sebastos

Yeah - I guess not much I disagree with here. But, some food for thought: people on this website have been telling me Uber is going to fail for nigh on 10 years now. Constantly, breathlessly, they've explained to me it's NOT because they feel any one way about the misogynistic leadership elements at that company. No, they predict it will fail purely based on a dispassionate reading of the financials and fundamentals. It will definitely fail _because_ it's a bad company. Any day now, they assure me.

Point being: phrases like 'rationalization' and 'wishful thinking' exist for a reason. You should be extremely skeptical of how fairly you are assessing the prospects of a company run by people you hate. You are almost definitely interpreting the outlook uncharitably.

It’s so interesting. On the one hand you have our culture’s deserved rancor at late stage capitalist CEOs juicing the profits and squeezing every last drop of profit out of their customers. Tired derivative products and enshittified service models are exhausting us. Our institutions seem to be creatively bankrupt, and every single product and utterance they make has been through 500 different committees to ensure maximum profitability and minimum soul. We all fucking hate what almost corporate America has come to stand for.

And yet… when it’s Elon Musk’s company, we are suddenly all numbers and figures, and we waggle our fingers disapprovingly that he doesn’t have board approval. Yes, with Musk you have a childish huckster asshole. And increasingly it does appear he’s gone off the deep end, buying into his own self mythology. But the one redeeming quality he still demonstrates is refusal to settle for doing the same thing over and over. He continually and unreasonably pushes the envelope.

Tesla has definitively become a successful company. They defied all the naysayers in reaching that success, and it has turned into a global behemoth. They have oodles of money. The fact that Musk tirelessly insists on trying new moonshots that seem ridiculous is a GOOD thing - it’s the thing we _lack_. Inventive, audacious risk-taking is exactly what our stupid extractive scam economy lacks. Compared to you and me, yes, Musk is a cringey edgelord with the energy of a weird kid at the sleepover who tells bragging lies. But compared to his cohort who run large businesses, he is a goal oriented doer who attracts great talent and then relentlessly pushes them to achieve the impossible. And they actually succeed some non-zero amount of the time. It doesn’t matter that not every idea is a winner. That’s not how moonshots work. The point is that _some_ moonshot ideas do work though and actually move us up the tech tree. And the probable reality is that the delusional unrealistic asshole _helps_ push you there, precisely because they cannot be reasoned with. No, you cannot build moonshot companies without grandiosity, because the people working on it need to have a mission that is bigger than dollars and cents or common sense. If the only thing pushing you is good financials, you will quit as soon as “projections” start to look bad. In the area of moonshots, projections are just the opinions of uninformed non-believers who will ALWAYS mount until the world convinces you to stop working on the “stupid” thing.

All that said, the flying car is the dumbest thing I’ve seen him push and I don’t find it remotely exciting. Self-driving and robots are way cooler.

Not arguing that sequence of thought doesn't occur, but it bothers me because the reasoning is faulty. If money's worth less, then the appraised value of my home measured in dollars should correspondingly increase. If the biggest taxes are assessed as rates on things that tend to scale with inflation, then it ought to be relatively indifferent to inflation. The only changes you should have to make to your tax system in response to inflation should be raising flat rate taxes.

>Eckert and Mauchly weren't reliable narrators of the history of their work, given how much they needed to claim in order to get the patents

The existence of an incentive doesn't predestine the outcome.

Von Neumann was the one who inappropriately failed to credit them in "First draft...". Goldstine was the one who distributed it knowing they were legally unable to publish themselves. These are the unethical actions that clouded the record. Between these two sides, I'll be trusting Eckert and Mauchly's account.

>They claimed quite a few things that were later disproven in court or through historical study.

Ehh.. I'm curious which things you're referring to. The patent trial was hogwash, so depending on the topic, 'disproven in court' could mean literally nothing. I hope you're not just an Atanasoff crank...?

For dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs!

No, no - all that “useless” knowledge is the good stuff. There is no clean interface boundary for driving a car, because the only interface that has been enforced is “if a human can navigate this situation, it’s fine”. Real world driving situations can be arbitrarily complicated, and if you want >human level driving, you need human level semantic understanding of the world around you. If you see a kid about to throw a model airplane across the street in front of you, you have to bring all your “useless” world knowledge with you to recognize that as a developing hazard. If you’re supposed to bring your passenger to the city building on main and you encounter construction outside with a detour sign saying “for tax dropoff park in rear”, suddenly all of your useless knowledge about the English language, what taxes are, and the likely goal of your passenger given their destination become useful.

