davidivadavid

Icons are supposed to have some amount of stroke width consistency, detail consistency, etc. This is giving AI slop vibes immediately.

This is just the n-th iteration of the naive view of technology is a kind of inert tool humans use, as opposed to a projection of some human wants onto our environment that in turn influences our behavior in a cybernetic loop. That the AI doesn't "spontaneously" start talking to you is immaterial when because of its very existence you've started thinking and acting differently.

It doesn't need to go "beyond" to have influence. Influencing people's imagination is influence.

Mediocre literally means middling, which may or may not be good enough depending on requirements.

My intuitive understanding is that deriving new theorem from existing concepts is "new math" insofar as it conclusively proves whether existing conjectures are in fact true or not by deriving proofs within an existing formal "system" (loosely understood), but it's not "new math" as it doesn't introduce new concepts to the system. It's the usual problem solver vs. theory builder dichotomy.

An interesting thought experiment would be: assuming AI can solve any given problem (or prove it's undecidable), and thus that the "proving" activity becomes trivialized, what's the interesting part that remains? Can we work on "refactoring" mathematics to make it more intuitive? More "powerful" in some sense? What are other refactorings that are worth exploring?

I gave up the belief he could abstain from that after he ruined Return.

Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.

And that's why Curse of Monkey Island is and will always remain the best MI game.

Having working in that area a little bit, simple heuristics to know if someone has dumb ideas about advertising are whether they: a) think it's some kind of magical MK-Ultra-level mind control technology, b) think the business that pays them for a living could exist without any form of advertising. Once that's acknowledged as fantasy you generally get into goal-post moving territory about what is or isn't really advertising but that's purely academic.

And you ask Claude to read it for you. No way I'm reading past a couple sentences of that level of slop.

I think what it boils down to is that in my experience physics education lacks a clear historical component about how the current state of the art is a gradual process of proposing new models and rejecting old ones and figuring out the gaps between reality and the model. Instead, it feels like a God-given set of equations (that lots of people consider "the truth" for some reason), that you apply to cookie-cutter problems you must learn by rote. Though I understand the practical concerns (but then let's call it "physics for engineering"), as far as I'm concerned, you couldn't treat physics in a worse way.

Also, physics (the discipline) is also a construction by and for humans.

My point is precisely that I was often taught physics as if it was mathematics, where there is in fact a profound ontological difference between the two.

Lagrangian / Hamiltonian mechanics, the principle of least action, always seemed neat, in L&L and other places I encountered it, until I tried doing exactly what you're saying: gaining an intuitive understanding. At that point it just never made sense to me and seemed like a gratuitous deus ex machina that happens to work beautifully but for no apparent reason. You won't be surprised to learn I dropped out of my STEM program shortly after, though I keep a keen interest in the topic.

More than twenty years ago, I quit a program that taught math/cs/physics (the notorious French "classes préparatoires") ~almost precisely over this: I felt like I was being taught physics like it was an axiomatic system where the tricks should not be questioned, they just work so "shut up and calculate" (and you don't even need to be doing quantum mechanics for that).

I just felt like we never got to the heart of the matter of why the models work and how to approach developing them, it was all about learning a bag of tricks.

Meanwhile, math and CS being a lot more axiomatic by nature, they also made a lot more sense to me.

That being said, that specificity of physics, the unbridgeable gap between reality and the models we build to describe it, in retrospect, is what makes it more interesting to me today (it's not just a "closed" system in the sense that math is — of course the relationship between math and physics is itself fascinating but that's yet another topic), but I still feel like I haven't found the right pedagogical approach to make it fit my mindset.