jhedwards

I think "visual hallucination" is something very different from the minds eye. The imagination is one source of visual experience, the eyes are another. A visual hallucination is when something goes wrong and the data from your eyes is contaminated or distorted in some way. In my case, my imagination can produce photo-realistic visual experiences which are strong enough to block out the data from my eyes. They don't mix, but I can supplant one for the other at will. If they did mix I think that would be a disorder and we'd be talking about something other than aphantasia and imagination.

This is such a weird response, what do I have to gain by lying about such an event? Why would you want to "verify" it? I am sharing a lived experience: my visual experience of the image of the dystopian landscape was so strong that my cognitive experience was consumed by the image in my mind, to the extent that I no longer saw the image conveyed by my eyes.

I suppose, hypothetically, there are people who come to HN to fib and spin tales, but I am here with no agenda other than learning and conversing.

They absolutely exist. I have a VERY strong minds eye and can invent and watch movies if I want to. Once I was driving while my friend described a post-apocalyptic landscape. I was seeing that landscape and not the road. Suddenly (some part of my brain was still paying attention, thankfully) the road rushed back to me and I saw that the cars in front of me had stopped. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident.

As possibly a tradeoff for this intense visual imagination, I have dyscalculia: I am unable to do more than simple calculations in my mind, and the more math I do the more my mind "closes up" and I feel a kind of pain and visceral frustration. There was nothing more frustrating growing up than people telling me I just needed to be patient or try harder, when nothing I did had any effect on my math ability.

As an adult I have worked around that disability by learning the fields of math that don't involve lots of numbers (discrete math is fine, algorithms are fine), and by learning non-numerical strategies for breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable calculations.

People are different, we have different cognitive abilities. Just like some people are blind or deaf, some people lack a visual imagination, an internal narrative, or the ability to manipulate numbers. I think this cognitive diversity is really quite fascinating.

This comment make a couple assumptions I don't agree with:

1. That technological development and a "carbon neutral goal" are incompatible. Carbon neutrality is precisely a problem of technological development, with green energy, battery technology, and improving the grid all on the vanguard of modern technological development. The problems caused by global warming will only get more severe (even if they don't cause the apocalypse) and these technological issues will be correspondingly more important for the survival of any other tech that depends on energy.

2. That America's military interests and private sector involvement are inevitable. I think that Google could influence an overly militaristic policy precisely by withholding support. We are _not_ a dictatorship where everyone and every institution must bend their will to the leader, and changes are in fact sometimes made through a show of resistance. This may be a somewhat naive view, but I think it's more correct than one that sees US politics as so inevitable that even Google has no choice but to fall in line. Sure, it would probably cost them to resist, but as another commenter pointed out: ethical decisions typically have a cost.

In my workplace we argue without ego and with the assumption that we are working together to find the best way to do something. If someone realizes that the other person is right, they will say something like "Ah, OK, yes that's true..." and from that point on it stops being an argument and becomes a collaboration where both of us examine the correct position to make sure we're clear on it and its potential downfalls.

Reading this article has me a bit surprised, and the culture the author describes does not sound like an engineering culture to me. I am a bit saddened to think that people have to work in such an environment, and I am curious what it would take to change such an environment for the better.

Just for some perspective, my kids get about 1 hour of screen time a day, and a lot of my friends are shocked at how much they watch. I'm glad you made this change and saw the positive effect, especially to the extent that they started choosing other activities over screen time, but I can't image how much they were watching before you "cut down" to 2 hours a day, and how you could have felt that that was OK for children?

Historically, all speech was considered "intentional". And by speech here I am including two distinct things: the expression of opinion, and the publication of opinion by a magazine/newspaper owner.

I separate those two things because they are very different with respect to the scale of the dissemination of speech. Nevertheless, magazines and newspapers are free to publish opinion, though it is significant in my opinion that in those cases there is an accountable individual (the editor/publisher).

