bccdee

45 ms·

661.
by bccdee 2y ago
Since it's not a good idea, I'd dispute the idea that there are any properly good books about it. It's Roger Penrose's idea, though—he calls it "orchestrated objective reduction" [1]—and his main book about it
662.
by bccdee 2y ago
"Self-awareness with a theory of mind" doesn't account for qualia, which IMO are the most important part of consciousness discourse. What people mean when they say "consciousness" has more to do with a certain ineff
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by bccdee 2y ago
It's remarkable how far consciousness discourse can progress without a substantive definition. The closest we can really get to an objective definition is to point at a certain set of feelings relating to the perceived "realness&q
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by bccdee 2y ago
> We can't come up with anything better, and have ruled out everything we reasonably can at this point in our inquiry, so therefore the findings support the only remaining plausible mechanism. No, quite the opposite. As the top-leve
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by bccdee 2y ago
Yeah I think this is a misreading of Orwell. Orwell wasn't afraid that the government would point a gun at the public's heads and the people would hate it. He was afraid that, when that happened, the people would love it. Authorit
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by bccdee 2y ago
> Design by committee is always doomed to failure. If you need to communicate your design to a lot of people, that's probably because a lot of people are depending on the output of your work, and they want to make sure it suits thei
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by bccdee 2y ago
I've never heard anyone say recursion is bad. What a weird view. It's a problem if you're overflowing the stack, of course, but otherwise…
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by bccdee 2y ago
The kind of design doc that gets presented to management typically isn't checked into the git repo, in my experience. It's a google doc or a wiki page full of planning details, and it gets covered in amendments about whether XYZ w
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by bccdee 2y ago
Oh I agree, but the person who put them there must have had some sort of reason, even if it's a bad one.
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by bccdee 2y ago
Then you end up with a design document that corresponds to the code as it existed conceptually before v1 of that code was even written. By the time v1 is written, the design doc will be slightly out of date; by the time the code reaches v3,
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by bccdee 2y ago
You don't need to abandon plain text to hide comments. Comments are detectable with a regex; an extension to hide comments would be trivial to make in most editors. I think it's not a common feature because people generally just d
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by bccdee 2y ago
I wonder if that's intended for a specific workflow, e.g. ctrl-f "Function" enter-enter-enter-enter to cycle through all the functions in the file. That's the only reason I can think of for writing those comments.
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by bccdee 2y ago
Really? There's a perfectly good example in the article. RunFewerTimesSlowerAndSimplerAlgorithmAfterConsideringTradeOffs() That's a horrible way to name a function. Function names should be short, punchy, and unambiguous.
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by bccdee 2y ago
A query builder ORM is an abstraction I don't want and don't need. I know which SQL queries I want to run on my DB; please don't make me learn a whole DSL in order to run them. All I get in exchange for that is the extra work
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by bccdee 2y ago
I imagine a lot of people bought reMarkables, enjoyed the stylus handwriting for a few weeks, and then remembered that they actually prefer typing to writing by hand. So the product shifted to become a keyboard-driven device with an e-ink s
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by bccdee 2y ago
No. Just useful.
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by bccdee 2y ago
Yes. This process is also known as "thinking about it," and it often proves useful when data-driven approaches fail.
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by bccdee 2y ago
We're talking about the ideal chapter length. Yes, chapter length is easy to quantify. But what about chapter idealness? If we want to discover the ideal chapter length using statistics, we need a way to quantify how effective (or &q
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by bccdee 2y ago
Mathematics can only give you insight into things that can be quantified. When people try do things like (say) perform a statistical analysis of the tone of a narrative, they have to either go through and numerically quantify the tone of ea
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by bccdee 2y ago
Why are you attached to the word "memorization" here? Certainly taste comes from experience and learning. Maybe you could argue that all learning is an oblique and imperfect form of memorization—but why argue that at all? The only
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by bccdee 2y ago
> The profit motive is why they get the capital to do the R&D. A massive amount of research is funded by public grants. iPhones are a famous example of a private-sector product almost entirely created off the back of public research.
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by bccdee 2y ago
It's not a binary. If we say market freedom is a spectrum with the USSR at 0 and the US at 10 (reductive, but let's pretend) then China moved from 0 to 5 and became a global power within a couple decades. This is a strong argument
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by bccdee 2y ago
The contemporary "multi-paradigm" style is influenced by the many paradigms which preceded it, but for all the elements it borrows, there are elements it leaves behind, too. Implementation inheritance is often left out of newer la
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by bccdee 2y ago
> Without diffs, without analysis, we are going nowhere fast. The victory of plaintext coding over visual programming is another example of worse is better. Semantic, language-aware diffs exist, but I see them much less frequently than d
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by bccdee 2y ago
> He did it for a tiny fraction of NASA's budget. NASA does a lot of things. If they'd been given SpaceX's capital and a mandate to build reusable rockets, I'm sure they could. They're world-class engineers. >
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by bccdee 2y ago
That's not really true. Structured programming completely supplanted the paradigm that predated it. I think it's pretty close to a consensus now that null values are a mistake. Same with manual memory management.
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by bccdee 2y ago
> A lot of government funds have also been looted by CCP honchos. Yeah, because they're corrupt and undemocratic. I certainly don't endorse China. But they do put to rest the idea that the freer the market, the stronger the eco
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by bccdee 2y ago
> What is the moral justification for a state stealing private property? I think it'd be good, is why. Non-intervention with private property is extremely low on my list of moral priorities. If someone's starving, I don't
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by bccdee 2y ago
You assume pharmaceutical profits are all funnelled to R&D, rather than to shareholders. I see no reason why we shouldn't slash profit margins on medicine and offer the money back in earmarked grants. So you see, I'm actually
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by bccdee 2y ago
> That is maximally efficient, economically speaking. It is not. The resources which went towards that mansion would be (by your definition) much more efficiently spent elsewhere. The utility which one wealthy person gets from a 20k sqft

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