I have little respect for "artists" who do UI because the job requires little skill.
Sites and exposes like the parent of this entire thread serve to inflate the worth of people who do this stuff.
Painting the mona lisa is talent. Arranging text and pictures with flat colored geometric elements is NOT talent.
The idea that the still life painting is even comparable to some website design is laughable. It takes a lot of skill to be able to create that painting, it takes almost no skill to devise the layout to that site.
This is where we disagree. It requires little skill to do it well.
Minimal/simple/clean designs are not only simple visually but simple from a intelligence and effort standpoint.
There are many UI designers/programmers but their aren't many Character artists/programmers, 3D artists/programmers, animators/programmers, concept artist/programmers.
The reason is the latter examples are two freaking incredibly hard skills to combine. The former dual skill set is common because UI design is extremely trivial compared to the later skill sets.
We're in the habit of blaming the police for everything. No. When there is a call for danger assume the worst. Not doing so could mean a life is lost. It is very rare for someone to die of a heart attack because of a swat.
How about we punish the hell out of anyone who does these stupid prank calls instead.
Standard practice elsewhere is to send the nearest foot or car patrol to investigate, and prepare intervention team as backup.
No idea why you would send an intervention team in blind, much less on an unconfirmed tip. It's a recipe for all kinds of disasters and expensive one too.
How about we do both? Think of strategies that minimize harm in case of a false alert and severe punishment for malicious false alerts? Death by heart attack is not the only possible bad outcome of a SWAT team storming a house.
>We're in the habit of blaming the police for everything.
This is true, and I think people today have a very warped view of policing. However, there are plenty of legitimate areas of improvement:
- No knock raids
- Violent arrests of non-violent offenders
- Eminent domain
- etc.
No knock raids are particularly troubling because (among many other reasons) they can result in a legal shootout between police and civilians: A civilian who has been violently woken up in the middle of the night is disoriented and scared, and legitimately believes he is subject to a life-threatening home invasion. He opens fire on the police, who he believes to be the home invaders. The police, being fired on, have a legitimate right to defend themselves. It's not airtight, but this scenario can lead to a legal shootout where both parties have valid legal arguments.
I realize this is mostly oblique to the topic at hand, but our policing can and should be improved, even if it gives ammunition to the folks who want to demonize the police unjustly.
You can react without assuming the worst. For example after a bomb threat it is reasonable to calmly evacuate a school and do a search, that doesn’t mean people should be fleeing for their lives. Swatting however generally provokes an over reaction.
> Swatting however generally provokes an over reaction.
How can you know this. My guess would be it's like hacking any other system. You hear about the few times they succeed. Especially if turns into a horrible incident the news media can use to fit one of their favorite narratives.
Several states recently passed anti swatting legislation, California (2013), Illinois (2015), etc because it’s common enough to be considered a significant issue. It’s not just about the risk to the public, these overreactions interferes with the police and waste significant resources.
Really people have been doing this for a long time, the “boy who cried wolf” is part of Aesop's Fables dating to ~600 BCE. Swatting is significant because it’s harder for cops to filter based on internet famous than actually famous.
The boy who cried wolf is not a story of over-reactions. And none of this evidence proves or even suggests such a thing, unless perhaps you were claiming the laws themselves were an over-reaction. Or unless you are defining over-reaction as any reaction at all other than omnisciently knowing when a warning is false and not reacting to it.
Assuming the worst includes assuming being used for swatting. Excessively violent response from US police is a big part of the problem. Also see Brionna Taylor. The police should always verify before going in guns blazing.
I've hit this as well. There are a number of deep technical falsehoods believed by the industry that are very widespread. These falsehoods are so ingrained that pushing against these falsehoods even rationally or logically could land you in hot water. The one that affected me personally has to do with Quaternions.
At the company where I work we convert all of our data to quaternions when transmitting over the wire or for data storage. In the gaming and robotics industry there is a misguided assumption that quaternions are always better, and at my company we force this assumption onto all engineers by using typed protobufs. We can never send EUler angles over the wire, we must always send quaternions.
This is actually fundamentally bad. Like it's not even a design question. It is by logic worse to store things as quaternions. Quaternions are only good for certain transformation calculations. They are not as good for data transmission or storage. So I made a proposal to offer alternatives but I was shot down even by the CEO (who took the time to personally make his own viewpoint known on the entire slack thread out of nowhere) because all of these people buy into the misguided notion that quaternions are always better.
The person I was talking to about this was so hell bent on believing that quaternions are better that if I pressed the point further I could start an all out conflict that could get me fired so I had to stop and pretend (aka lie) to agree.
