ppsreejith

Anyone found a good file upload solution for MCP? Or is the best practice to use HTTP to upload files outside MCP?

> In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.

Yeah, good point. At a cultural level, this was a change from an Oral world where _knowing_ what to recall, being able to, and being 'witty' about it mattered a great deal; to a Literate world where things could be cited, 'looked up', and compared.

@Practal's comment is interesting:

> Pure mathematics is dead. Long live mathematics. I think all of interesting mathematics is applied mathematics in the end. Powerful AI means that the level at which we can do applied mathematics will be so much higher, though, and many more people will be able to be "mathematicians". The importance of pure mathematics is often argued for by citing examples of important applications that used pure mathematics invented a long time before the application became apparent. We can reverse this argument: by properly developing the mathematics our applications need, we surely will obtain all of interesting pure mathematics.

Perhaps the pace of applied mathematics would rise sharply, given cheap intelligence. And this* may end up being the forefront driving progress in mathematics.

*Or maybe a split between the human domain and the practical real world. Where the human domain might end up with a variation of a "No machine contributions" policy. Sorta like the recent gcc policy.

> He is obliterated

Technically, he is not. He returns in the final scene.

Thank you :)

> The program must fit in a genome-sized instruction set of about 1 gigabyte

True but this can be a lot larger, maybe even a 1 exabyte instruction size since it depends on he programming language used to express the program. And even accounting for the invariance of runtimes at scale*, the constant factor might be gigantic since we have to build up a lot of cellular machinery first. Reminds me of the Carl Sagan quote: To make a sandwich,you must first construct the universe!

* For example, to translate a program from language A to language B, you can dedicate a constant size to write a language A to B translator. Thus at large program sizes , the kolmogorov complexity (i.e instruction set size) is fairly similar between programs since the size of the program dominates the size of the translator program which is constant. But the constant factor for cellular machinery might be gigantic**

** Or not if we only need a rough simulation

Agreed. I don't like that you're downvoted for pointing this out as the language is very weasel-wordy (revealed to have? by who? what is all of Facebook?):

> Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook

Tbf, the book actually makes the right claim that it's Chinese user data, not all of Facebook so the article is to blame.

Seconded! Great read though maybe a bit reductive in places

Why are room temperature superconductors an 'obviously-impossible' technological claim?

Asking since we've managed to increase superconductor temperature several times in the past, right? (to ~ -130 degrees celsius right now IIRC). Why is our current temperature of, say ~30 degrees celsius special?

In the book "The Quest for Community" (1953), Robert Nisbet argues that social function is primary and natural and leads to true association which for man fulfils a core need. From the book:

> In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.

Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:

1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has always had, and will always have high marginal utility, independent of and utilising any technology.

2. That there are political and not technological barriers suppressing it in our current age.

3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)