civilized

10 ms·

91.
by civilized 3y ago
How do critical thinking and problem solving work? How do we evaluate potential courses of action, if not by predicting their consequences? I showed how prediction is involved in a basic example from everyday life. Do you dispute that?
92.
by civilized 3y ago
There's a germ of insight here that could use some development and nuancing. > The future is uncertain. You cannot predict it. But you can create it. For millions of years, prediction has been the engine by which humans have creat
93.
by civilized 3y ago
The cost savings is low but the risk is high? How do you figure? It sounds like both options are easy (one is just even easier) so there's not much risk if we have to switch.
94.
by civilized 3y ago
Just because something has a tree structure, it needs to be able to support all tree operations? Why is that such a compelling argument to you? What if it just doesn't?
95.
by civilized 3y ago
It's kind of a strange response when the author already explicitly said "people think they always need to formally encode parent-child relationships but sometimes they don't, sometimes nested display is all that's needed
96.
by civilized 3y ago
I think the argument is that, to the uninitiated, x = x + 2 looks more like an invalid equality than "replace the value stored in x with its current value plus 2". Personally, it seems to me that = for assignment is so ubiquitous
97.
by civilized 3y ago
The posited DRY-related benefit ultimately also comes back to conciseness, because (as the author does note) you can always avoid repeating yourself by assigning expressions to an intermediate variable instead of repeating expressions.
98.
by civilized 3y ago
I wouldn't be opposed to the addition of this new pipe. The author has a decent argument for it being helpful in some complex special cases. But I don't know if I would want to see this used extensively. IMHO the proliferation of
99.
by civilized 3y ago
It's also trying to suggest that that history explains the dominant computing paradigms today. I think that historically-driven thinking only goes so far when today's hardware is vastly more powerful than anything we used to have.
100.
by civilized 3y ago
It's an interesting perspective but ultimately unsatisfying because it doesn't touch on basic questions it seems like anyone would think to ask. For example: from a hardware perspective, today's "microcomputer" hard
101.
by civilized 3y ago
Agreed that the social democratic solution of redistribution and welfare programs does great on this front, and I think all Western countries have some form of it. But I think here we are talking about other socialist prescriptions, which h
102.
by civilized 3y ago
What are the successes of this age-old solution?
103.
by civilized 3y ago
Probably one of those PR firm-generated articles Paul Graham warned us about many years ago. Driving business to someone or other.
104.
by civilized 3y ago
I think we should stop stretching the word "clean" to encompass everything we approve and disapprove of in code. Your discussion of the underlying issues is perfect - the author's coding dilemma is a classic tradeoff between
105.
by civilized 3y ago
Read literally, the word "clean" in a coding context is most naturally interpreted as "observing a consistent style at a basic syntactic level" (e.g. camel case vs snake case), or "having a minimum of irrelevant clu
106.
by civilized 3y ago
Extensive medical information is publicly available on websites like www.nhs.uk. So even if it wasn't literally trained on exam questions, it may have picked up substantially identical information elsewhere. Which is still a significan
107.
by civilized 3y ago
> Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have t
108.
by civilized 3y ago
It's a bit peculiar to cite PTSD to discredit everything a person says except the things that reflect poorly on themselves. I'm not sure there's any mental disorder that causes that pattern of misstatements?
109.
by civilized 3y ago
Who exactly are you referring to?
110.
by civilized 3y ago
Hacker News represents hackers, not Boards of Directors. The hackers of OpenAI overwhelmingly demanded Sam back. Everyone here should be happy.
111.
by civilized 3y ago
We discussed this in a previous thread. The author is basically hypothesizing that perhaps people are so universally terrible at predicting their ability, their self-rating is like an unconditional random variable - just a random draw that
112.
by civilized 3y ago
Nevermind, it looks like I got mixed up responding to a different comment or article. Sounds dumb but it has happened to me a couple times over the years...
113.
by civilized 3y ago
I don't know if we will get a healthy research community by attempting to police unhealthy communities out of existence. This will only lead to research activity being further stifled by useless bureaucracy that fails to restrain most
114.
by civilized 3y ago
This video game needs a "skip intro".
115.
by civilized 3y ago
Has anyone else started feeling the following? In the last year or so, reading a banal, superficial, and platitudinous summary of something has, for me, become inflected with this feeling that it was written by GPT. In the case of this arti
116.
by civilized 3y ago
Other than complaining about perceived inconsistencies in others' positions, what do you actually believe? Do you think GPT is AGI?
117.
by civilized 3y ago
About this goalpost moving thing. It's become very popular to say this, but I have no idea what it's supposed to mean. It's like a metaphor with no underlying reality. Did a wise arbiter of truth set up goalposts that I moved
118.
by civilized 3y ago
It is very easy to separate humans from LLMs. Humans created math without being given all the answers beforehand. LLMs can't do that yet. When an LLM can create math to solve a problem, we will be much closer to AGI.
119.
by civilized 3y ago
LLMs don't have a concept of "best". Only most likely in what they've been trained on. I think LLMs ultimately just take imitation to a creative and sophisticated extreme. And imitation simply doesn't comprise the w
120.
by civilized 3y ago
This sort of comment has become a cliché that needs to be answered. Most people are not good at most things, yes. They're consumers of those things, not producers. For producers there is a much higher standard, one that the latest AI m

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