The fact of the matter is, Quaternions are a higher entropy form of storage for rotation and orientation. You lose information when converting something to a quaternion and this is good for calculation but definitively bad when you choose to use quaternions for data storage or transmission. If you transmit or store things as Euler angles you CAN always convert it to a quaternion. The conversion is trivial and mostly a non-issue.
The problem is that once you have a quaternion you can't go back to Euler Angles without additional assumptions. The back conversion algorithm is not One to One. So by forcing this format as storage you are limiting the future productivity of this data by keeping it in a higher entropy form.
Each quaternion is realized by TWO euler angles within a 360 range of motion across 3 axis-es. When you convert something to a quaternion you cannot go backwards. You cannot find the original euler angle where the quaternion came from because you HAVE two options to choose from.
For gaming this problem is not so apparent because you're in a virtual world and having everything exist in quaternions is ok because rotational orientations don't have to be realized by actual movement or rotations. The computer simply draws the object at the required orientation.
But real world rotations HAVE to be realized by euler angles. You cannot Orient something in reality without actually turning it about an axis. Gimbal lock cannot be erased in the real world and even the Apollo module suffered from this phenomenon despite the fact that the engineers knew about quaternions. People at my company seem to think the issue disappears once you switch everything to quaternions.
Thus for something as simple as having one robot gimbal imitate another... if the communication protocol between them both was exclusively quaternions (with no additional assumptions) the imitating robot can choose an alternative euler angle to project it's motion onto and the two robots WILL not be be in sync. Total information Loss.
So all in all this proposal never went through. I was shut down by stubbornness and over confidence by "robotics experts" who've been brainwashed by false dogma. The people I was proposing this to told me that I should trust the extensive experience their backgrounds of building self driving cars at uber and building robots at CMU. Yeah I respect that but can you not see the literal logic of the issue here? I don't respect people who aren't able to see logic.
The company culture is just part of the story, these falsehoods are likely held industry wide and you'd get these issues everywhere. False Dogma is powerful. Try telling a christian that walking on water is ludicrous when looking at it logically. It's same issue here. Peoples' brains will fight logic if it goes against their beliefs.
Very likely I might even get replies to this post who have so much confidence in quaternions that they'll come up with a retort that doesn't fully understand the problem I illustrated here.
All cultures have anti poor sentiments as well as empathetic attitudes towards the poor. What is "interesting" here is prejudice attitudes from people like you towards america.
Also stop calling Americans "interesting." Using a term like this is a deliberate insult on a culture or a person. You are examining the culture like it's a lab rat and commenting on how the behavior is "interesting."
You are not an idiot. People do not talk like this in real life by remarking on how behavior is "interesting" to the subjects face. You and others only use these terms behind the anonymity of a forum. Therefore you are aware this is insulting. Stop.
This is a common tactic used to get around the HN rules. You say "interesting" posing it as an innocent remark. It is not, you are conducting a deliberate and insulting attack on American culture here.
The algorithm that executes an element from the set of all algorithms one at a time until an algorithm succeeds to select an element from a set will work on any set and itself?
a = the algorithm
A = set of all selection algorithms
b = any set
def a(x):
while True:
f = a(A) # you have to select an algorithm from the set of selection algorithms
result = f(x)
if result is None:
A = A - f # set of all selection algorithms without f
continue
else:
return result
a(b) #will always return a result or not terminate for any choice of b?
Obviously there's problems with this because I'm not a mathematician and I'm just making stuff up off the top of my head. But would any one who's an expert care to explain what's the issue with the above?
I'm looking at it and such an algorithm is defined in terms of itself (like a factorial, which is legal) and may never terminate (which also legal because an algorithm selecting the smallest number from all sets that only contain positive numbers will never terminate either).
Wait but then if you look at the code it provably will never terminate because A does not shrink as it recurses.
You can run a countably infinite sequence of algorithms in parallel and stop when one of them terminates without running into the halting problem. Say you have a set of algorithms, numbered 1, 2, 3, ... and each algorithm consists of a sequence of instructions (with jumps and gotos), where each instruction takes a finite amount of time to run. The algorithm is as follows: run the first instruction for algorithm 1, then the next instruction for algorithm 1, then the instruction for algorithm 2, then 1 again, then 2, then 3, then 1, 2, 3, and 4, and you can see the pattern now. If any of them reaches the halt instruction halt. Even if all but one of these algorithms runs forever, you'll still eventually halt when that one algorithm completes. I believe this approach is called dove tailing
Can you iterate through a set without * selection *? I'm confused about this part. It seems to me in order to use an algorithm from the set of all algorithms you need to invoke the axiom itself.
I think us programmers think in terms of time. But in math there is no time so whether you do things in parallel or procedural is irrelevant. That's why you can discuss infinities in math.
