llamaz

> But given the above, I have not understood their importance as kernel functions or use for GP.

If the author has a CV attached to their blog, the purpose is to signal competence and the target audience is future employers .

There are levels to morality, from the abstract (e.g. climate change, energy usage, veganism) to the concrete (murder). Time are unstable, but there are multiple ways to make money. If you are established in your career, you can probably find work in a similar field, but the worst case scenario would be to drive a truck.

The way you frame it, you make it sound like an engineer at OpenAI has no choice but to work there or end up on the street. But an engineer at OpenAI is not going to end up driving a truck, they're going to remain and engineer.

A position shared by both Lenin and Thatcher

It's a university project, so it wouldn't have been expected to be perfect. I had to do something similar as an assignment, but if I had the choice, I would have chosen anything else because the project was anything but fun.

Everything was implemented using transistors, so it involved a lot of calculations, and simulation in LTSpice.

The credit for the labour theory of value goes to Adam Smith, specifically the Wealth of Nations. Whether it was true or not is a separate question, but it was based on empirical data available at the time. Marx is usually credited with it because he altered it, and saw a flaw in Adam Smith's version. The idea that "what something costs is what people are willing to pay for it" was something Adam Smith was familiar with and addressed in the Wealth of Nations.

> Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things.

The Gnostics and followers of Hermes were one of the most hounded and persecuted groups throughout history. The Cathars were wiped out, and Giordano Bruno, an early proponent of the Copernican model of the solar system was burnt at the stake by the inquisition. It seems to be the other way around.

> Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds.

I don't think this is correct, but I can't prove a negative.

Excellent game. I also suggest adding instructions that words can only be top down or left-to-right.

I was trying to fit right-to-left in some cases initially.

"Do you know what it’s like? What it’s like when you get the feeling that you’re about to die? And that you were ready to collapse at a moment’s notice?"

It sounds like the author had a bad experience with energy drinks. Everyone reacts differently to substances such as caffeine, or a combination of substances.

Some people are lactose intolerant, or gluten intolerant. The author is energy drink intolerant.

I didn't know, thanks for the correction :)

The Arabs must have switched it around then

This is intentional. They're called Arabic numerals for a reason - when they were imported to Europe to replace Roman numerals, they weren't flipped. This is why mental arithmetic is harder than it needs to be.

Leibniz did that from memory, although the stoics deserve the credit for propositional logic (which can be reduced to a collection of truth tables). and contrary to popular belief Boole actually extended Aristotle’s syllogisms (reduced the conventional syllogisms to computation using matrices of 1s and 0s) rather than create a today’s binary logic.

I get what you're saying, but this is not immediately obvious.

For example, control systems also adapt to data and are often robust to noise, and they're understood mathematically very well.

I don't necessarily disagree, but you would need some more justification.

No, I’m fact the best female chess player, Judith Polgar was known for her aggression while the best male chess player Magnus Carlsen is known for his conservative style. They are different generations, however, but there have always been aggressive and defensive players.

I'm not a Foucault fan, and I used to hold the same opinion as you. But now I realise the exchange was, as you say, a "waste of time".

Chomsky doesn't seem to have read up on the issues Foucault is talking about, and he admits as much in an interview on the topic, about how he was surprised that he could not find /any/ common ground from which to build a conversation with Foucault.

This is more of a failure of communication on the part of French intellectuals, who use verbose language helps keep their radical tradition so insular.

So... it's what you would expect an exchange between the analytic and continental philosophers to be like. Chomsky takes the enlightenment humanism tradition for granted, and assumes he can find common ground with Foucault there, but Foucault had been working in a tradition where the humanism vs anti-humanism debate (e.g. Althusser) was front and center.

In fact, Foucault himself was on the anti-humanist side. (anti-humanism doesn't mean "evil", it's just an unfortunate tongue-in-cheek terminology). What you end up with is Foucault trying his best to introduce Chomsky to the basics of a core part of the French intellectual tradition, more-or-less unsuccessfully.

What the debate highlights is the extent of the divide between continental philosophy and analytical philosophy. It doesn't make new ground.

How do you know truth is objective? Without a doubt it's true in hard science, e.g. chemistry and biology.

But by the time you get to social science, economics, politics, and ethics I think we're closer to the dark ages than we like to admit. In the dark ages religion was taken as objective truth, but in the present that doesn't work because people think religion exists to "trick" them or gain political power.

It's possible that we extend the authority that science has in the fundamental sciences to areas where it is not as effective without justification. The free marketeers always touted their view of objective science as dispassionate, objective science. Similarly, everything from the marshmellow test to the left-vs-right brain (creative vs logical) has been debunked, or at the very least been called into serious question due to a reproducibility crises in psychology and similar disciplines.

We really live in a HP lovecraft-esque world, where we understand almost nothing, and are controlled by powers beyond human understanding and control. This idea is something that naturally repels the human mind, and those who profess such a view are treated as being deficient if not mentally ill (external locus of control, anxious/depressive).

The reason Nietzsche is so revered but Schopenhauer is not, is that Nietzsche offers a hopeful "way out" of this crisis with his nonsense idea of the overman, while Schopenhauer is more disciplined and stops at pessimism. The latter is attacked as bourgeois, and as being a hypocrite, while the male chauvinism and other negative character traits of Nietzsche are overlooked.