Dove

I'm not who you're replying to, but I tuned out big movies and TV long ago, and just recently, YouTube became a hostile enough environment for me to start limiting it. When I do go there, it's to watch specific channels I already know. Clickbait titles and slop suggestions just aren't worth the psycholigical hassle when I want to relax.

I had been replacing it with podcasts, but they are so ad-infested now that it's been pushing me more and more to audiobooks. I also watch a fair bit of content on smaller special interest platforms, like CrunchyRoll for Anime or Pepperbox for guns. They're easy to sub and unsub depending on what I'm interested in. I often rent old movies. And more and more... I read.

I had used Prime's videos for a while when they had something I liked, but the ads have gotten so bad that I now go out of my way not to emotionally invest in anything they produce. The experience has left me skeptical of other platform exclusive shows and I generally just go do something else with my time. I used to be a big fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek, but at some point they both started producing Platform Content and in response, I haven't watched anything from either for about a decade now.

Wow - I really want that to succeed!

In broad strokes, the skins of things are high in nutrients, medicines, fiber, and toxins - natural, agricultral, and environmental. The degree to which each of these things is true depends very much on what specifically you are trying to eat, where it comes from, and sometimes its condition.

It is easy to forget, but plants aren't inherently safe. Produce has been made so by breeding, historical wisdom, and by laws and customs and systems. While some of these things are overcautious or corrupt, others may be keeping you safe without you realizing it. Eating things you aren't expected to eat is playing with the safeties off, to some degree.

I wouldn't think you'd get into too much trouble eating the skins of things you'd find in the grocery store, but green potatoes would certainly be an exception. I'd mostly want to wash a akin I intended to eat very well, as I'd mostly worry what might have been sprayed on that part on the assumption I wouldn't eat it.

The further you get away from expectation - stems, seeds, leaves - the further you are from built in safety measures and the closer you are to eating a random plant. Even knowing that people consider something medicine is not a free pass. Medicines come with dosages and side effects. Drugs powerful enough to help you are usually also poweful enough to hurt you, and this is often similarly true with plants.

All of that is not exactly to dissuade you from trying things, and toxic bits of things are usually obvious and not too dangerous in small quantities. Still, it's worth starting small and doing the odd search first. You never know when a particular breed of apple, grown under particular conditions, will have unusually potent seeds, and you want to have some understanding of how quickly certain toxins accumulate and clear. We do have a lot of accumulated knowledge on food safety, and it is worth consulting if you are going to step off the usual path.

On the other hand, lots of things known to be beneficial and safe are considered unpalatable due to being rough and unsweet, but you can certainly develop a taste for them. Wheat bran and potato skins are among my favorites.

This sounds to me like it is very much time to start dumping certain tablets into Boston Harbor.

Excellence is what matters. It can be found in universities (and is in theory what universities are for), but in my professional experience, a C.S. degree is no guarantee that one has been trained with excellent taste and judgement. In fact, I usually react to the new hires with C.S. degrees with some degree of frustration at what schools are teaching these days.

Excellence can also be found in independent reading, and it can be learned with professional mentors as well.

You can learn it from AI, too, actually. I'm skeptical about the central use of AI in writing code directly, but find it incredible as a teaching tool. It is especially impressive when I use it as something between a tutor and a search engine, talking to it a lot about the best way to do things and asking it about standard methods and resources. It's not infallible, to be sure, but it's this incredible combination of tutor and textbook, with a better connection to the zeitgeist than all but the very best of tutors and textbooks.

In this way, AI is not dissimilar from school, independent reading, or work experience: you can use these tools in different ways, to serve different goals. If you focus on credential, skill, productivity, and money, you may entirely miss out on excellence in your craft. On the other hand, you can pursue excellence in any of these contexts.

I find Brave search is superior to Google, particularly in linking me to more useful references.

He was an incredibly great man, and it remains a privilege to have learned from him. While I left mathematics for engineering, his audacious asking of the right questions around the philosophical foundations of an endeavor remains a large influence on me and has become a hallmark of my engineering work. It makes me smile that you are familiar with him as well. :)

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Here's the full puzzle, as best I remember it:

Suppose you have two convex polygons with the following very specific relationship: one has been created from the other by making one side stretchy, moving an adjacent side on a hinge, and keeping the remaining sides fixed. For example, imagine a square with a top side made of rubber, and a rigid right side hinged at the lower right corner. You can make a series of convex polygons in a continuous fashion by rotating that right side on its hinge.

