inimino

22 ms·

241.
by inimino 4y ago
If the problem with SICP (with both authors teaching it) was that too many people were failing out, I would expect they would have mentioned that. The Harvard course welcomes non-majors and is part of a liberal education, it's not comp
242.
by inimino 4y ago
Yes, and SICP was the book taking you through the abstraction barrier. Toto showing you the Wizard of Oz, behind the curtain. The point of the bureaucratic approach is that how you use the spells together is more important than individual s
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by inimino 4y ago
He says "like science" but he doesn't say that it is like physics. Sounds more like highly risky field xenobiology with the grabbing and poking.
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by inimino 4y ago
This is a ton of fun! If you have the double-quote escaping then you have to mutate the data in place, but if it's just a table of numbers then not. Usually CSV parsing doesn't matter, but when it does, it matters a lot.
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by inimino 4y ago
Your words were "the only way" and "fools errand", what I actually see in the clip is that the course was due for a refresh, both the original professors quit, the administration had no idea what to do after that, and th
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by inimino 4y ago
Sometimes you don't need something as complex as existing commercial solutions. But you are correctly repeating the standard wisdom of the day, which is that first-principles understanding is inefficient (because people don't have
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by inimino 4y ago
SICP is better for full-time programmers with some experience than it is for recent HS grads, however motivated they might be. As I understand it, no freshman class ever made it through the full text anyway, so it was always understood that
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by inimino 4y ago
The difference is whether you are the one conjuring the spirits by writing your own spell, or whether you are the one casting the spells that others have npmed.
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by inimino 4y ago
This is the right perspective, and you should continue to pursue your own projects using the languages that make you most productive. Don't study what does not interest you. The problem is if you change majors to engineering, the first
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by inimino 4y ago
Do you think that, as an industry, we're in danger of hitting this theoretical limit?
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by inimino 4y ago
There is a radical idea discovered in the 70s, that you can just buy computers and run your own code on your own machines. Rumour has it that some still practice this ancient art.
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by inimino 4y ago
> building my own virtual CPU and RAM, then I learned... Sounds like you know exactly where :-) Being committed to a project or goal for a long time, taking your time with the foundational material, seems to be the most direct path to ma
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by inimino 4y ago
Do you experience the qualia of red as a choice? If so, you cannot trust your senses any further than your own choices. But if you experience, for example, before taking an important call, that you have a choice to make, then you have a cho
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by inimino 4y ago
It certainly governs the rate flakes of oxide are released into the water and so on--what else could be said to? Of course if you think the rusting bar is conscious , you should probably look at the tapioca a little more closely...
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by inimino 4y ago
I think this is a reasonable position, but the reason people are downvoting you is it's a defeatist position, and there's reason to be more optimistic.
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by inimino 4y ago
The problem is that MIT used to be the high road for engineering and now it is a prestige degree and grants access to various roles etc. They gave in to the bureaucrats because it was inevitable that things would go that way anyway. At leas
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by inimino 4y ago
My point, which you missed, is not that you can't ask why, but that you aren't obligated to ask why. Saying that you made a choice (repeatedly) to work hard is enough of an answer to the question of why you had some benefit in you
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by inimino 4y ago
OK, so the "we" that is observing the outputs and the "we" that thinks it is in control are both the tapioca. But the tapioca is wrong about being in control, because actually it's just physics and chemistry. Where
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by inimino 4y ago
But what if it thinks it is the tapioca, and that it gets to choose? Would that not be correct?
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by inimino 4y ago
Well, I don't suppose I can disprove that without reading all the essays... but I do think that pg's writings have a style that's less amenable to more humanities-oriented readers.
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by inimino 4y ago
Those who reinvent it will understand it better than those who thought they understood it.
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by inimino 4y ago
> an on-going electro-chemical reaction that we’re just observing the outputs of and concluding that we’re controlling it somehow? Who is the "we" in that sentence, that is not in control?
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by inimino 4y ago
Q. Why do you work hard? A. Because you choose to. Choosing to work means taking action in the world, which is where you can stop looking for a cause outside yourself. How did you choose, you can still ask. But you choose to work because
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by inimino 4y ago
"Vaguely upsetting in how confidently wrong it is" is a good summary of ChatGPT in general, so the summary captures what ChatGPT is better than it captures what the article says. Very few humans are both capable of putting sentenc
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by inimino 4y ago
That's a good story, but you didn't provide any evidence for it, so an anecdote like "I read his essay about [X] on which I'm an expert and it was wrong" would have more value.
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by inimino 4y ago
If you know the result of the flip, then no. Otherwise, yes (b for both).
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by inimino 4y ago
I might be missing the distinction you're making here. If you mean if the flip has already occurred, but the result was concealed (for example, the coin is under my hand but I have not looked at it), since my state of knowledge is the
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by inimino 4y ago
If the two outcomes are both possible and that's all you know, that's exactly what .5 means. I think the confusion comes from that, if the coin flip is repeated, we know (if the coin is fair) it will approach N/2, and in the
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by inimino 4y ago
Indeed. Obviously Gelman is accomplished in the field, so it's a bit surprising. But it's easy to get confused on these issues, for anyone apparently. There is a part towards the end of the paper where he suggests that the coin fl
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by inimino 4y ago
It is similar to a religion, because if everyone agrees to adopt the same reality, then there's easy communication and a shared background understanding that makes it easy for everyone to work together. Picking a religion is a societ

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