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runald

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Some funny anecdote, my fullname is relatively unique, two or three people have it AFAIK. On my upwork profile, they put the military veteran status because a completely unrelated military guy with the same name shows up in the google/linkedin search. I can't remove the status, I don't even look like the other guy.

Category Theory is easy because it starts from nothing, literally. You can learn it at any age and with no almost no prior education. Same with various formal logics.

I disagree, you need to have capacity for abstract thought for abstract topics, most especially with category theory. Normal people have quite difficulty understanding abstractness, you either have the aptitude for it, or work your brain hard enough that it becomes somewhat easier. Children and younger people especially have difficulty understanding non-concrete topics.

This is useful for detecting file types of unknown blobs with custom file extension, when the file command just returns data. Though it doesn't correctly identify lua code for some reason, it guesses with low probability that it's either ruby or javascript, or anything but lua.

Just talk to people with UDP, that way you don't have to do handshake, just speak without waiting for your turn. When they say "I'm sorry, I didn't quite get that, can you repeat?", you'd just go back to your little corner and drop all incoming packets, and wait until the party ends.

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html

  int function(void) {
      static int i, state = 0;
      switch (state) {
          case 0: /* start of function */
          for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
              state = 1; /* so we will come back to "case 1" */
              return i;
              case 1:; /* resume control straight after the return */
          }
      }
  }


Huh, I didn't know you could put case statements arbitrarily anywhere inside a switch block in C. Past the initial WTF, it's a nice hack for implementing coroutines.

I haven't read the whole paper, but isn't one reason MMA wins because it has less restrictions on what moves you can do? Other martial arts have strict rules on what kind of moves you do, so a practitioner of Taekwondo will be at a disadvantage against MMA practitioner, for obvious reasons. This doesn't mean one martial art is necessarily better, they just have different rules. It seems silly to compare them that way.

Imagine a hypothetical new martial arts that allows all the moves of MMA, but with biting and eye poke allowed, so practitioners of this arts is at a definite advantage against MMA. Would you say that this martial art is any better?

We’re now having to define what an expert in the field is now

What do you propose, just delegate an authority who defines an expert and blindly accept what they say? That we should stop asking questions and should hold an expert's opinion as absolute infallible truth? Never mind the fact that there are different opinions of experts and they can't even form an unified absolute consensus?

Good idea. Forget dark ages, dystopia is the future.

Extremist positions are never good. One side is to never trust experts. The other side is to trust everything experts say. You argue for the latter against the former (strawman), because you see it pointless to define expertise and that experts opinion should not be discounted (why not?).

Experts are tunnel-visioned by their narrow specializations. They don't see and know everything. It's up to the people how to interpret and apply their opinions to their respective domains.

I’m sure if you received diagnosis for a rare and life threatening illness and your doctor referred you to an expert in the field to help save your life. You’d be totally happy to believe in experts.

A good example of the extremist strawman, where you decide that thinking for one's self and asking questions about expertise is the same as never trusting an expert.

There's no bayesian reasoning here, just someone assuming something to be proved to be already true. Statements don't become self-evidently true just because someone assigned probabilities on them.

Also, using only past billion occurrences of the sun not blowing up, and then still concluding that the sun will not blow up despite of any recent indications of the sun showing anomalous activity seems a more accurate analogy.

People invoke Occam's razor too often that it has become pretty much a thought-terminating meme. Occam's razor only gets you the simple, convenient explanation, it says nothing about the truth. Epistemologists understand this very well. It's easy to find counter-examples where simple explanations reflects nothing of reality.

It's called circular reasoning. Conclusion cites the premises, which in turn the premises cite the conclusion. Evidence (or lack of) is used to prove it self. When you start with a false or circular premise, anything that follows is technically true. It's a powerful (bullshitting) tool that can be used to prove or disprove anything.

I was just advocating against abstractions in general

No, you are advocating against particular kind of abstractions, and dismissively pretend that most abstractions are bad. Otherwise, you won't be using high-level programming languages and just stick to assembly or punch cards instead. You shouldn't even be interfacing with the operating system, write your own OS every time you need to do something with the computer. Also, since you don't like abstractions, please also avoid using higher maths or any kind of formalized systems that build upon layers of layers of abstractions. Define your own axiomatic system from first principles every time you need to reason about anything. While you are at it, consider moving out of the civilization, and avoid any kind of recent technologies such as computers, as they are built on the idea of "more and higher abstractions".

I'm being absurd, but I hope you get the point.

Yeah, what's wrong with those people. Don't they know javascript is terrible and not a real programming language, and people should do some deep soul searching before deciding to use it. Oh, every other programming is language is fine. Extra points if it's esoteric and cool. "\/s"

I'm still setting up the tiny tent for the "delusional parrot" camp, right next to the "it's gonna get better for real and change the world" camp, which seems to have a quite an enormous tent and has a suspiciously large flashing banner that draws a lot of attention. There's a sign next to it that says: "Mt. AI goldrush is now open, buy your shovels and pickaxes now!111!!"

A more apt term would be delusional parrot, applies both to the LLM and to everyone else who thinks GPT is the second coming of Jesus.

assume it speaks to everyone and anyone it doesn’t can’t possibly be as productive

Chill mate, it's just some person sharing their own experience and beliefs, they are not assuming anything. I don't know why you feel so opposed and attacked to an otherwise benign topic. The workplace interaction is dominantly biased towards speaking and face-to-face interaction. Even job interviews selects for the extroverts who can talk smoothly and has an outward pleasing personality. A dissenting opinion that argues for the unpopular or minority point of view seems perfectly healthy and natural.

In fact, I find your comment strange. Given the current dominant mode of communication, I would have expected that you would support the idea of writing more. Why? Because you clearly advocate for a balanced team that covers all modality (whatever that means), yet I don't see you pointing out the fact that people dominantly prefers and selects for verbal communication, subtly discriminating people who are more effective in writing or other alternative modes of communication. Instead, you get defensive and even argues against the minority view, clearly contradicting what you seem to be advocating for. What do you say about that?

Sure, most of what we're doing have been doing has already been done before, but that doesn't mean general intelligence is deprecated. It's not like we just keep repeating actions over and over without thought. For each problem we have, we adapt them and make changes to fit our specific context and needs. As long as humans and nature are involved, there's no such thing as a generalized solution that can be mechanistically applied to a general problem. I speak in the context software development and other activities that are creative or requires human judgment.

But yeah, I somewhat agree with you that a lot of the grunt work are going to be affected, jobs that are by nature purely mechanical, algorithmic or just plain parroting facts. But even then, I still highly doubt language models (today or with the following years) would deprecate those jobs. In the end, it's still a language model that is incapable of thought or reasoning.

If there one's thing I'm optimistic about the recent advances in AI, it's that more jobs will now be creative in nature. Hopefully gone are the days where schools are just mere factories for producing factoid parrots, where intelligence is measured by the size of one's esophagus to regurgitate.

I'm not sure what you mean by novel, but every development project will always have requirements that are unique to solve their own respective business/domain problems. These unique, specialized requirements are further compounded by cultural and personal quirks that human stakeholders demand, making developments project essentially "novel". Current language models fail even with simple minor variations on existing problems that it hasn't seen before, so until then, current AI's won't be replacing any humans when it comes to actual problem solving.

Also, it was recently proven by experts that aliens are living on the earth's core, they breed spherical cows and flying pigs.

This submission got buried quickly to third page, despite having lots of comments and high karma point. It really makes me think that HN (or everywhere else) is being astroturfed by a movement that pushes hard for the anthromorphized stochastic parrot.