It really says a lot about what an amazing society we have created in that here we have some people making history by revolutionizing our understanding of something that was (at least in the past) considered absolutely fundamental and unique to the human condition...
...and one of the things that people find remarkable about it is that it isn't immediately and freely available to everyone on earth.
To be fair they call themselves OpenAI. Expecting things to be a little more open isn't unreasonable. They are kinda setting themselves up to disappoint people with that name.
Yeah, but I really wish I could use the thing right now. I DM roleplaying games, and I'd love having the ability to just generate high-quality procedural artwork illustrating whatever my last game is.
I'm not too upset, though. The way the technology is progressing, it's a pretty short time span between "the bleeding edge researchers can do it" and "there's a phone app that can do it for free".
> This is the precise argument in favor of diversity: that we have, for centuries now, been discriminating on the basis of race and selecting inferior performers over better choices because they were white, or male.
If people who believed this could actually present a shred of evidence that it is true, then a lot of people would be a lot more receptive to these ideas.
We can look back to the 70s when black americans were legally prohibited from certain jobs. Or prohibited from from owning property in most areas.
In the 80s we have plenty of lawsuits demonstrating the black americans were routinely denied home loans because they were black.
Most of the Ivy League colleges denied entry to black americans no matter the quality of their character. This racism remains entrenched, and leaves a lasting legacy of bias through legacy admissions, formalized hereditary entrance: the original positive discrimination.
The legacy admissions also provide the formal evidence of the original claim: people who's admission to a good school has nothing to do with their skill, merely being white allowing their family to have attended any school.
Ok you have provided zero evidence of anything happening today, the best you had is 40 years ago, and that one was false.
>In the 80s we have plenty of lawsuits demonstrating the black Americans were routinely denied home loans because they were black
This has been proven statistically false. Easily proven because if it were true, the black people that were accepted for home loans would have lower default rates than whites. In fact, they had exactly the same default rates as whites and when laws were introduced to force banks to accept more blacks, the default rate increased above whites. Proving race was never considered, just the chance of repaying the load.
Anyway, since you are only talking about history, lets put it into historical context.
Racism was pushed heavily by the big government socialists and the intellectual elite who called themselves "the progressive movement" for a very long time in the US, and was opposed by the Republican party, who thought everyone should be treated equally, for just as long.
One can't help but notice, it is exactly the same people, and with exactly the same economic and collectivist ideas who are pushing the exact same racist policies today, like affirmative action against Asians, for example. The same people who have always been responsible for the problem saying "we are now solving racism with more racism" doesn't impressive me much. To accept this I would need some evidence that today's world, with the new ideas that everyone should be treated equally regardless of their race, is not working.
Evidence which you have not provided.
>The legacy admissions also provide the formal evidence of the original claim: people who's admission to a good school has nothing to do with their skill, merely being white allowing their family to have attended any school.
This ended with the introduction of standardized testing. A policy that is now being challenged by people who follow your ideology.
I don't understand all these comments saying "Sure Wolfram may be arrogant, but he has achieved amazing things". "lets look at his work and ideas not him as a person".
... What does this even mean? Steven Wolfram has never achieved a single thing in science or mathematics. Absolutely no one has ever said otherwise, except for Steven Wolfram himself.
I used to think he was a failed scientist who, at least, was good with computers and software, but after seeing the decline in the quality of Mathematica, and the hairbrain schemes he has been leading there instead of improving his core software, it has become clear to me that he wasn't even the one responsible for Mathematica being so great, and whoever it was has now left the company.
Feynman wrote something in the sense Wolfram did invent an interesting way to implement quantum chromodynamics on a computer, so he did something contributory to science.
Every release is more bloated, runs more slowly, non of the old problems fixed or improved (e.g. still can't handle large files well and every release handling of graphics gets slower). The user manual has gone from being one the best I have ever seen to being terrible for all the new sections for the new functionality they implemented. A lot of the new functionality is badly designed, not like the old stuff which was incredible. The actual useful stuff like interfacing with external code is so old that it barely works anymore (like interfacing with c# compiled later than 2010)...etc.
Yeah but if older you had actually told younger you to relax a bit, would you be where you are now talking about how things are going well, or would you be like OP in the linked article? Sure it is true that opportunities usually never come from the places you are searching, but they don't come at all if you aren't searching.
For me, it was about stress. I never did and still have trouble enjoying good things in the moment, because I’m always thinking about the next thing and how I need to prepare for it. Even when it’s unnecessary…
Our younger selves would never listen to us now anyway, but I’d probably tell my younger self to meditate and be more positive. It’s free to have a positive attitude and it helps a ton.
I’m not sure about others, but I do think I’d be roughly in the same spot if I relaxed more. I’m skeptical how much doing that extra 1% effort really helped me get further when it cost me sleep or joy.
That was the case 10 years ago, but since then they have discovered that all the temperature records since 1950 were wrong, and they have been correcting them. Turns out the computer simulations were correct all along and it was the data that was wrong.
This guy has been digging up old NASA publications showing what they claimed, in 2000, that the temperature was between 1950-2000 and what they claim today that the temperature was between 1950-2000.
Oh believe me, every thread here about physics is exactly like this. 90% of the comments are the most ridiculous crackpot nonsense from people who clearly learned physics by watching startrek. There are usually a few surprisingly knowledgeable comments too, but you usually have to look at the bottom of the thread.
I used to have quite a lot of blind faith on HN comments regarding subjects I don’t know well, but after sharing the occasional link to friends who are established scientists in the field it ends up being mostly nonsensical :(
Just last week there was somebody insisting cell phones work by (I swear I am not making this up!) measuring heat with an analog to digital converter attached directly to the antenna.
And assuring us that, on the basis of his deep understanding, 5G is known to be perfectly safe. :)
I can tell immediately that you have never actually picked up a physics textbook. The main reason is that most physicists only have the most elementary understanding of the mathematics underlying what they are doing. This is for historical reasons because usually the physics came first, then the mathematicians came and cleaned everything up. The result is that every physics textbook teaches you exactly what you need to know and not a thing more.
Most physicists wouldn't understand group theory or lie groups any better than an undergrad having done the first 3 weeks of an algebra course. I'm telling you this because by listening to too much popular physics rather than actually reading a physics textbook you are going well on your way to becoming one of these people from the article.
Anyway, Gerard 't Hooft made a great little website to help people in your situation.
oooh I can answer this one. About 15 years ago I saw a talk from a team at, oxford I think?, that had invented a way to store many terabytes on an ordinary blue ray by adding rotation to the scratches, which can then be read because scratches at different angles polarized the returning light differently.
Anyway, they had a working prototype and everything and the big companies like Panasonic all said "No sorry, everyone is shutting down their optical drive lines. We have determined that the future is internet storage and solid state. No one wants disk no matter how much storage they can hold." And that was that.
I think the class warfare aspect of this stuff isn't discussed enough. People also want to differentiate themselves from other classes in some way. These days everyone has money and owns the latest iPhone and can afford nice clothes, so it is a lot harder than it used to be. This is why the concept of "upper class ideas" has surfaced. It is important that these ideas be strange enough that someone from the working class would never except them.
...and one of the things that people find remarkable about it is that it isn't immediately and freely available to everyone on earth.