Amazing to see this. I just landed after a week in Japan where we discovered this word and instantly recognised how it applies to our team. Made heavy use of it when pitching to explain our passion for what we do.
B2B SaaS founder - Direct sales (contacts, LinkedIn, in-person industry events). Client advocates voluntarily promoting the product within the industry.
This take is less than generous to Penrose. In a recent debate (which was less than fruitful as debates go), Penrose said this regarding this paper:
> Moderator: ... saying that these effects are now experimentally established, so I thought Sir Roger must now be triumphant, the experiments are now in favour, so I'm very curious where you now are with your theory.
> Penrose: Well, as far as experiments are concerned, I think one has to be a bit cautious about it all, so I'm not an expert on experiments, but I certainly have a colleague who, although the recent experiments to refer to seem to be supportive of the point of view, I'm putting forward, he was a bit skeptical, thinking it might be a bit wishful thinking experiments, so I just have a neutral position on this, I can't really judge the experiments.
> And exactly how one might make experimental observations to see whether the argument would have to be that one has quantum effects in microtubules, these little tiny parts of cells, and this has been the argument for quite a long time, ever since I had a communication from Stuart Hammeroff.
Source: Quantum Consciousness Debate: Does the Wave Function Actually Exist? | Penrose, Faggin & Kastrup @ 5m55s (https://youtu.be/0nOtLj8UYCw?t=347)
This evokes some strong nostalgia. My formative years were spent playing Doom IPX on LAN (DOS), Trials of Battle (OS/2) on LAN, and Galactic Civilizations, learning to code with REX, and spending time on internet chat rooms. We had an Windows NT 4 box in the house which was for my dad's work, and I didn't touch it much as DOS games either didn't run or were a real PITA to get working, so OS/2 Warp 3/4 and DOS were where I resided most of the time.
We bought a new primary car last April, it was a toss up between an electric and a petrol/diesel, and we opted for a diesel car in the end.
Reasons: range anxiety, and war anxiety.
I want a Tesla, but the problem is that an electric car becomes a giant paperweight in an emergency.
We have a secondary, small electric car and we use it for short local trips. There’s been more than a few instances where a lapse resulted in not being able to use it because it wasn’t charged fully. And don’t get me started on the state of public charges, it’s a mess.
Don’t get me wrong, I like electric, but edge cases are real and important and so they must be planned for.
Methinks you assume too much. Rooftop solar is only really an option for someone that owns a SFH, or is in a townhome with a fairly permissive HOA (In the US).
Someone living in an apartment probably has no ability to access reliable solar except via the primary grid (which we assume will be down in case of emergency.) And in other places, like California, having solar panels is growing increasingly expensive due to the additional fees imposed by the electric utilities (and nevermind the initial costs.)
Gas is relatively easy to stockpile in large volumes, it has a huge energy density, and is highly useful for other things, not to mention being fairly portable. You can even use it for producing electricity by using a generator.
If that is the case, chances are you are in not a good position for any emergency. For ‘emergencies’ you want to be outside the city, with a big stockpile of food and clean water. Maybe enough land to grow some veggies. Extra points for solar and a battery. A gas powered car won’t save you in any real emergency. Do you stock 100liters of gasoline in your home?
> A gas powered car won’t save you in any real emergency.
And unless you happen to live somewhere with reliable off-grid electric generation, neither will your EV. What are you going to use your EV for if you live on the 4th floor of an apartment building that's a 1500' walk from the closest parking spot? Run a giant extension cord up to the balcony?
> Do you stock 100liters of gasoline in your home?
I keep a jerrycan or two of gas in the outdoor storage space that I refill every half year or so. Sure, that's not 100L, more like 40, but it's not nothing. I could easily expand my storage capacity to 200L or so without much problem if I decided I needed to. And like I said, gas has many uses, including as a currency in more extreme circumstances.
No, in an emergency, we all run out to the gas station to fill the containers that we just bought. Then we find out they are out, because that is what happens in an emergency.
> Huh? What emergency? You will always have solar on your roof. I think in emergencies, gas will run out much quicker than electricity?
You're assuming having solar on your roof (most people still don't) but more importantly, assuming an emergency where you get to stay home.
