And many more who sell crops, chemicals, power, machine parts, cars, concrete...
Many companies have billions of customers and no trace of lock-in or virality at all. You might want to shift your perspective a little and remember that there is a world outside of Silicon Valley.
Verizon competes with T-Mobile and AT&T. Comcast competes with a different arm of AT&T, Google Fiber, various older satellite internet services and now Starlink.
Outside the US, broadband providers are still huge but differences in regulation mean there are five or six of them in most markets.
Overall, I think my point still stands: claiming that you can't build a giant company without Silicon Valley's growth formula is ridiculously narrow. The vast majority of big companies are built by other methods.
No, it really isn't a good idea to base your theories of psychiatric medicine on a satirical half-hour cartoon show about swearing construction-paper children.
It is true that there are some corners of the internet where probably-healthy people meet to discuss what it's like to have disorders that they probably don't have, or in some cases disorders that might not even exist.
But you really ought to talk to some actual doctors and patients before you conclude that their problems aren't real, or can be overcome by pretending they don't exist.
South Park is poking fun at the industry, but it's humor. It doesn't tell you what the problem is. I only mentioned it because it's a good related episode :)
My point is not about pretending problems don't exist. It's about focusing on encouraging people rather than focusing on claiming who they are.
The biggest per-student spender on education in the developed world is the US:
> In 2019, the United States spent $15,500 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $11,300 (in constant 2021 U.S. dollars). At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $37,400 per FTE student, which was more than double the average of OECD countries ($18,400; in constant 2021 U.S. dollars).
And everybody knows that US outcomes in primary and secondary education are not great. (Actually they're considerably better than many realize, but not as good as, say, Finland, which spends much less). So budgets aren't everything.
And yet, at both the top and in the broad middle, US universities have some of the best outcomes in the world. So big budgets can still be good.
Human brains are complicated. Big groups of them are more so. Transferring output of some brains to other brains in big groups is not at all straightforward.
It's no wonder people would rather swap platitudes about bigger budgets.
If you want to learn about symbolic AI, there are a lot of more recent sources than PAIP (you could try the first half of AI: A Modern Approach by Russel and Norvig), and this has been true for a while.
If you read PAIP today, the most likely reason is that you want a master class in Lisp programming and/or want to learn a lot of tricks for getting good performance out of complex programs (which used to be part of AI and is in many ways being outsourced to hardware today).
None of this is to say you shouldn't read PAIP. You absolutely should. It's awesome. But its role is different now.
Some parts of PAIP might be outdated, but it still has really current material on e.g. embedding Prolog in Lisp or building a term-rewriting system. That's relevant for pursuing current neuro-symbolic research, e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.08381.pdf.
Other parts like coding an Eliza chatbot are indeed outdated. I have read AIMA and followed a long course that used it, but I didn't really like it. I found it too broad and shallow.
I have never given emacs a fair shot, so I can't compare the two. Neovim makes it easier to get modern editor features like treesitter and lsp support integrated into the editor. The Lua api seems to have been very well received, so the plugin ecosystem for neovim is thriving. It has also attracted a lot of people outside of the original vim niche (including me!) recently, which means there are more plugin developers who care about how things look and feel to use.
There are certainly some constrains on what plugins can achieve due to nvim being exclusively a TUI, but in my opinion the pros of the editor outweigh the cons.
As to what makes me choose neovim over vscode with a vim plugin, it's a combination of things. One thing I love is that neovim is extremely easy to configure. I also enjoy that everything follows vim rules, rather than some things like file trees or consoles having their own unique rules. I have also become dependent on some vim plugins that don't exist in vscode.
VS Code's goal is to get the low-effort 30% of devs who want something that will just work right out of the box, while providing enough functionality/customization to attract a significant fraction of the remaining 70%. And given that, it's pretty good.
But I'm skeptical it will ever be as good for someone who does want to make the investment in something like Emacs.
He's a "futurist", who's explicit job is to make hand wavey, big, shocking claims. Historically, futurists have a less than random chance at being right about the future.
Also I would not consider him an expert in anything ML, though he probably has enough of the underlying math to get some things.
Kaku is a media sensationalist; that class of person has a terrible track record. Futurists, that is, people like Aasimov, have an ok track record at predicting the future. Interestingly, early futurist predictions about digital tech were pretty good. For "physical" goods? Not so much. A plausible explanation of this discrepancy is that they didn't predict the breakdown in the historial trend of increasing energy usage. See the Henry Adams curve.
I'm saying explicitly that the words that come out of Mr Kaku's mouth are noise, not signal. If he is right about something, it is in the way a broken clock is occasionally right. I agree with most of what he is saying personally, but that's not relevant.
string field theory is a a "field" of physics which is entirely theoretical and has no experiment data to back it up....
hard to imagine how even the top person in that field would be a top physicist given the large number of top physicists who are doing useful stuff like LIGO, CERN, etc.
I am not going to say that this is wrong, because I haven't read the study. But it was produced by the Berkeley economics department, which could well be the most left-leaning in the country. Significant parts of it are outright Marxist. Which is fine. Diversity of viewpoints and all that. But when a bunch of leftist economists tell you they've proven something that leftists in general wish desperately were true, you should be skeptical.