The question is, if you have two convex polygons that differ only by this one stretchy side and this adjacent hinged side, can you guarantee that you can always smoothly deform the one into the other by this hinging method while keeping the whole thing convex?

That is to say, if you are deforming one polygon into another by this hinge and rubber band method, if your starting polygon and ending polygon are both convex, are all the middle ploygons guaranteed to be?

The answer is intuitively obviously yes, but in point of fact, it is no.

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To bring this back to the original story, the question was a small step in a larger constructive proof he was working on. The overall result was already known - in fact, we had just discussed it in class - but the proof had this distressingly jerky, discrete movement to it, and he was hoping to construct a more pleasing and smooth algorithm as a more satisfying proof.

As for me, I would not have known how to begin to prove even the smaller question... but I sure could doodle a counterexample. ;) I therefore looked for a one with all the gusto of a young grad student hoping against all odds to do something helpful. You may look with all the confidence of knowing there is something to find, which is also a tremendous help.

I only know his side of the story because he started Monday's class with this line: "I spent the entire weekend trying to prove the result, without success, and it was a good thing too, as there was a counterexample in my box this morning." He did seem genuinely frustrated, but I also wouldn't have put it past him to have exaggerated that part for the laugh.

Anyway. Asking an AI to find counterexamples under such circumstances seems to me similarly reasonable to asking grad students. In my engineering work, I find there is a balance between using the AI to improve and augment your work (especially to call on the diverse perspectives in its training set), and using the AI to avoid your work. I do think the best experience and results are found in that balance. I would expect the same to be true in mathematics.

This was back when the internet was mostly chain emails and personal web pages, being unreachable once you went home for the weekend was perfectly normal and expected, and automatically thinking the worst of people was not a common form of public performance art. ;)

When I was in grad school, I had the opportunity to take a course from my adviser in which he discussed his current research and some open questions. It was a relatively accessible subject area and the questions were sometimes easy enough that we could meaningfully contribute.

On one particular Friday afternoon, he stated a conjecture that he hoped was true, and invited us to try to help him prove or disprove it. It was the sort of thing that he really wanted to be true; he liked things smooth and beautiful. I, on the other hand, hoped it was false as I like the weird and exceptional in mathematics. It was also the case that I had absolutely no command of the sort of machinery that one would use to prove such a thing, but I could certainly look for a counterexample.

I learned on Monday that he had spent the entire weekend trying and failing to prove it. I, on the other hand, had put all my energy into finding a counterexample and had one within an hour.

My single (quite small) contribution to mathematical research was a counterexample because it was all I could do. The story does illustrate that it can be helpful to have people with different tools, hopes, and motivations working on a problem, though. I was not, and will never be, even a shadow of that great mathematiciam I studied under, but on that occasion, I had reason to look in a different direction than he did.

I think one of the most aggravating things about interacting with the health care system is losing control of cost/risk/reward tradeoffs. The mandatory transfer and ambulance ride in the linked story are an excellent example. I think I'd have walked out against medical advice in that circumstance, but there is the constant danger of being subjected to similar costs, both monetary and physical, when I am less conscious or at a serious informational disadvantage. The need to bring a patient advocate with you to the hospital whose role echoes both doctor and lawyer is becoming quite serious.

Air filters, decluttering, regular deep cleaning, replacing dust-friendly surfaces and furniture (such as carpet, drapes, and upholstered sofas) with things like wood, vinyl, or leather. HVAC maintenance, cleaning, and filters. Washable allergen covers for things like pillows and mattresses.

Let us imagine a Bug Bounty Bouncer Service.

The project does not accept bug bounty submissions without BBBS attestation. To get it, you must first submit your report to the BBBS for review.

Now, if this is your first submission (you are unknown to the BBBS), you must submit $50 to the BBBS along with the bug report, to pay a human to spend an hour looking at your work to verify it is written in good faith. This is not a review of whether the bug is real or valuable, just a readover to verify the report is coherent and plausible. If you have done this before, you can get a free attestation based on being a member in good standing, but submitting slop (per the judgement of the BBBS reviewer or the project receiving the report) is an account ban.

