tikwidd

I'm intrigued by the redirect to facebook.com/sorry.php. Are there any other .php url paths on facebook.com?

It's because the first vowel in 'about' is an unstressed schwa. It sounds unnatural in English to stress or lengthen a schwa.

(The only exception I can think of is 'evennn'. e.g. Bob and Sue are at a dinner party with friends. Bob tells everyone that he likes all vegetables. Sue knows he doesn't like broccoli, so she nudges Bob and says "evennn...?". This makes sense if 'even' in fact contains a syllabic nasal consonant rather than schwa: /'ivn=/.)

That said, I don't think it's a big deal!

Is anyone else using XState on the backend?

At work we have an interactive guided process/wizard that is currently implemented with an unwieldy low-code engine. I've been replacing this with a Node API that uses XState to encode process states. The API endpoints wait for XState to enter a 'ready' state (calling out to external services in the process), then pass meta properties of the current state back to the client.

One nice thing about this is that I can translate the existing low-code model into XState more or less directly. And the state machine can be rendered as a process flow diagram using viz tools in the Xstate ecosystem or some straightforward custom tooling.

Matter does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative progress of time. Every way we measure "matter" involves the progress of time: microscope, telescope, ruler, calipers, vibrations of photons hitting the eye.

When you say that the earth has rotated 15°, it simply means an hour has elapsed. When you move 60 miles while the earth rotates 15°, you have gone 60 mph.

The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Matter is a creation of the mind.

If there were no time, there would be no matter.

(sorry)

We now know that exoplanets and the conditions for life abound in the universe. Where the conditions for life abound, the null hypothesis ought to be that life abounds. In discussions of alien life and intelligence, we are often biased by earlier states of knowledge about the universe and our position in it. When we first started digging up dinosaur bones, we came up with fantastical notions of creatures to explain these artifacts that were mysterious to us. Notions that fit into our existing worldview, drawn from folk knowledge and cultural history. Once archeologists started studying the bones carefully, they gave us stories more fantastical than we could have ever imagined in the framework of our folk knowledge. I suspect the same will turn out to be true of UAPs.

For example, UAP stories are often ridiculed on the premise that intelligent alien life would not bother to come all this way just to hide out in the ocean. That's our folk knowledge of aliens: they like to travel, are eager to make contact with other life forms and are capable of doing so. But the elusive behaviour of UAPs is exactly what we would expect from an "unmanned" scientific probe. The home planet would be dozens or hundreds of light years away, so the craft would need to be completely autonomous in the absence of any communication system. Where does an autonomous probe go to look for signs of life? Oceans.

After training my physics simulator on thousands of hours of video footage of trees moving in the wind, arborists tell me the trees are much more realistic (they are getting worried that I might put them out of business). But the physicists are still not satisfied. How many more videos do I need to generate the laws of motion?

ChatGPT-style AI should be called AC - Artificial Communication. It is trained on an extremely limited selection of utterances - most of our thinking is never written down. But no matter how many utterances are plugged in, the system will never be able to learn how to think. Its capabilities are stochastic and generalising, not systematic and generative.

An utterance is the expression or outcome of an internal thought process. A machine learning model is trained on the outcome, but not the process. Utterances look like thoughts to us; like pareidolia, we can't help but find thoughts in utterances. This is what makes ChatGPT so compelling.

People don't learn how to think either - it's a capability that grows from a genetic endowment. After the next AI winter, when we get over the spectacle of Artificial Communication, we may begin to examine our own generative capacities for thought. We'll know we're on the right track when AI is slow, uncooperative and childish, fails to thrive when exposed to nonsense training data, and requires very little of the right kind of training data to acquire its language.

My thoughts on the incident, organised as a series of nested propositions.

0. The Nord Stream pipeline incident was not an accident.

1. The pipeline was sabotaged by a state actor.

   a. Only a state had the capability to carry it out undetected.

   b. The sabotage was in violation of international law.

   c. Evidence of the sabotage would cause a diplomatic scandal.

   d? Either Russia or the United States sabotaged the pipeline.

   e? The sabotage was authorised at the highest levels.

   a? Russia had no motivation to destroy it.

   b. Russia controls the pipeline, and could choose to turn it off.

   c. No state has presented evidence that Russia was involved in the sabotage.

   d. The area is highly monitored by US and US-aligned countries.

   a. The US had strategic and economic motivations to prevent the pipeline from operating.

   b. The US govt made public statements prior to the sabotage that, had they been made by the Kremlin, would have uncontroversially implicated Russia in the eyes of the American public.

   c. The US has the means to destroy it.

   d? The US has the means to hide their involvement in the sabotage from European allies and the US public. 

   e. The Western public have no appetite for stories which portray Russia as a victim, or US/EU as villains. Hiding their involvement is therefore trivial, since media outlets have no motivation to investigate the truth.

   f. Conversely, Russian state and media have no incentive to investigate, since the Russian audience takes it for granted that NATO was responsible.