It strikes me as different when we have social media platforms that amplify speech to a massive scale without any accountability. Clearly, monetization fuels the large-scale amplification of some undesirable speech so that 1. it is not an opinion expressed in good faith and 2. there is no directly accountable individual, unless the poster can be considered accountable for FBs large-scale publication of their speech, which feels perverse to me. It's effectively "robo-published".

There are some conclusions which could be drawn here, and I'm not sure which should be drawn if any. But I think it's important to point out that the details do matter (libel laws and "malice" for example) and that the details change in significant ways as society and technology change.

> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.

I'm not sure I understand this. We've added hundreds of gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. There's no mystery here, it's basic physics and chemistry that this will change things, and it's accepted that we don't know exactly _how_ things will change. The alternative: "adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere will _not_ change anything" is simply non-sensical. It goes against the basic rules of physics and causality. I'm happy to be proved wrong here, I just legitimately can't see how an alternative position makes any sense.

Edit: I see you specifically pointed out "predictions of catastrophe", which if that is true (and not just the position of radicals on Twitter) is indeed unfortunate.

Ah this reminds me of my first big mistake with PCBs. I have recently started down the hardware track, and my first PCB has a number of BC547 and BC558 transistors on it.

Once I had a functioning prototype, the next step was to convert it into a schematic. After that, you have to convert the schematic into a PCB. Now we are at two layers of translation, and at this step I made a mistake: I wanted to use SMD components to save money, and I found that the BC8xx transistors are the SMD equivalent of the BC5xx ones, so I used the footprint of the BC8xx transistors in my PCB, with no errors from KiCad.

As it turns out, the BC8xx footprint is not compatible with a BC5xx schematic! The pinout is different: the base is pin 1 instead of pin 2, so the components in my PCB that use transistors (crucially, the voltage controlled amplifier) didn't work. Unlike a bug, that mistake cost me $200 and weeks of development time, but after 10+ years of writing software I'm still happy to be making things that people can touch.

I've read quite a bit of classical Chinese philosophy, and in my opinion that major piece that is directly translatable to Western concerns is the discussion of management principles. Confucian and legalist scholars recognized that statecraft was fundamentally a management problem, and they included a lot of wisdom about that sort of thing in their writings. This includes:

- One of the most important jobs of a leader is to find the talented people and give them work worthy of their talents

- Large projects start by laying a foundation which will facilitate later work

- Resource and disaster management are central problems of government

- If someone makes a bad decision, it is probably because they didn't see the value of the better decision. Instead of criticizing the path they chose, show them the superior value of the one they overlooked.

Sure, but my whole point is that humans are _not_ passive input/output systems, we have an active biological system that uses an input/output system as a tool for coordinating with the environment. Thinking is part of the active system, and serves as an input to the language apparatus, and my point is that there is no corollary for that when talking about LLMs.

Thinking in humans is prior to language. The language apparatus is embedded in a living organism which has a biological state that produces thoughts and feelings, goals and desires. Language is then used to communicate these underlying things, which themselves are not linguistic in nature (though of course the causality is so complex that the may be _influenced_ by language among other things).

This criticism strikes me as lazy: it zeroes in on some casual introductory remarks made by the author which are intended to serve as a general guideline or frame of reference for understanding the concepts which follow, then invents a premise which is not in the article (that engineering doesn't contain discovery) and uses that to falsely demonstrate the weakness of the rest of the article.

How can you read this article and your takeaway is that "the author is arguing that engineering does not have abstraction or discovery"? How can you read this insightful article and think "this is extremely poor understanding" because the author does not discuss how "all engineering is full of discovery" when that is not even relevant to the topic of the article? Clearly their point is that engineering does have discovery, and they give examples specifically from the domain of software engineering.

If you think that discovery in all fields of engineering is an interesting topic, go ahead and write your own article about that topic. Show examples from plumbing, electrical engineering, and material science. It would be fascinating, it really would be! But that is not this article, nor is it at odds with what the author of this article is saying.

It's difficult to write an article like this. It takes time and consideration, organization and work. Nit-picking generalization which are not core to the argument of the article, on the other hand, is easy. Anyone can do it.