For example when we had to evacuate due to California wildfires a few years ago, we left the EV behind. Doesn't have enough range to be a good evacuation car and who knows how busy charging stations were going to be with everyone doing the same.
We have gas cars too so no big deal. But having only an EV in such an emergency would be scary.
This is incredible. Not just because of the engineering that went into such a long lived machine, but also because of the ingenuity of the teams that have looked after this mission and those currently working on it.
Half a century of operation. Bits of data, like gold dust, peppering our radio telescopes with telemetry from the edges of our protective solar shell, and beyond.
Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated, but the pushing of boundaries of our understanding is awe inspiring. It carries the symbolism of some of the best parts of humanity’s desire to explore.
This sort of news, at least for me, is an antidote to the darker side of our species. It reinvigorates my hope in what we can achieve when working together.
Thank you to NASA and the scientific community at large.
The stability of society (specifically American, specifically California/Caltech/JPL/Pasadena) must also be marveled at. That's 2 or 3 generations of engineers and scientists that were trained well enough to actually get things done. This is a marvel of teaching, technical communication, and societal infrastructure. Notably, NASA/JPL has maintained its prestige and funding for that entire time, as has Caltech.
There are many institutions (Sears), and world superpowers (USSR) from 50 years ago that seemed like they would dominate forever, but are gone.
This is a really good point, especially for a country that is so young and that has grown so fast. Maybe the instability resulting from that growth is yet to come but it doesn't detract from what NASA and JPL have accomplished so far.
The thought occurred to me some years ago that a key aspect of governmental institutions is their durability, particularly in the face of adversarial politics. Though the inefficiency of government services is quite often grossly exaggerated, there's much consideration which has to be made of the trade-offs between efficiency and durability.
This should be front-of-mind whenever someone proposes a start-up to address some long-standing social, societal, and/or political issues:
> The thought occurred to me some years ago that a key aspect of governmental institutions is their durability, particularly in the face of adversarial politics. Though the inefficiency of government services is quite often grossly exaggerated, there's much consideration which has to be made of the trade-offs between efficiency and durability.
Governmental institutions are durable even when they are detrimental to society, as long as the government has enough police and military might to prevent insurrections. The society must put up with grossly inefficient institutions simply because the government has a monopoly on some sectors.
Education on an ongoing project is far easier then rebuilding fresh, even with better science and engineering.
We often see this in infrastructure, like train electrification, tunnel boring and so on. Trams is a good one, so many cities got ride of their tram system, 50 years later they want to build it again and many of them issues.
"Reliably passing down information" includes a lot of stuff a lot less impressive than "reliably passing down the information required to keep operational a spacecraft mid-flight at the edge of our solar system."
Well the systems controlling Voyager are quite simple, being 1970s technology. Obscure by today's standards perhaps, but not terribly complicated. 70KB of memory, programmed in Fortran and probably some amount of machine or assembly code.
Edit: apparently, due to the post-Apollo budget environment in the 1970s, the Voyager program had to keep costs down so while some new systems were developed, they also reused technology from the Viking program, not even updating or enhancing it.
"The Voyager CCS and Viking CCS would ultimately have the same amount of memory (just under 70kB) despite the routines and programs for Voyager being much more complex. In-flight programming allowed for new routines and programs to be uploaded regularly in non-volatile memory and eliminated the need for large amounts of memory to be required onboard."
I didn't take the GP seriously because of this. Papyrus and clay and stone carvings do not equal operating a network of brittle, bespoke devices across the scale of a solar system. The existence of language, or writing, or even cathedrals or pyramids, do not eclipse this accomplishment. The odds of losing control of a system is proportional to both time and complexity of the system, and the GP ignores the latter factor.
"Reliably" passing down information for future generations is a recent phenomenon. Just go and look at the history of mathematics and there were multiple periods where information was lost and rediscovered.
We are talking past each other, I would not consider a few religions being able to pass down information about that specific religion to future generations as humanity as a whole being able to pass down information reliably. Especially given that the "Vedas" is wholly useless information while things like the Pythagorean theorem were discovered, lost, then rediscovered. We've only recently rediscovered how Romans created concrete?
