timeforcomputer

I would not like to think of "techno-" pessimism, just pessimism (we are past the point of making a sci-fi distinction between reality and computer-using reality, I think, especially since people walk around using a computer). I personally am not too focused on AGI or existential threats, or the loss of jobs, or the political changes, opportunity for exploitation, scams, AI grifting, misdirection of funding. It would be easy to name that as pessimism as it is just a little bit removed from daily life, you can go about your daily life and really forget about it unless you are ethically/politically or personally concerned.

One thing is obviously immediately concerning though. It is unbelievable how fast ChatGPT has been normalized. Within a year the new people have come to expect something like ChatGPT to always be provided for them, for the rest of their life. Of course people are rushing in to define what that something is, and provide an AI service which people will use/misuse like the first page of Google results. I think almost certainly this new "first page of Google" component of people's thoughts will be abused. Do you think the first page of Google is good and formed by good incentives and empowerment of the user, considering how much of a cultural force it is (Googling something being just a normal part of your thought process)?

(I do have limited life experiences. Anecdotally, I know a high school teacher who has been teaching for almost 40 years. Over time students went from hiding their phone in the back of the class to scrolling through it in class freely, vaguely attempting increasingly simplified homework, and have now jumped on the new cool AI website to complete even basic tasks. This is extremely normal, why would a kid not use it?)

I am studying physics now (with a CS and math background) and I feel obligated to get up to date on AI and to develop a good working philosophy of how it can be meaningfully used in scientific work. Not that all "apply machine learning to X" approaches aren't interesting, but I lack enough understanding to know whether these are popping up everywhere because people feel obligated to apply new methods. For example, the Fourier transform is deep and interesting and there are libraries and standards and ways to transform different objects over clusters, etc., but I wouldn't say good scientific research is about finding a place to apply a Fourier transform (maybe :)). I am new to this though.

Not sure if relevant as it is not just one institute but the Simons Foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simons_Foundation) seems along this line.

TikTok is another everything platform. If I used it, I imagine I could take any stream of thought and somehow warp it into a reason to use TikTok. It is very easy to pretend that the platform doesn't matter and it is just a carrier to provide the opportunity to engage in new thoughts or interactions. I made a huge mistake allowing reddit to be my go-to. I did not think twice about going from thinking "I want to study insects" to reading the top 500 posts of all time for insects hobbyists, learning almost nothing except apparent insider-knowledge and insect drama, feeling burned out, and continuing on from that thinly veiled meme-cynicism-comment-meme-article-comments new-tab new-tab new-tab cycle (in the context of insects) to the rest of the reddit machine. Maybe something is wrong with my brain but I'm going to assume that TikTok is actively trying to draw in every thought and intention into it's algorithm, and leave someone scrolling TikTok rather than continuing with whatever it is they intended to do.

For some reason, here I actually read the articles. On sites like reddit it seems like a lot of the content for discussion is already in the title, and that is the launching pad for discussion in the comments. Maybe just a psychological trick, and I would like to build the habit of reading articles in every case, but I think the title length restriction helps a bit.

This is not advanced, but Rodrigues' rotation formula (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigues%27_rotation_formula) which is used to act on vectors given an axis-angle vector representation of the rotation. This calculation or similar is used all the time in 3D programming, but I thought the derivation would be a bunch of unintuitive trig so I never bothered with the proof until I was bored. Given a vector v, v can be thought to act on other vectors u as (v x u). The "v x" can be represented by a rank one anti-symmetric matrix (with 3 degrees of freedom, same as v) which can be thought of as a "rotation generator". In fact, anti-symmetric matrices are the Lie algebra which generate rotation matrices. One way to compute the exponential is by a matrix Taylor series. By some algebraic properties of anti-symmetric matrices, this expanded Taylor series can easily be rearranged into Rodrigues' rotation formula.

This is on the simpler side of applied math but I think it leads well to thinking about interesting things like encodings of geometric objects (vector versus rank-constrained tensor) and to geometric algebra which is becoming more popular in game development.

I feel like something bad is happening and I am unsure how much of this is me being negative. I "quit" the internet in late 2018 due to severe addiction and years-long disengagement in my hobbies (reading, programming, thinking, music, art, ...) and only recently have started reintroducing it into my life, for example, catching up with what people do on YouTube, trying to get an idea of "what people are talking about". It feels like a fever dream and I am unsure whether this is due to me picking up my extremely unhealthy internet browsing habits that I had pre-2018, and I wonder whether there is a "healthy" internet that I am not seeing.

I made a twitter account recently and followed Jonathan Blow, Sebastian Lague, and 3blue1brown. I just scrolled through the default twitter page and I got karen videos, a naked woman in a car caught cheating, israeli soldiers harassing someone, a police dog mauling someone. I made an instagram account to see 3blue1brown videos on my phone and went to the default page (I assume it knows nothing about me) and I was given videos of disabled people doing sports which are clearly meant to be "funny", with extremely hateful comments apparently from children, spelling out the N-word with separate letters, etc. That was in 3 minutes of using Instagram and I gave up. I am interested in game development and a google search of "game development" gives me absurd "industry knowledge" youtube videos and r/gamedev. r/gamedev is just "meta-commentary" pointing out "societal problems" of game developers, you won't make money, noob assumptions, angry at the world, even mixing in discussions of depression, self-hate. It is a mess. Where are the people talking about neat collision detection tricks? I am aware that this is the "surface level" and I will eventually need to find and curate a variety of incoming "feeds", such as group chats with good engaged people, great forums, etc., but I just don't feel like it is "natural" to find them. I feel like I need to start a project for myself to intentionally build my own "algorithm" which leads me to find enriching content. I feel though that that is actively going against what "the internet" wants me to do. It is so easy to find such hateful things, and I am worried it will bring me back to being as depressed as I was before quitting the internet.

Yes, I do not follow that argument comparing modern tech to past changes. It feels like people are assuming a weird technological inevitability. The printing press was amazing, it had a huge effect on society, of course, leading down the line to some kid reading trash in class. But it is just marks on paper, while digital technology forms a "place", and a direct line of effect from tech companies to the daily habits of billions of people, overnight. I think it is completely different...