At least wait for some corroborating evidence to come in before you start writing policy, because you'll hurt people if you get it wrong.
Ask an economist about WHY economy exists in the first place and you can put a bet on the fact that many of them get it wrong. How can anything building on that be right then? Exactly.
This talk is utterly ridiculous. This guy clearly hasn't actually studied the intellectual history of economics. He gets very basic things wrong as soon as he starts. Economics was called the 'dismal science' because it disagree with slave holding elites that slave holding was good for the economy. The phrase 'dismal science' is well attest to a quote of a slave holder angry at economists, calling it 'dismal' because it can't defend slavery. This is well attest and not controversial.
And then he goes on to totally mischaracterize the field, he also doesn't seem to actually know what 'neoclassical' actual means in the history of economics thought.
This actually hurts to watch. Specially when he starts making a bunch of arguments that have been debated within 'neoclassical economics' for a long time. So instead of asking for a 'new economic field' he maybe should have actually read beyond Econ101.
I'm not saying any of his actual recommendation are right or wrong, but his engagement with the field of economics is embarrassing and seems to mostly serve as a crowed pleaser. The old tactic of uniting to fight a common enemy, the evil 'neoclassical' economists.
So, in other words they are less extremely right wing than other economics departments?
To be frank, in most of the sciences, left wing views are overwhelmingly dominant because they are objectively correct (global warming is real, the earth is not 6000 years old, evolution is real, etc). Economics is an outlier, and that is mostly because of its usefulness as a political tool of the powerful. To the extent that it’s right wing, its conclusions are extremely suspect.
For anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating- I grew up Baptist, and I can tell you that what they believe is that God created the earth and all the animals on it recently, that there is no such thing as continental drift or evolution, that Jesus is going to return soon to bring forth the end days, and that Noah really did fit every kind of animal on the ark.
More than that, they believe in maintaining the social order. That’s what they value. The reason they are so upset about trans people, for instance, is that they threaten the male/female gender based social order. They believe in a universe built on simple rules that apply all the time. Don’t kid yourselves, that’s exactly how they think.
And, they believe that having power is its own evidence that you deserve that power, because otherwise why did God give it to you? Therefore powerful people are virtuous and obedience makes you also a good person. And in a certain sense violence is virtue since it cleanses the earth of wickedness.
Again, I grew up among these people and this is absolutely what they believe.
And as a corollary, scientists or activists (largely the same, in their view) are by definition evil because they are in opposition to the social order, or in the case of science they are agnostic to the social order, which is even worse because science treats the social order as irrelevant.
> left wing views are overwhelmingly dominant because they are objectively correct (global warming is real, the earth is not 6000 years old, evolution is real, etc).
Maybe it’s only in your country where these are “left-leaning” views…and I even doubt that.
Example; I agree with these statements but I’m not “left leaning” by any shot.
Like many American commenters (I'm guilty of this as well), we assume a US-centric viewpoint a lot online.
You're right that these positions are not left leaning worldwide. Unfortunately, they are very much left-leaning viewpoints in the US. There are still more than enough voters on the right who genuinely believe the converse that they need to be catered to by right wing politics. And, on the other hand, left wing politics needs to put significant effort into fighting and refuting objections. Arguably, this puts more strain on the left, which might be another factor perpetuating all this.
Mathematical models aren't real in the same way as human social life is. Just like social structures, they are accorded certain laws, which determine their order; but human social structures have real effects, whereas one can modify axioms in a mathematical model and nothing changes until you apply that model to social life. By all means, math can model certain things from basic, accepted axioms that even we aren't aware of and give us conclusions we could've never predicted; but to pretend that this somehow implies that our axioms, which we constructed, are somehow "right" or "wrong" in and of themselves, and not in their relation to how we use such math to organize society--I believe that logic is extremely flawed.
Political ideology is always in the service of constructing a logic to sustain itself, consciously or not, someone constructing a set of axioms that just so happen to lead to the political conclusion they find most favorable, and then they call those axioms true. Whatever truth value someone ascribes to mathematical axioms, whether they be "right" or "wrong," is far less important than for what purpose they are employed.
Weather reports have a lot of math behind them, yet they're regularly wrong. I wonder what's the underlying reason for that? I also wonder whether that reason could also affect economics?
Wonderful comment. We'd require a whole lot more information and processing power in order to be able to accurately predict the weather, and if we had that, we would be able to accurately model and predict a whole host of things.
Like with anything, there is the objective reality that none of us can see, and then there is the constructed reality placed on top of it.
Economics used to be called political economy and split into economics and political science. Economists are well aware that things like 'property' and 'markets' are not some universal absolutes, but engaged in a larger social context. There are whole sub-fields of economics studying all these things.
Sure some macro economics that try to abstract over a huge amount of things, by necessary (its literally called 'macro') but even then they are aware that high level decisions have political implications.
These anti economics hate mostly generated by people who don't actually follow the discussion within the economic field rather believe in some leftist fantasy buggy man version of the economic field.
Joan Robinson: The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.
And many more who sell crops, chemicals, power, machine parts, cars, concrete...
Many companies have billions of customers and no trace of lock-in or virality at all. You might want to shift your perspective a little and remember that there is a world outside of Silicon Valley.