The BBBS couldn't steal your work and submit it themselves if they gave you some sort of signed hash as a receipt, which as a side effect would also be a deterrant against bounty programs stealing your work.

Submissions would only be expensive per submission for an anonymous user, enabling the low friction high trust communication under which collaboration works best when reputation has been established.

The BBBS itself won't be overrun by slop since the price of establishing an account far exceeds what a bot might expect to make with a single malicious submission. Nor can legitimate established accounts be sold since the cost of creating them exceeds the value to be expected from abusing them. Moreover, the cost to establish a reputation as a bug bounty hunter is small in dollars compared to the cost in time and expertise that a legitimate hunter would be expected to expend in the course of their work.

The vast majority of slop would go away as the cost of a first submission is much too high. The cost to the project is close to nothing - integrating with the BBBS attestation API. The cost to a legitimate bug bounty hunter is low - some human review while establishing a reputation, which could even be made useful if it came in the form of feedback. All review is paid for by the submitter, so no one is trying to counter infinite slop with volunteer hours.

Moreover, the BBBS can serve as a mediator of trust, not only against AI, but as a place to receive reputational merit for high value work and trustworthy bug bounty programs.

I realize I am describing a lightweight guild, which is subject to well known political failure modes (the most significant of which is exploiting newcomers), but the concept has the advantage that guilds have functioned as successful slop gatekeepers in society for a very long time and a lot is known about how to make them work.

By the way, this paints a very dark picture. I keenly mourn the world I feel slipping away, but there are bright spots and people who fight the good fight, and the occasional blessed and beautiful creation and the odd victory. I don't mean to imply these things are pointless or hopeless - on the contrary. People who do that are the reason we have any good things at all. Thank you.

It is not an us vs. them sort of thing. Don't get me wrong, there are wicked people doing awful things, but I breathe the same air everyone else does. I remember building things 20 years ago with breathless excitement about how it might make the world a better place, and these days I am much quicker to think about how to monetize. Asking a fair price for something isn't evil, but none of us is an island and I don't like how my dreams have changed. I write these things in part to teach myself.

We are a generation of tyrants, each oppressing the others in his own little domain. Gone is the dream of making a modest living while enriching humanity with offerings of technology. Whatever is invented now is gated, rented, and exploited for power, in the shadows and in the open, and what technological power had been granted to the people is whittled away year by year, immense riches destroyed so someone in particular can extract something from a replacement.

There is no Caesar to assassinate because it is everyone, or near enough. It is the idea that this is how you do things. Tyranny is in the air and in the water, that exploitation of power for more power by means of misery, old as mankind.

In such a world, removing one tyrant only gets you ruled by his rival, who is often worse. The historical recipe for freedom and abundance is a people who, as a whole people, are generous with power and expect it of each other at every level, and are viciously intolerant of its abuse. Such was the world of technology for about five decades in the last century, but it hasn't been so for the last two or three. I think it doesn't take much for a few awful people to eat up any abundance, if they are allowed to, and that war is written across the history of computing from its very beginning. But these days, it is not a healthy society defending itself from would-be conquerers, but a world of feuding warlords anxious to eat up any excess anywhere, not only for profit but because thriving and independent people are inherently a threat. With few exceptions, and it seems like fewer every year, any kingdom now which consists of a group of people and some code, be it a software service, a phone, a game, a car, or a dang toaster oven, looks like a despot extracting taxes from his peasants, not a king sheparding his people. Certainly the big ones are that way, and the legacy of the last generation continues to be eroded.

Whatever the means, that tangle of the legal and economic and social and educational and technological and cultural, and I do not pretend it is anything but a thorny and incomprehensible thicket, Aristotle's identification of the broad themes remains relevant. Divided, humiliated, disempowered - whatever the pretext, the encroachment of dark forces is unmistakable. The only defense is (and ever was) those who see their work as in some sense sacred and power as conveying a duty to serve. The generation for whom Superman is a central myth builds one way; the generation for whom it is Game of Thrones builds very differently. Not that these stories are necessarily causes, but their resonance is a reflection of how two very different groups of people think about power.