Thanks for standing by your principles on this one dang.

I was hoping there would be some discussion of the SONAR buoy remote detonation story - is it plausible (from a technical perspective)? Has it been done before?

Some random folk practices I've come across:

* Blocking, stacking and pulling creep camps in DOTA. Unintended behaviours that became core game mechanics.

* Comments in the tag section of Tumblr posts, to avoid the comments appearing in a reblog ("Why do people use tags on tumblr instead of comments?" [1])

* The appropriation of switching MOSFETs such as the IRF510, designed for low frequencies, in homebrew amateur radio QRP power amplifiers. "In talking to International Rectifier, they were floored to find out QRPers were using them at 7MHz or higher." [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/nu4vpa/w...

[2] http://www.iw3sgt.it/IW3SGT_PRJ/IW3SGT_AMP_LF/ClassDEF1.pdf

Very interesting, thanks!

How does the vocabulary generation work?

Show the results and how you will achieve them at a business level of detail.

e.g. "I will change parameters A, B and C of widget X" -> "I will optimise widget X to achieve higher throughput of process Y, saving you $Z dollars per widget".

You don't have to get into the details of A, B and C because they shouldn't be relevant in a business conversation.

The goalposts should be to create something useful, not trying to reach some nebulous criterion of "true intelligence". Submarine engineers don't labour over the question of whether their new designs are "truly swimming".

There's nothing indeterminate about the algorithm though. It's a fixed set of instructions fed into a Turing compatible machine like any other program.

An algorithm with an indeterminate output is still an algorithm.

This program, like everything that has been called "AI", is following an algorithm. It's an impressive algorithm but not fundamentally different from my dishwasher.

In the Enlightenment period, philosophers and scientists marvelled at mechanical automata, machines that simulated aspects of digestion, the circulatory system and the brain. New developments in machine learning are rehashing the same philosophical questions that were raised in the 17th century in response to technological progress.

You still have to get from "unions are bad" to "union discussion should be censored".

Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Chomsky and Berwick if you're interested in some of the deeper questions in linguistics. It's a bit heavy but aimed at a general technical audience.

I wish all that grant money was spent on trying to cure the underlying diseases.

Do submarines swim?

Next.js or a create-react-app project for the frontend, which you can host for free on Azure Static Web Apps.

Azure functions or Google Firebase for the backend.

With this approach you might not need to pay a cent depending on your usage, plus you can take advantage of the large ecosystem of React components. For a "non-serverless" approach, I would set up a VM on Linode and use docker-compose behind nginx.

A big downside with the Scuttlebutt system from a user perspective is that once I post something, it's out there forever. The best I can do is ask my friends to delete their copy of my post.

And on HN especially, where we all dive into systems engineering to build reliable pipelines and fix bugs to ensure they don't happen ever again... it's so weird to see the same ppl just say quit. Because that literally solves nothing for anyone.

That's a good way of selling the idea of unionisation to the HN crowd, as a solution to an engineering problem. We have unpatched vulnerabilities in the system which are being exploited.

This is a good example of why IT professionals need to unionise. Nobody should have to put up with abuse at work. With a unionised workforce we could create standards for ethical employment relationships and independent mediators. Without a union it seems there are limited alternatives -

Leave the job: Boss is not held accountable, no justice. OP's replacement now has to deal with the same problem. OP is forced to change jobs under potentially less favourable conditions and potentially without a good reference.

Sue the boss: Expensive, time consuming and risky if you even have a case. Still probably need to find a new job anyway.

An array of tactile antennae/feelers?

If there is no coherent notion of physical or material, there is no notion of immaterial either. Chomsky talks about this at length in "The Machine, The Ghost and the Limits of Understanding" (previously discussed on HN here [1]).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448901

Or we will realise the conclusions of the 17th century philosophers, that there is no coherent notion of physical/material. Anything we can reason about is a construction of the mind on the occasion of sense.

Declaring peaceful intentions strikes me as the opposite of aggression.

There are calls for independence, but ROC maintains a claim over the Chinese mainland which constitutionally requires a referendum to change. Source: ROC constitution.