Also given humanity has existed for many years longer than 4000 years and 4000 years really only represents 160 generations of humans I don't consider that impressive.
We literally have clay tablets from ancient babylon and books that are thoisands of years old. We have traditional crafts like blacksmiths and pottery that were taught for thousands of years.
>Over decades, the crew members who have remained have forgone promotions, the lure of nearby Silicon Valley and, more recently, retirement, to stay with the spacecraft. NASA funding, which peaked during the Apollo program in the 1960s, has dwindled, making it next to impossible to recruit young computer-science majors away from the likes of Google and Facebook.
> NASA funding, which peaked during the Apollo program in the 1960s, has dwindled, making it next to impossible to recruit young computer-science majors away from the likes of Google and Facebook.
This problem can be attacked in a couple of ways, one way is to increase compensation sure, but another is to make it possible to have healthcare and housing on the salary they do offer. The chasm between pay and cost of living is huge and growing.
I've long thought universal healthcare (& UBI) would enable more people to take entrepreneurial risks, but I hadn't considered that passion jobs like NASA could also be beneficiaries.
UBI and universal healthcare would enable _so_ many people to take risks that they can't today. We would see an explosion in the arts, in fundamental science, in passion projects like this. It would be absolutely incredible.
Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money and all they would do is buy drugs. And that's why we can't have nice things.
> Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them
You might argue that there's more tech came out of the UK (which still has some sort of healthcare, and had free education until recently) than there should considering its population and economy size. E.g. ARM, HTML, cloned sheep...
Also quite a bit of popular music came from the UK.
And Harry Potter was written by a person on state benefits.
The Scandinavian social safety net is excellent and I think the positive effects of that are apparent. People can take larger risks than they can in the US, but still nowhere near as large as they could with UBI
Also very high taxes to pay for it. Very productive granted, but also taxed at a commensurate rate. Plus Norway now has a bottomless pit of oil money keeping it afloat for the foreseeable future.
Go there and look at how they live; that takes inspiration. The benefits of their social welfare are apparent in their lifestyle compared to US daily life.
And the flip: Shouldn't Scandinavia be overrun with drug-addled do-nothings if social welfare is so bad?
I completely agree and am generally supportive of universal healthcare and the welfare state and suspect the Scandinavian model would be an improvement on the current US state of affairs.
I’m just skeptical of the parent poster claim that a Cambrian innovation explosion awaits us all if we would just welfare harder.
They spend a lot of money on education, and almost everyone is multilingual – Finns generally speak both Finnish and Swedish natively given they’re the state languages, and many I’ve met have very fluent English and German alongside. So I imagine they do pretty well. Look at Linus Torvalds, for example…
Oh btw, “Scandinavians” only includes countries in the Swedish axis of influence, so to include Finns alongside one has to say “Nordics”. Finland is Nordic without being Scandinavian (technically)
Capital is concentrated in US, so you have to go there, make some good money and if that doesn’t work — fall back into safety net of your home country.
> UBI and universal healthcare would enable _so_ many people to take risks that they can't today. We would see an explosion in the arts, in fundamental science, in passion projects like this. It would be absolutely incredible.
> Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money ...
If you look at that 'half' as people representing the status quo power, they don't want an explosion in such things that cause change.
This is a tangental subject but I disagree. I think this is one of the many excuses used by people who feel pressure to be entreprenurial but in their hearts are not risk-takers. And that's OK -- the world needs a lot of people who work for others.
If you are a risk taker, especially a young one, lack of UBI or health insurance is not going to stop you. It never has in the past, when those things didn't exist.
I think there’s a substantial number of people who aren’t averse to calculated entrepreneurial risk specifically, where negative outcomes are more predictable/bounded.
These are your types who currently bootstrap themselves and grow slowly rather than seek explosive growth by way of external funding, and I think you’d see both see this group grow and become more bold if basics like housing weren’t something that was ever in question.
Your "especially a young one" is doing a lot of work.
I anecdotally know a number of people, both in and out of tech, who would prefer to be independent contractors or small-business owners - in fields that they know well, and stand better than even chances of ending up with higher total compensation - but have families. Their fear of losing healthcare benefits (temporarily, whilst they get their businesses off the ground; or longer-term, should their businesses fail) keeps them working for others.
