richk449

If you want to know if something is a human or a parrot, you could give it a paint brush and ask it to paint the Mona Lisa.

It is also possible that the enlightenment only happened because of protestant reformation, which only happened because of the power and abuses of the Catholic Church. So in a way, we have the Catholic Church to thank for modern society.

The reformation was highly religious of course, but it was also about reading original sources, devolving power from a central authority, and allowing individuals to discover the truth.

Sometimes I think that the catholic church is like Leto II in Dune - ruling people so that they will rebel in a way that there can never again be a central power structure.

I’ve been using cadquery and build123 with Claude code and I find it incredibly painful.

What is your workflow for llm integration to openscad?

You don't need WSL to run Claude code on windows.

Unlike conventional cars that require expensive safety systems such as air bags and seat belts, the mover3000's top speed of one mile per hour makes it intrinsically safe.

This authorizes an attack on Iran?

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This joint resolution may be cited as the ‘‘Authorization for Use of Military Force’’. SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES. (a) IN GENERAL.—That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

I love the visual of humans desperately trying to preserve what they consider the natural world, and when they turn their backs evolution does it's thing.

In this analogy though, maps are the only things we have access to. There may be Truth, but we only approximate it with our maps.

How do you give cc the ability to compile in a loop?

Slack is orders of magnitude better than Teams.

Google docs is better than Microsoft office, but only by a little.

Google drive is many many orders of magnitude better than Sharepoint.

It sounds like you are making a distinction between digital (silicon computers) and analog (biological brains).

As far as possible reasons that a computer can’t achieve AGI go, this seems like the best one (assuming computer means digital computer of course).

But in a philosophical sense, a computer obeys the same laws of physics that a brain does, and the transistors are analog devices that are being used to create a digital architecture. So whatever makes you brain have uncountable states would also make a real digital computer have uncountable states. Of course we can claim that only the digital layer on top matters, but why?

HFSS does a typical FEM matrix solve then displays the results. It is often used for very complex or large problems, so as far as I know it isn’t set up for instant display of results. That would be a neat feature for small problems.

if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no?

Hallucination does seem to be much less of an issue now. I hardly even hear about it - like it just faded away.

As far as I can tell smart engineers are using AI tools, particularly people doing coding, but even non-coding roles.

The criticism feels about three years out of date.

If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years?

What if chatbots and user interactions ARE the path to AGI? Two reasons they could be: (1) Reinforcement learning in AI has proven to be very powerful. Humans get to GI through learning too - they aren’t born with much intelligence. Interactions between AI and humans may be the fastest way to get to AGI. (2) The classic Silicon Valley startup model is to push to customers as soon as possible (MVP). You don’t develop the perfect solution in isolation, and then deploy it once it is polished. You get users to try it and give feedback as soon as you have something they can try.

I don’t have any special insight into AI or AGI, but I don’t think OpenAI selling useful and profitable products is proof that there won’t be AI.

What’s the latest on open/free solvers to replace HFSS/CST?

Why do you say that America looks in research as a waste? We spend higher percentage of gdp on R&D than just about any other country in the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_re...

It seems amazing it has taken this long. Electric motors are so critical to national security, as well as the US economy.

I keep wondering if these folks have a realistic alternative: https://www.nironmagnetics.com/ (They claim high performance rare earth free magnets.)

Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5553.Six_Easy_Pieces

The art of doing science and engineering by Richard Hamming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Doing_Science_and_E...

What is a hyperscaler for autos?

Is this really true? The linear algebra is deterministic, although maybe there is some chaotic behavior with floating point handling. The non deterministic part mostly comes from intentionally added randomness, which can be turned off right?

Maybe the argument is that if you turn off the randomness you don’t have an LLM like result any more?

Is there an effort to get this underway? I’m no expert, but I would guess that the two expensive parts are the electron source and the vacuum pump. UHV chambers seem solvable, and detectors are probably cheaply obtainable. High voltage power supplies can probably also be cheap.

So what is number 2?

Black mirror was a British show first. I don’t know the others except for Man on the Inside - I’m skeptical, but if it turns out to as good as The Good Place, it will be impressive for Netflix.

Has recent Netflix done anything that comes close to The Wire? Or to Breaking Bad?

I’m not sure that the writing quality is the point. A better question to ask whether the creator has something they are trying to convey. It can be something artistic, or philosophical, or ethical, or none-of-the-above, but there is something there someone behind the series believes in.

So much of what is on Netflix feels like a Hallmark Special with better writing and cinematography. It’s still empty calories.

As an ender-3 owner, I’m curious what makes the Bambu better?

Similar machine at Arizona state university: https://news.asu.edu/20230205-discoveries-firstofitskind-ins...

Multibeam corporation is making “maskless” lithography tools:

https://multibeamcorp.com/applications/#high-value

It’s a well documented story: https://www.technologyreview.com/1999/01/01/236818/melted-ch...

It was Percy Spencer - fourth employee at Raytheon (third employee was Vannevar Bush, for reference)

A colleague asked me for advice on being a manager. Amongst other advice, I suggested he read High Output Management.

He came back a few days later and said that chatGPT knew what was in the book - was it okay if he just read the summary?

I wasn’t sure what to say. It’s probably true that chatGPT can summarize all the main points from the book. But it has always been easy to find the key points from books on line. The hard part of being a manager is figuring out how to take the obvious instructions and act on them consistently.

Maybe some people can do that just be reading the summary. For me though, reading the whole book is important. I find myself thinking back to the examples used to illustrate the points. And I find that repeating ideas in different ways as I read the book helps make them part of my mental framework. I read lots of interesting ideas in quick articles, but they rarely stick with me unless there is a specific translation to action.

I ended up telling my colleague that it was up to him to decide how to learn best. If it was me, I need the book. But he needs to know his own learning system.