1. Many people intuitively assume that clumping/clustering of events implies non-randomness, and that random processes are smooth and low-variance. The opposite is true [1].
2. A consequence of 1. is that people often over-estimate their understanding of the likelihood of events and the degree to which they are conditional/dependent.
3. There was an intriguing comment on this site a few days ago [2], referencing Daniel Kahneman's work on System 1 and System 2 thinking. From memory it said that reality is a lot less explicable than we tend to think - and that a lot of what we casually think we know about the everyday world is just our brains filling in the gaps using quick and cheap System 1.
As to why people are clutching at science-fictional interpretations: perhaps they're looking for some excitement or novelty? That would be very human.
Point taken. But I'm not an academic and this is just hn - and I think the comment was well made.
Edit to add: The critique in the linked blog post refers to weak studies relied-on in one chapter of one general-readership book by Kahneman. I'm not aware of anyone claiming that he is generally unreliable as a scientist.
You say "just HN" but deep down it's a cabal where the rich and elite gather to laugh at the affected and groom future billionaires through advanced snobbification.
One of my colleagues has a mechanical keyboard - possibly a Filco - that they use in preference to their crappy corporate-issued one, and i have come to loathe the machinegun sound. I get that they feel good to use, and the haptic and audible feedback combo is particularly effective. But for the love of $deity I just want the noise to stop.
It’s nothing to do with the manufacturer. I have 3 Filco Majestouch TKL keyboards, all with Cherry MX “silent” Red switches. They are quiet in and of themselves.
The only noise from them is if I bang away at them too hard, which is generally a sign that I’m frustrated and need to go for a walk. (It’s mostly my wife or kid who point out I’m being too noisy, and they are right 99% of the time.)
Sad to see Filco go. I’ll keep an eye on eBay for any bargains to keep a spare of two.
FWIW, not all mechanicals are loud. The clicky audible feedback is a deliberate thing on some types of switch, and you can get others with less or even virtually no noise.
I think what your parent commenter means is that, if the application is warlike or nefarious, them the money will be found. If, on the other hand, it is humanitarian, then every penny will be counted.
I disagree. If your charitable application is profitable, it will get funded.
Now, people will hate you for doing a "good" thing for money (exhibit A : name any pharma company selling the drugs that keep people alive ; that company is going to get called a "cynical shill" given enough profit.)
It just happens that the bad things are often highly profitable, so the investors will pour the pensioners money in (because the pension money must flow.)
That being said, the best way to get funded is not for your app to be good or bad, but to be massively fun. Sell tulips, video games and Céline Dion tickets. Find a way to divert 10% of the benefits to a charity.
Yes, I get that, but for whatever amount of money is found, you're better off using it more effectively. The cost of things still matters, if you want to win wars against serious adversaries.
One problem the US has had in its Iran adventure is that they're shooting down $30K drones with million dollar missiles, often several of them. Now the missile stockpiles have been depleted by 30% to 50%, depending on missile type, and they're not all that quick to replace.
> Travelers going between cities/countries carry items for people who need to send stuff.
Carrying othet people's parcels across national boundaries is a really, really bad idea for the person involved. Drugs, money, weapons, explosives, endangered species, etc.
If you plan to run a business that facilitates this then you are exposing yourself to potentially very severe legal liabilities.
It seems to me like magic links are just off-loading the auth problem to email.
If magic links become increasingly common then email† account access increasing becomes a single point of vulnerability/failure. And email providers obviously can't use magic links for auth. I dont know what the solution is.
I'm unconvinced. Doesnt this just replace the need to choose a suitable epsilon with the need to choose the right number of bits to strip? With the latter affording much fewer choices for degree of "roughness" than does the former.
Not quite. It's basically a combined mantissa and exponent test, so it can be thought of as functionally equivalent to scaling epsilon by a power of two (the shared exponent of the nearly equal floating point values) and then using that epsilon.
I think I'll just use scaled epsilon... though I've gotten lots of performance wins out of direct bitwise trickery with floats (e.g., fast rounding with mantissa normalization and casting).
Context matters. The first guy to write X is a luminary. The next 50 people to write variations of X start falling along a spectrum, from luminary to hack. After that, everyone except children have been exposed to X, and anyone writing about it seems trite.
I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov, and now the original seems trite (when you read it after all the stuff derived from it). But the work remains foundational.
this story has arguably aged worse in that respect than asimov's similarly titled "the last answer". that one still evokes a "whoa" when I think about it.
Thank you - I hadn't read that before. Its a much richer, and also darker, work than The Last Question.
Also it was written in 1980,.almost three decades after The Last Question. I wonder if part of the difference (to me) is in the evolution of the author's writing practice, or development of themes in SF over that time?
The triteness was more in the ending than the overall exposition. Humans create computer, computer creates universe->humans.
> I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov
You're probably right, although the transitive chain of derivation is necessarily long. Clarke - probably not derivative. Blish and Cherryh (some), Stapeton, Lem, Heinlein (the juveniles, as a kid), Baxter, Banks, Gibson, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, Peter Watts... I dunno.
I did grind through the Robot books as a child, and the Foundation books that he wrote. But just because they're foundational (no pun intended) doesn't stop them feeling stuffy and dated now.
(And as an aside, it strikes me now that Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God is kind of the anti-particle to The Last Question.)
the penultimate line of "the nine billion names of god" has always stayed with me: "there is always a last time for everything". sounds a bit trite just by itself, but it was an incredibly powerful line when I encountered it in the story and that feeling has stayed attached to it for me.
1. Many people intuitively assume that clumping/clustering of events implies non-randomness, and that random processes are smooth and low-variance. The opposite is true [1].
2. A consequence of 1. is that people often over-estimate their understanding of the likelihood of events and the degree to which they are conditional/dependent.
3. There was an intriguing comment on this site a few days ago [2], referencing Daniel Kahneman's work on System 1 and System 2 thinking. From memory it said that reality is a lot less explicable than we tend to think - and that a lot of what we casually think we know about the everyday world is just our brains filling in the gaps using quick and cheap System 1.
As to why people are clutching at science-fictional interpretations: perhaps they're looking for some excitement or novelty? That would be very human.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion
[2] Unfortunately I cant find the comment. I wish I'd favourited it.
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