> It seems to me in order to use an algorithm from the set of all algorithms you need to invoke the axiom itself.
Nope, you don't need the axiom of choice to define the sequence of all algorithms. The axiom of choice allows you to order any arbitrary set, but you don't need it for things you can construct an explicit order for, like the natural numbers. In the case of all algorithms, it's somewhat straightforward to construct the set of all of them. You can construct the sequence of all strings, right? You can construct them as "", "a", "b", "c", ... "y", "z", "aa", "ab", ... "ay", "az", "ba", "bb", ... Now, pick a programming language, like C. Given any valid string, you can determine if it is a valid C program in finite time, and if so you can convert it into a set of instructions to use in the dove-tailing procedure in finite time. Take the list of all strings in the manner described above. For each one interpret it as a C program, or if it's got invalid syntax interpret it as a program that immediately halts. Now you've got an enumerable sequence of algorithms. Since C is Turing complete you'll find every single algorithm in that sequence. There will be a ton of duplicates (for whatever notion of equivalence you want to use) but all the algorithms will be there, and in a well-defined order that you can enumerate through.
As my retort to that common mentioned, he is wrong.
That is still random. You are arbitrarily picking an encoding, (English) in this case. Why not a Russian programming language or Chinese? How did you *select* your encoding out of the set of all encodings?
The act of assigning order to an unordered set is arbitrary. ABC order is a made up concept. It's not numerical, it's an arbitrary language and an arbitrary order that's a by product of human culture. Thus invoking this is at it's essence invoking the axiom of choice. You are arbitrarily selecting an algorithm.
Gödel worried about this, and one of the lemmas leading up to their First Incompleteness theorem is that the encoding doesn't matter, as long as it's a bijection on valid algorithms. (Numbers which code for invalid algorithms, perhaps due to syntax errors, can be ignored.) Gödel also was the one who showed that such encodings are possible and useful in the first place, so the problem of arbitrary encodings started and ended with him.
You can phrase things like Gödel did. For any encoding of algorithms into natural numbers which is bijective (ignoring invalid syntax), enumerate the algorithms as 0, 1, 2, 3, ... using the bijection, and then run them in parallel by taking steps [0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...] The user provides an encoding, without invoking the Axiom of Choice.
I think you're misunderstanding the axiom of choice, focusing too much on the literal word "choice". Sure, that ABC order is arbitrary, but so are most mathematical constructions! How did I "select" that encoding? By defining it! By your definition of the axiom of choice, literally defining any set at all (besides the null set and the set of natural numbers, which are defined in their own axioms) would require invoking the axiom of choice.
You only need the axiom of choice if you need to pick an element out of a set WITHOUT SPECIFYING which one you are picking. And sometimes not even then. For instance, if you want to prove all elements in a set have a certain property, often you will see proofs take the form "pick an element of that set, assume it doesn't have this property, then by X, Y, and Z we have a contradiction, thus all elements have that property". That doesn't involve the axiom of choice at all, even though a straight reading of that statement makes it sounds like we are making a choice. In truth that proof is saying we can do this with every single element of that set, so you aren't really making a "choice". You only need the axiom of choice when you are, say, stating the existence of a function without defining what that function is. For an example of an actual invocation of the axiom of choice, check out the proof sketch in the wikipedia article on Zorn's Lemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorn%27s_lemma .
I can say arbitrary stuff like the set of all sets with positive numbers but when I say the set of all algorithms written in English and C++ suddenly I'm getting too specific. Where is the line drawn?
Your assuming all algorithms are defined in terms of English that's how you can order them alphabetically. English is an arbitrary language that comes from human culture. Same with a programming language. You are defining a set in terms of concepts that are cultural.
Algorithms themselves have no specific order. In order to define enumeration you must first start off by *selecting* which algorithm gets the first enumeration. This is a completely arbitrary choice.
No, I'm not assuming any particular encoding of an algorithm. I'm just assuming by "algorithm" you mean a computable function, and we know there are only countably many computable functions. This is not a cultural notion.
And yes, which particular encoding you decide to use is arbitrary, but the point is that you can enumerate the set of all algorithms, and thus you can select one without needing the axiom of choice.
Your own example used the word "alphabetical." So your example is false because it uses a "particular" encoding.
Try to select an algorithm out of the set of all algorithms without using an encoding. If you must use an encoding, please ensure that it's not a "particular" encoding.
You can't.
The point is all encodings in the known universe are "particular."
Additionally, to even use an encoding you have to *select* and encoding from the set of all encodings.
Yes, I chose one arbitrary method of enumeration. That’s not important to the point, which is that algorithms are enumerable and thus you don’t need the axiom of choice to select one out of the set of all algorithms.
ketralnis is right that this only terminates if an algorithm exists, so the claim that this terminates is equivalent to the axiom of choice.
