golemotron

The premise is wrong. Kevin Bacon was never meant to be unique in this way, just an illustration of a point in a small-worlds network.

We shouldn't forget the sun either. Without the sun none of us would be here.

I don't think you can lay naming at the feet of capital. Euclid, Ramanujan, Galois, Poncelet.. The list goes on. The Marxist lens is feeble.

Reputation and desire for recognition are an incentive system that have gotten us a long way. They are a way of celebrating and honoring the human reach for excellence. If you like humans, that's a good thing.

I like the UK's archaic system of measures for the similar reasons. It has the stamp of humanity. For those who think about such things it reminds of who we were. Without historical context we think less of ourselves.

That's a cultural artifact. Culture comes and goes. Read about how hiding mathematical discoveries was commonplace in Fermat's time and before.

There will still be a place for posing problems and noticing how breaking assumptions can create something new. The history of Non-Euclidian geometry is a good example.

A lot of progress comes from taking assumptions and breaking them. There was a time when everyone assumed that locked checkouts were absolutely necessary for version control, for instance. You could argue that AI could learn how to do this well but humans have context that machines won't. This is just an extension of the fact that things with independent existence will have different impressions of the world. If they didn't they would functionally be one thing.

It's hard to get humans to agree to things that are in their collective interest but many not be in their individual interest. It is at the root of many problems. Look up "collective action problem."

Unfortunately, it is a collective action problem. Whenever I hear "we" I flinch.

It's so bad for me that I often drop down into Terminal, find there (with 'find') and then use 'open'. I'm very used to doing this.

I've just assumed that Finder is fine for non-technical user so no one complains. But fair point. It can be fixed.

When you say "X proxy" the 'X' stands for the thing that is being proxied not the thing that is doing the proxying.

Imagine what happens when human readability is discarded as a goal. LLMs are already very good at inferring meaning with little context. If the objective function is reduction of token consumption, it's hard to know where we will end up.

I wonder when we'll see articles on the lost civic life of social media? With increasing AI use, it is happening.

Reminds me of Elon's answer to the question of what various countries can do about StarLink: "They can shake their fists at the sky."

I'd just be happy if companies were required to call them licensed and forbidden to call them sold or owned by the buyer.