The sibling post about "calculated risk" is correct. The conclusion these folks have made (not to strike out on their own, under current circumstances) is likely the correct one, but it's a continual drag on total economic potential. Worse, this is a cost which isn't captured by calculations of what's currently spent on health-care, nor can be off-set against what a more robust social safety net would "cost". It is, nevertheless, considerable.
If you feel that way about this, I would highly recommend "Carrying the Fire" for you as a tremendous read. Out of all the Apollo-era books I've read, I'd say this one does the best job of mixing in really interesting technical details to really get you to peek at just how much complexity there really was (and may I even suggest giving NASSP a go so you can even try it yourself) while also doing a fantastic job at connecting it to the human and meaning side of the whole endeavor. Just a fantastic read, and sounds like you'd be the perfect target audience for it!
In fairness to the workplaces that I've been in, documentation for a software stack, or even the product, from 18 months ago may as well be in Swahili for as much good as it would do any new member to the team
Just like the comparison to code quality I often see is any such NASA thread: it's a whole different ballgame when one is sending a spacecraft out, or carrying lives to space, than "I tried to send a Slack message and it did a sowweee,oopsiez"
I've been trying to "learn" the missions more thoroughly by flying them on Orbiter and NASSP, and just the sheer amount and depth of documentation that is accessible today is truly astounding. There's something awe-inspiring about sitting and my computer and looking at the mission plan, only to then not understand the "why" of this particular switch that I'm throwing, to then open a pdf with a "astronaut training booklet" which explains the overview of the thing I'm using, to then open another pdf with the detail technical documentation of it, to then a schematic of the equipment should I at any point (but prob not) ever try building one myself.
The care that must go into writing and testing software that goes out to a machine like this is incredible. I write software that, if and when it fails, it fails hard and it just comes back with no added cost to me while I go ahead and look at what went wrong and release a fix within the hour.
Not having that failure feedback loop is daunting. I really respect that kind of work.
These spacecraft don't have CPUs, at least not the way we think of them, in the sense of a single microprocessor IC. Their "CPUs" are built from discrete logic gates on CMOS and TTL ICs, the way the earliest digital arcade games were.
Shared this with my son who really enjoyed reading that others share his optimism about our species. Very well said, thank you. You've impacted the outlook of a young man trying to figure out his place in the universe, who often times struggles with noticing the rare opportunity it is to be gold dust peppering a radio telescope.
I understand that this comment probably wasn’t meant in this way but it comes off as condescending of people from only a few thousand years ago and it feels like my friends were being spoken about (personally!)
We have to remember that it’s humans we're talking about here, and that this wasn’t exactly that long ago. They would have had the same cognitive potential as us, if not more simply because we’re lazy ungrateful creatures living in a level of comfort that royalty of old could not even imagine. The cost of a mistake in their “real world” was often death, and they _had_ to get it right so that their family didn’t die.
People can spontaneously self organise and achieve all sorts of things “on the spot”, kids in the playground do this daily- making up fun games without any parental input. I don’t believe you need a whole level of social development beyond “I won’t kill you, let’s be friends” to achieve great things. This becomes complicated as groups grow of course, but I would imagine most of us have experienced this on some level.
Necessity is the mother of innovation. Doing something the hard/impossible way a few times will force you to be creative, especially when you need to feed your family/group.
I’ve been actively using it and it’s become my go-to in a lot of cases - Google is more for verification when I smell something off or if it doesn’t have up to date information. Here are some examples:
• reviewing contract changes, explaining hard to parse legalese
• advice on accounting/tax when billing international clients
• visa application
• boilerplate django code
• learnt all about smtp relays, and requirements for keeping a good reputation for your IPs
• travel itinerary
• domain specific questions (which were 50/50 correct at best…)
• general troubleshooting
I’m using it as a second brain. I can quickly double check some assumptions, get a clear overview of a given topic and then direction on where I need to delve deeper.
Anyone who still thinks that this is “just a statistical model” doesn’t get it. Sure, it’s not sentient or intelligent, but it sure as hell making my life easier. I won’t be going back to the way I used to do things.