But I'd also add that you can have a choice function that isn't an "algorithm". An algorithm, at least in the sense I'd generally interpret the word, has finitely many instructions and at most countably many steps. If we have uncountably infinitely many uncountably infinite sets, it is possible to have a choice function that can't be described in a finite algorithm.
Like, think about a well-ordering of the reals. If you believe the axiom of choice, then one exists. But you can't tell me what it is, because that would involve handing me infinite amounts of information. And similarly you can't write down an algorithm to produce it, without writing down infinite amounts of data.
> ketralnis is right that this only terminates if an algorithm exists, so the claim that this terminates is equivalent to the axiom of choice.
No my algorithm above will never terminate. There's a recursive call where the input never shrinks and it won't converge on a base case.
It's equivalent to saying
def f(x):
return f(x)
which is a pointless (but true) statement. The whole thing is distracting everyone.
Basically ketralnis is clarifying context which is sort of lost with my post. There's an axiom and do you believe in the axiom of not?
If the axiom can be proven then it is not an axiom. But a theorem. What I'm doing here is kind of pointless because we know it's an axiom by definition, the question is whether this axiom is valid or not. Attempting to prove the axiom is a a signal that I'm lacking clarity with the logic here.
These guys earn it. If I pay for a concert of I pay for a game I know I'm contributing to that celebrities salary because that person is responsible for a huge portion of the entertainment. I do so willingly.
When I pay for a product I want the majority of my payment to go to the workers responsible for realizing the product not the CEO telling the workers what to do. We all know a company is destroyed if you remove all the workers, but not if you remove a CEO. The same cannot be said of celebrities.
Additionally I'm a fucking worker as are most people here. So of course it's a problem for me if the CEO is taking something that isnt considered a fair share by workers. I'm also 100 percent fucking aware of what my CEO actually does and how much he actually contributes.
What amazes me is the leaps of logic that CEOs formulate in order to justify their crimes and lie to themselves.
A concert also falls apart without stage crew, yet we still accept that the star in the light gets 20000 times their hourly pay. And while “Spice girls” would certainly be different if they’d chosen a different cast of girls for the positions, I highly doubt it would have been fundamentally different[0] Yet Amazon would not be here today without Bezos, Facebook would not be here without Zuckerberg and Apple wouldn’t be here without Jobs. I think it’s quite narrow minded and unfair to discard their contributions off-hand simply because you feel like 100% of the money you pay for an iPhone should go to the worker that pushed the button on the assembly line that put it together, or the person sorting the package into the right bin before the robots at Amazon sort those into the shipping box that eventually ends up at your door, so you can use it to like the latest SoMe posts from your favorite boy/girl-band.
[0]I’m not trying to put down their musical or performance talent, just commenting on the fact that even the greatest entertainment products are still just entertainment products and certainly don’t justify a huge x compared to CEO’s just because one song is more popular than another.
> I think it’s quite narrow minded and unfair to discard their contributions off-hand simply because you feel like 100% of the money you pay for an iPhone should go to the worker that pushed the button on the assembly line that put it together
I think it's quite narrow minded and downright evil to paint a picture as if this is what I'm doing.
I NEVER said the CEO doesn't matter. But certainly he doesn't matter as much as you and their salaries imply. Jobs died, guess what happened to Apple? Nothing. Steve jobs matters, but along with every other CEO in the world, if he suddenly dies, life goes on and not much happens to the company.
Additionally what the hell is this garbage about assembly workers pushing buttons? That's just one step in a highly complex process. There's designers, engineers, programmers and assembly workers. All of these people combined contribute far more than Steve Jobs saying, "build me a touch screen phone." Certainly you need someone to give the order but in no way is this person a critical part of the equation. You saying this is a deliberate distortion of what I am saying. The best word to describe it is: lies.
>[0]I’m not trying to put down their musical or performance talent, just commenting on the fact that even the greatest entertainment products are still just entertainment products and certainly don’t justify a huge x compared to CEO’s just because one song is more popular than another.
Yeah great job covering your ass while distorting and twisting my point. No dude. CEO's as they stand today deserve far less than celebrities. The entire operation falls apart without a celebrity. Not so for the CEO.
CEOs are an important part the equation for a product. But they are also the least important when compared to the rest of pipeline. The CEO is replaceable, the pipeline is not.
Sites and exposes like the parent of this entire thread serve to inflate the worth of people who do this stuff.
Painting the mona lisa is talent. Arranging text and pictures with flat colored geometric elements is NOT talent.
The idea that the still life painting is even comparable to some website design is laughable. It takes a lot of skill to be able to create that painting, it takes almost no skill to devise the layout to that site.