Hey of course, happy to meet and exchange about our fun projects. You can send me an email using the address in the above comment and we'll setup something!
I looked at github and came away with the impression it's very much still a work in progress, but you seem to imply it's closer to being complete?
Does nrepl work well? Can I just load a relatively arbitrary cljc file?
This discussion made me check it out as I'd like to use it in conjunction with some C++ files/libs, but looking at the project left me really quite unsure as to it's current state.
jank is still under heavy development. It is not released yet. A lot of features are working, or complete, but the language is at least several months out from being alpha released.
Exactly, construct a team to tackle a large enough problem, disband the team once the challenge is met. Hopefully the challenge statement concludes that sufficient documentation of the outcome is created.
But, I really don’t have all the answers, I just think cutting across disciplines is fruitless when you put 10 devs in a room and they work on 10 completely different things, which is how Agile is practiced where I have worked.
That can work in some environments, depending on expected support model.
A lot of organisations are doing product (vs project) development though, and personally I find it superior.
Teams that are responsible for running and operating the product they built are generally more incentivised to produce quality software. Nobody likes to be interrupted in the middle of a technical session or, even worse, in the middle of the night, because their application crashed - so they learn to build resilience in. They start optimising for operability, maintainability and extensibility - since they will be the ones operating, maintaining and extending.
The above is not the solution to all software delivery issues, and is not something that works everywhere, every time. Where it does, it produces better outcomes.
You are generally not going to be legally liable for things you do in ordinary security research, but you will sure as hell be liable if you do unauthorized serverside research. Apple bounty stories are invariably about clientside work with little to no legal risk.
Pollution is a tragedy of commons scenario, so our best tools for solving it are laws and policy that force behaviour.
I'd be surprised if it's completely impossible to do the resource extraction without minimising impact, we just don't tend to have much pressure to innovate in that direction.
The end user on the other hand, has the least power to change any of the dynamics you're describing and is usually least able to choose to do without.
I think you underestimate both the value and importance of individual action by users.
The best tools for preventing tragedies of the commons are collective and individual desire to do so.
Taking action and paying personal costs are incredibly important.
On the flip side, it is extremely difficult to force change top down without people willing to lead by example.
Looks at any place with nice commons and they are maintained though widespread desire to do so by individuals. Japan isn't free a litter due to harsh fines, regulatory action, and policing.
Except the commons in this case is a shared atmosphere. Unless we get other countries to agree to equally punitive actions, all we end up doing is giving them the license to accelerate their economies at our expense.
Its a shared atmosphere, so they will suffer the effects of it equally. This isn't a "just the US" type of thing. if you suffer from hurricanes or monsoons, earthquakes, and so on, it is in your best interest to reduce the effects of pollution. China was the biggest polluter, they still are, but they are taking measures.
We also haven't agreed to punitive actions, tax credits incentivize cleaning, but there is barely any punishment or accounting of it. Else coal which is probably the worst form of energy production would not exist.
Just out of curiosity, having looked at the blurb, I'm left wondering, what do you fill notebooks with?
Planning projects and what you want to do?
From the description, I'd personally think I could be labelled a scanner, but I'm trying to work out if this is a read now or read later book/
At present I'm interested in unpacking more of what's going on in my head and putting it down on paper, and I'm curious to know what reading the book gave you and if it will be useful in pulling out interesting stuff from my thoughts =)...
The book gives you permission to lean into your scanner personality type. It explains that exploring our ideas is often enough and you can do so in a notebook. Interestingly, I eventually complete many of the projects I write about in my Scanners Daybook. It could be that writing them down somehow solidifies the idea and focuses your mind. Still, writing it down is enough in many cases too and I’m perfectly happy to move on, having explored the idea as deeply as I wanted right now.
To people who claim that "thinking and reasoning require language", here is a problem:
Imagine standing at the North Pole of the Earth.
Walk in any direction, in a straight line, for 1 km.
Now turn 90 degrees to the left.
Walk for as long as it takes to pass your starting point.
Have you walked:
1. More than 2xPi km
2. Exactly 2xPi km
3. Less than 2xPi km
4. I never came close to my starting point.
Think about how you tried to answer this question and tell us whether it was based on language.
Just quoting this here in case anything happens to the tweet...
I agree with this, however I have one tiny nitpick, feel free to tell me if you think I'm wrong or being overly nitpicky, but the knowledge of the situation in which the phenomenon that he's describing occurs, I learned about entirely from language. So my ability to answer the question is based on that knowledge.
I'm aware that the reasoning problem itself doesn't utilise it, but a position and direction system in and of itself arguably also suffers from being insufficient.
I suppose I'm wondering if "setup" counts as needing language model?
I don't think the example is a good rebuttal of "thinking and reasoning require language".
It may be a decent challenge, probably still not an actual rebuttal, of "language is sufficient for all thinking and reasoning", but "X is required for Y" and "X is sufficient for everything encompassed by Y" are very different claims.
That's fair, it's not supposed to be a rebuttal of that :)...
Though now that you said it, I'm really thinking about the original statement.
Honest question, can you give me an example of thinking or reasoning that happens fully independently of reasoning via symbols or their manipulation?
I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but nothing is coming to mind right now :)...
Just thinking about the underlying statement and simplifying language down to symbolic expression. (I was originally going to say manipulation, but it doesn't feel like it quite fits...)
> Honest question, can you give me an example of thinking or reasoning that happens fully independently of reasoning via symbols or their manipulation?
I don't think we have anything but subjective, indirect understanding of how thinking happens, but I think that, at a minimum, what we describe as "reasoning" specifically is tightly conceptually related to, if not a subset of, manipulation of abstract symbols to which concrete experiences may be approximately mapped.
