westcoast49

I got a slight flashback to Blue Max, just because of the graphics.

It is possible though, to unify those things, and to see those other effects also as second or third order effects of the same underlying deficiencies that cause problems in social interaction. I believe, for instance, that our super power as neurotypicals is our ability to see, process, model and make sense, especially in real-time, of what's inside the minds of other people. In a way, we are wired to be comfortable with multiple worlds or perspectives around us, because we can see them, process them, and make sense of them. It makes sense to me that a person who is less good at this, will end up seeking a model of the world that is more rigid. If the worlds of other people around you seem chaotic to you, and uncomprehensible, then you will seek an environment and an understanding of the world that is more static, rigid or fixed. So, I think, at least on a conceptual level, it's possible to link the root causes of social problems to the root causes of the need for rigidity and stability.

I’m sure it does. If you ask a question, it forces you to think the problem through, which has a similar effect as the kind of therapeutic writing that is mentioned in this article.

I think you're right. I'm on the opposite side of it, but I have a colleague who routinely writes functions that are hundreds of lines long, with 30-40 local variables inside each function. I've come to realize that he does so because his brain allows him to do it. He has a brain that is more detail-oriented than my brain. Where I naturally see a problem as a "tree" of sub-problems with their own details, he naturally sees one large problem with 100 details. He naturally writes code to accommodate his own cognitive style, while I write code to accommodate my own cognitive style.

Moreover, I've come to realize that my colleague is not adverse to using abstractions if they are well established, and if they already exist. But he is (much) less inclined to invent or write new abstractions than I am. As you have concluded, I have also concluded that this is actually a matter of cognitive style, more than it's a symptom of "slop" or "cargo-culting of best practices".

Knowing At a high level what needed to happen to accomplish what the code did, I know for a fact it could have and should have been broken down more. However, because of the complexity of what he wrote, no one had the patience to go through it. When he left, the code got thrown away.

And today an LLM could probably have refactored it fairly well, automatically.

Kalman filtering is what's used in GPS navigation apps, is it not, to smooth out imperfections in the raw GPS signal?

If you could always do it over, an infinite redo so to say, nothing would matter. Every choice and outcome would become insignificant, because you could just redo it until it was just right.

The movie Groundhog Day comes to mind.

Or:

(e) because it’s subjective.

I'm just arguing that there has been no qualitative shift. The skills you need to produce pop music today are different than the skills that you needed before. Now you need to be able to operate a MIDI sequencer or a program like Ableton, which is not necessarily easier in and off itself, than for instance learning how to play a guitar. I think it's the same with AI tools and programming. We're just talking about a different set of skills that you need in order to be competitive. I don't think there has been any real shift from "skill needed" to "judgement needed". I think this relationship remains the same, both for pop music and programming, but also for the example of playing an instrument in a symphony orchestra.

Music was never an issue of skill. You might have needed skill in order to get to the point where you could use your judgement, but skill was never the deciding factor. So, I don't agree with Brian Eno's point that there has been some kind of seismic shift when it comes to this. Rather, it's just a matter of a shift in the type of skill that you need to have. The same is probably true when it comes to AI tools within the field of programming.

So this is WYSINWYG.

It seems to have merit as a subdivision scheme.

The shapes look a bit wonky when projected onto a map, though, and it may not be as intuitive to reason about as the hexagons that would (mostly) result from subdividing an icosahedron. With a subdivided icosahedron you end up with a regular lattice of shapes that is easier to reason about. I think an icosahedron might be a better fit for an indexing scheme for that reason, despite it's higher mathematical error in approximating the sphere at a given resolution.

I explored a similar idea four or five years ago, without being aware of H3. My goal was to find a compact multi-resolution geospatial height map format. My idea was closer to H3 than to yours, it seems.

Is it based upon repeated subdivision of an icosahedron?

I think it happens to a certain extent, if we do as the article says, and revisit our memories. We then probably reinterpret our memories in the context of our new and updated understanding of the world.