100% this. It's also game changing for learning a new language (of any type, not just programming), any of the boring parts of software engineering like most programming tasks (it's like a personal intern -- sure you have to check their work and the quality is all over the place but still, dang I love it), and even a bit of therapy.
Learning a new language is a really cool use case. Especially when it gets to the point where you can talk with it and it corrects pronunciation, etc. even just the practise of random conversation is a cool idea.
I'm studying Chinese. If I run across a sentence whose grammar I can't parse, I paste it in and say, "Can you explain this sentence?" It will usually break it down, phrase by phrase, explaining what each thing means and how it fits within the whole. If it doesn't, you can ask "Can you break it down in more detail?" If there's a specific word you don't understand, you can say "What is the word X doing in this sentence?"
You have to watch it, because it does hallucinate (at least, GPT-3.5; I'm using the API and haven't been given access to GPT-4 yet). In one instance, it said that a series of characters meant X in Chinese, when in fact I happened to know it was just a transliteration of a different language, and not in Chinese at all. But it's still helpful enough to be worth using.
You can also ask it to give you example sentences with a specific word; and I've had some success asking it to generate sentences in which then word is used in the same way, or with the same grammar structure.
I’d be very careful with relying on gpt for anything health related; I’m not saying there can’t be benefits, just that the risks increase exponentially.
Risky vs what? Googling? Not doing anything? Waiting for a therapist? It’s extremely sensitive to human emotional dynamics. It is also extremely biased toward non violent communication, which is very hard for humans.
Personally I wouldn't use gpt as a therapist but I've seen enough bad or useless therapists in my time to say that it's worth a shot for most people, especially if you need help now
As risky as any other health related self help, plus the added risk of unreliability.
When GPT proves itself to be reliably beneficial, then therapists will use it or recommend it themselves. Until then it’s an experimental tool at best.
I would say self-help is quite unreliable already, more unreliable doesn’t make it much worse.
The authority argument is pointless. The therapist must value person’s wellbeing above their continued income for this to apply. In theory they should, but it would take a lot to convince me and I would want to know what’s the incentive behind such a recommendation. An to be clear, I’m not saying LLM can be your therapist.
Can I just say that Im actually become scared reading your comment? Personally I would never ask chatGPT these questions because for me these questions are hard to verify, and knowing how often AI likes to hallucinate.. I just can't trust it.
You mentioned 50/50 correctness in domain questions. I can't be sure that other hard to verify questions do not follow these percentage..
It IS dangerous. You must apply critical thinking to what’s in front of you. You can’t blindly believe what this thing generates! Much like heavy machinery, it’s a game changer when used correctly, and likewise it can be extremely damaging if you use it without appropriate care.
Quantum computing has a similar problem, in that the error rate is high. As does untrained data entry. You can put things in place to help counter this once you know it's happening.
Google search might uncover BS too, but I'm already calibrated to expect it, and there are plenty of sources right alongside whatever I pulled the result from where I can go immediately get a second opinion.
With the LLMs, maybe they're spot on 95% of the time, but the 5% or whatever is bullshit, but it's all said in the same "voice" with the same apparent degree of confidence and presented without citations. It becomes both more difficult to verify a specific claim (because there's not one canonical source for it) as well as it involves more cognitive load (in that I specifically have to context switch to another tool to check it).
Babysitting a tool that's exceptionally good at creating plausible bullshit every now and then means a new way of working that I don't think I'm willing to adopt.
I'm excited about the potential of travel itineraries once extensions are available. What if I can tell it where I want to go, and it could just handle picking the best flights and accomodations for me and I didn't have to spend any time searching airline or hotel websites. I'm curious to know more detail about how you're using it for travel itineraries now.
I have used it to build travel itineraries and was tempted to write a travel app around that. Until I realized that some of the hotels and places it recommends do not actually exist or have existed in the past. It overconfidently also publishes broken booking links to these fake hotels. I am hoping that with chatGPT plugins, it would get better.
The real time applications are a game changer. I haven’t dabbled with that yet! Pasting things from emails and summarising - then keeping in my notes app. Also for planning out days when on holiday.