I'm not sure I'd say this is the same thing as language, but there's at a minimum a shared common symbol-manipulation underlying both. Do the capacities always come together? I'm not sure how we would know that, I think our ability to recognize reasoning is tied to it being mapped to language, and are ability to distinguish something as language rather than nonlinguistic signaling or mimicry of something else that is using language is tied to independent expression of reasoning through it.
If the brain actually used language to represent ideas in use, we should have succeeded in finding its https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar. Instead it seems more like language is a kind of lossy compression we keep reinventing for ideas, to export them from a brain in some tangible way and get them into another (even in the future).
Just because you use a mechanism for expressing your ideas and reasoning, doesn't mean that underlying reality has to confirm in any way to it?
We invent new symbols and terms all the time as we experience new phenomena. A universal grammar may still be possible, barring incompleteness anyway, we may just be lacking a whole bunch of ideas still...
@erik_seaberg the lack of success in finding a universal grammar is a logical leap. The failure to find something does not necessarily mean it doesn't exist. Language is powerful for expressing abstract ideas without explicitly saying them, which suggests language more than "lossy" compression because it's more similar to Shannon's lossless compression with prefix codes. I see where you're coming from though.
@Felcon If language is a mechanism for expressing ideas and reasoning, it should reflect our cognitive processes that generate those ideas, so " [...] Just because you use a mechanism for expressing your ideas and reasoning, doesn't mean that underlying reality has to confirm in any way to it" is a bit contradictory. Are our cognitive processes not included in reality?
The existance of a universal grammar is a specific hypothesis that requires empirical evidence. It's tiring to hear Chomsky's ideas parroted despite no empirical framework to stand on. What ideas could we be lacking? This argument is similar to String Theory proponents who kept pulling ideas out of the ether to support an unsubstantiated theory.
Firstly I meant conform btw, not confirm... Unfortunately it's too late to edit!
> Are our cognitive processes not included in reality?
Ah, this may not be productive, but I'm really just trying to tease apart different things.
Of course our cognitive processes exist in reality, however I would say there's nothing that requires that what they produce must materially map to reality.
We do not for example treat dreams as evidence, even though they run on our cognitive processes.
> It's tiring to hear Chomsky's ideas parroted despite no empirical framework to stand on.
To be honest, I had no idea I was doing that...
> What ideas could we be lacking?
I'm not claiming a lack of any specific ideas, I'm merely pointing out that considering that we do know that we invent terms for phenomena that we experience and I doubt that we have been exposed to even the majority of all phenomena, it seems unlikely that we can casually refute the existence of a universal grammar.
Absolutely, proving it does require evidence, which is in short supply and if I was pressed, I would suspect that it's existence is unlikely, but not impossible.
Now just to be clear, I don't mean that this is kind of reasoning can be useful for much else, but with regards to attempts to find some complete unification such as a universal grammar. In those specific cases things become a little fuzzier and reasonable people can disagree.
I would agree with you, except that I would say the reasoning problem itself not only utilizes language, but in fact hinges entirely on the language.
There's a bit of spatial knowledge involved to understand that you're walking in a circle around the north pole. But the reasoning needed to get the answer to the question is based on the language.
Specifically, the language tells us that our starting point is at the north pole. Then the language of the 4th point states "to pass your starting point", which has two meanings - to cross over the starting point (as in passing the finish line in a race) or to pass by it off to the side (as in passing a store as you're traveling along a road). But since we're walking in a circle around it, we'll never pass it in either sense of the word.
Had it used different language like "How far did you have to walk to complete a circle around your starting point?" then the answer would be quite different, as would the reasoning.
But that wasn't the language used. So the language completely determines the answer and the reasoning involved, including whether you even need to think about distance.
One could also argue that all four of the answer options are wrong, partly since 1km is not a very far distance, and therefore you were always close to your starting point, depending on your ideal of 'close'. But more specifically simply because the language saying you "never came close" to it would be nonsense because you started right at your starting point, and of course can't get much closer than that. So again you don't even really need to account for distance. The language alone determines it.
> But since we're walking in a circle around it, we'll never pass it in either sense of the word.
Are we, though? Or did we start on a great circle around the Earth from the random point 1km from the north pole?
It depends on whether you assume someone has in mind a "straight line" following a map, or what they'd actually experience as a straight line given the scale of the Earth.
I think the problem the author is putting is that it does not have any reasoning behind. It is a sheer coincidence it works eventually for problems that requires logic.
Mostly it could be because the dataset increases chances of it being right and not because it did process anything
You might be onto an interesting new view of the web here, if you've ever seen https://www.builtwith.com, something similar that also processes script tags and downweights based on what the script is would also add to this effect.
At the very least I'd be interested in looking at such a site and seeing how it differs from https://www.millionshort.com =)...
I would say that in this forum we try to be charitable to each other and it's certainly the way I like to conduct myself.
The poster you're replying to has so far merely provided you with an opportunity to clarify or expand on what you would consider "extremist violent rhetoric".
We're all pretty curious people here, and I would say reasonably opinionated, so I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to ask you to clarify your position.
We're not going to get to the high level of discourse we like and expect in this space without a bit of curiosity and generous assumptions to our fellow posters =)...
On that axis it's bad, on the axis of designers and people who value visual tools like that it's productivity and ease of use is off the charts, the number of people who I know jump on and find using the tool frankly joyful surprises me at times.
It's executed very well for what it's doing, the fact that you can't export the outputs into code is in some sense incidental, because it's not a requirement that anyone I know who uses it cares much about.
I built a full econsim for fun a while back with working markets based on order books and would absolutely love to chat to you if you're interested?