In other cases I believe it’s quite possible that our understanding of the world, say at age two, is so radically different from our adult understanding, that the old memories don’t even make any sense in the new context. They can’t be remapped in any meaningful manner.

We attach our early memories to our concept of the world as it was then. Afterwards, our concept of the world changes. As a result, those old memories sort of become dangling pointers. They refer to a world model that no longer exists in our minds.

It comes down to the quality of the abstractions. If they are well made and well named, you'd rather read this:

  axios.get('https://api.example.com', {
      headers: { 'Authorization': 'Bearer token' },
      params: { key: 'value' }
  })
  .then(response => console.log(response.data))
  .catch(error => console.error(error));

Because "things" are interconnected. There's not just one definition of Thing, whatever your thing might be. There's your perspective on Thing, and there's other peoples' perspective on Thing. So, whatever it is, Thing is not something that you can understand in solitude.

Understanding it means understanding both your perspective on it, and other peoples' perspective on it, at the same time. That's most peoples' reason for wanting to interact with random people. They see it as an opportunity to refine their understanding of Thing, whatever it might be.

I imagine this could be sold to upscale hotels or concert arenas, for display on a big screen in a reception area or foyer.

The cosine function itself is symmetrical around the Y-axis. Supposedly, the main advantage of the DCT is that it's better at representing symmetrical features in data sets, which is a good fit for both image and audio data.

Yes, I don't recall the game myself. But I recall Flashback. I had an Amiga at the time, but not a PC until a few years later. 1991 probably was about the time when the PC started to catch up to the Amiga in terms of graphics.

I like how ChatGPT can be used to to do fuzzy "queries" like this and come up with the right answer:

https://chatgpt.com/share/4cfcffdc-48e3-4780-a55a-091836c79c...

It guesses wrong to begin with, but then I give it the additional information that the game is French, and it gives me the right answer.

Here's the answer that ChatGPT gives to this riddle; it thinks that it must be the 1991 game Metal Mutant by French developer Silmarils:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOl_fBWIuac

The video seems to match your description quite well!

I'm guessing it must be because of some kind of deal between Microsoft and Financial Times. If that's so then probably there are also similar deals with other publishers.

Edit:

ChatGPT seems to disagree with me:

https://chatgpt.com/share/8b85ea2f-86bc-4c63-91fc-e32482c8e5...

(It says that it's more likely just an unintended side-effect of the mechanism that FT.com uses to let search engines like Bing or Google index their full articles.)

It’a still viewed as a peak intellectual game. And the magic is still there, just watch or listen to the fans of Magnus Carlsen when they’re viewing, discussing or analyzing his games.

better than most commercial offerings

The audacity!

Sean Baxter probably got close when he created Circle C++. Other than that, I think you're right.

If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself would be a relative claim which would undermine the assertion as a universal position.

Moral relativism means that everyone views the world through the lens of their own experiences. And my statement about moral relativism is also, as you point out, viewed through the lens of my own experiences (with that particular topic). But the second statement does not undermine the first one, instead it sort of "recurses" over it.

Scott Adams has tried to describe it. He says that a good recipe for a joke is something that almost makes sense, but not quite. In other words, it has to be slightly absurd, but also slightly sensible, at the same time. A lot of Seinfeld jokes are along those lines.

I tend to think it's specifically tied to physical activity. My explanation is that we're conditioned, as a species, to survive by performing physical tasks during the day, to a degree where the brain expects it. If we sit still in front of a computer all day, and do nothing else, it creates a disconnect between what our body and brain is built to expect, and what we actually get.

I enjoy running, even when I do it alone. I run at a moderate pace, and it's more like a meditation and a timeout than anything else. I've heard a lot of runners saying the same. I don't think solitary exercise needs to be a chore.

I think of ChatGPT as a natural language query engine for unstructured data. It knows about the relationships that are described in it's natural language input training data set, and it allows the same relationships to be queried from a wide range of different angles using queries that are also formulated in natural language.

When it hallucinates, I find that it's usually because I'm asking it about a fringe topic where it's training data set is more sparse, or where the logical connections are deeper than it's currently able to "see", a sort of a horizon effect.