether they can lower their ego.
> Some fresh out of school smart people might consider it a thing of the past. And just decide not to deal with it. Like COBOL.
Are you using "smart" positively or not? Being smart is often frowned upon in SE. Then, driving smart people away still is a good thing.
If you meant positively... considering things of the past to be useless by mere virtue of being of the past, is definitely not a positive character trait, so we'd have a contradiction.
Side note, but the problem with COBOL is not that it's old; to quote wikipedia:
> COBOL has been criticized for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These weaknesses result in monolithic programs that are hard to comprehend as a whole, despite their local readability.
There are strong mindset differences between various software communities; it might takes a little bit of time & effort to appreciate a more frugal/conservative approach to software engineering.
The previous links highlighted some aspects of those mindset differences. [0], while unrelated to OpenBSD, is another good illustration.
That's to say, OpenBSD people probably don't care much for a more featureful experience: it won't make them more productive, even if it may look like it would from the outset.
That's probably more of a feature than a bug: it acts as a "natural" filter.
Prophets usually encourage good measure, balance, not that kind of excessive behavior.
Let's add to this the use of digital art, which drastically reduced production costs (can't resist: [0]). I wonder however, if, in the long run, AI won't end up boosting traditional arts, and encourage higher creativity and skills from human artists.
> Islam in Europe is growing
In numbers definitely, but I was thinking in terms of "spiritual intensity".
Consider e.g. how Muslims feast during Ramadan at night: I doubt this is remotely aligned with the original intents. Same thing goes for other groups: hateful Christian despite Jesus's "Love Thy Neighbor", Jews celebrating murder despite Hashem's command, etc.
Industry jobs might be somewhat at risks, as businesses tend to optimize for profits, but even there, I'd wait and see what happens in the long run.
> I wonder how people will view the effects on art and sciences in 200 years.
Hopefully we would have had a Renaissance 2.0 since then!
Were Islam to keep on growing (I do personally think it's more on the decline), I think we could expect interesting outcomes, artistically speaking, as Muslims visual arts, because they tend to shy away from figuration, are somewhat orthogonal to Western's forms.
> Today, many people view both AI's effect on art and the rise of Islam in Europe very negatively.
Islam has always been culturally foreign to Europe, and the current economical & social situation have a bunch of weird, highly chaotic side-effects.
Most of the Muslims I've met were generous, heartwarming and thoughtful, perhaps more than the average person. I know it's not systematically true either, but I still have little reason to not have an essentially positive view of them.
I've also met people who told me (literally) that 99% Muslims were bloody awful, by sole virtue of being Muslims: the same reasoning we had a few decades ago, when Jews were targeted for sole virtue of being Jews, not because of their individual acts.
I meant, limited from an artistic point of view! But it's indeed a fantastic tool, and the ability to carry one in the pocket at all time is quite a blessing, even for artists! It also offers plenty of otherwise hard to reach possibilities: filming blooming flowers, microscopy, etc.
You can see in a few pictures the existence of a grid. It was originally used to transfer/scale drawings, but is also used as a substitute for untrained eyes who would struggle to get fair proportion otherwise.
Then the rendering itself relies on pencils that are sharpened quite thinly: the thin lead will be less sensible to the paper grain, and provide a smoother result. If you want more texture, used a duller lead. An even softer texture, use a brush or a stomp.
Generally, you'll want to draw quite big, so as to have enough room to articulate the details.
Finally, the key difficulty, "trick" even, for hyperrealism, and for fine-arts in general, is patience: good results are often produced with plenty of time.
That's a common viewpoint, but it's not quite true, for multiple reasons. A camera is a rather limited tool: it will transform colors, sometimes unpleasantly (value compression, color shifts), and can never quite capture reality as an artist would.
Then, while many paintings look lifelike, they still are absolutely out of reach of a camera. Landscapes in particular (e.g. [0]) are heavily staged: the light is invented, trees and mountains are moved around to fit various æsthetical choices, etc.
Or, consider how Bouguereau's, while life-like from a distance, are much less so from up-close (see [1]): the artist is among others playing with transparency and opacity of the paint to increase the feeling on depth and realism.
Art changed drastically during the 19th century, and photography played a role for sure, but IMO the decline of religion is probably a greater contributor.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Bierstadt_-_Among_...
[1]: https://www.muddycolors.com/2023/02/bouguereaus-the-oreads-a...