But if the model is an LLM, you actually COULD ask it why it drove under the semi, and it would give you an answer. Now, you may argue that it will just be generating a whole new, backwards-rationalized post-hoc explanation of its own behavior given the logs that it managed to take before the crash. But then I ask you: how do you think a person explains why they did what they did after a crash? I direct you to all of the unsettling split-brain neuroscience literature demonstrating that humans are incorrigible backwards rationalizers who make for unreliable witnesses.

As somebody working near the field, I do enjoy the fun of dreaming bespoke vision and autonomy algorithms (if I didn’t, I wouldn’t work in the field to begin with!). But I would drop it all in a heartbeat for a robot that works well. Robust, resilient robots would be such an incredible advance that the ‘how’ doesn’t matter. All of the nonsense from the current AI hype cycle would be worth it if it cashed out in Robots That Actually Work.

Thanks for your response, very intriguing! I have some controls background, and there’s something tantalizing about the idea that perhaps we need to be looking at the brain in frequency space, as it were. Are you aware of reservoir computing and do you see it playing a part in this?

Hijacking your post with a dubious segue because I’m itching to bounce these thoughts off somebody:

I’ve been consuming a lot of talks / writing recently about “enactive” pictures of how our brains function. From what I gather, recent studies have called into question the entire idea of real world concepts being “represented” by an area of the brain at all. While it’s true that atandard fMRI-style snapshots of brain activity are semi-stable over the course of a short experiment, it’s not true over longer timeframes. The response to the same stimulus will change over time. They refer to this as “representational drift” in the literature, and some people are using this to bolster theories of mind that they consider non-representational. They instead emphasize the brain as a kind of dynamical system that learns to “resonate” with the world to pull itself back into homeostasis. The focus shifts away from facts and memories as data, and sees neuronal plasticity more as a mechanism for tuning the brain’s resonant frequencies. This obviously places high importance on the spiking, recurrent nature of actual neurons, as opposed to the neurons-as-functions / back-propagation / ML approach.

My mind’s not made up on how interesting and revolutionary this approach is / isn’t. The distinction seems to be about whether learning is more like “writing to disk” or “tuning a PID controller” - but in either case, the world is leaving a stateful imprint on your brain that will impact how it processes future data. Is that important to understanding how brains work, or is it just semantics?

Sure, the specifics of this issue are intriguing on their own terms to the website nerds, but “there exists a problem with display of the website” surely rates as a tangential annoyance.

It’s unrealistic to imagine that we could ever fully moderate these meta comments away because there’s always going to be new problems and corresponding urges to discuss them. Nor do I think we really want to, when it comes down to it. They’re often useful, or at least cathartic.

…but. They DO make for dreadful reading if you actually came to read about the article itself. Thus my idea to add a wiki-style meta section. Then you get best of both worlds.

>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

This is the guideline that people find, by far, the hardest not to break. @dang or whoever - has anyone ever considered adding some kind of 'meta' discussion area to each topic? This would provide a place for people to commiserate / troubleshoot without diluting the main discussion? As we saw here, the discussions can sometimes be plenty productive (e.g. the author seeing and reacting to the criticism, paywall workarounds, etc.), it's just not what people interested in the actual subject want to read. And conversely, if it was moved into a special meta annex, people with a problem or a gripe would know right where to look.

I suspect you might hear a lot of push back on this take, but I for one fully agree. I would go as far as to say that in my workplace, this a nearly inverse relationship between quality of work and how actively that person is thinking about / talking about / acting-as-if-they-are-owed a promotion.

Sorry, I shortened to the point of inaccuracy - I should have said not fully electronic _speed_. Not meant to say that it was mechanically reading and writing values per se, just that the slow rotation of a mechanical drum was essential for its operation and ultimately had a limiting effect on the speeds it could compute. Thus the electronic storage and compute was rather defeated by inclusion of a mechanical element in the “critical path”, so to speak. I think that’s accurate to say?

…and whose digital calculator was _just_ a calculator (not a general purpose computer) that read values from a mechanical drum (so not fully electronic), and sat in a basement until it was later disassembled. That this device managed to qualify as prior art is mostly just an exhibit of how the trial system isn’t especially good at divining truth. So annoying that the ABC is a permanent barnacle on the ENIAC story.