I have a feeling that this HN submission is rather some test run which dark patterns work well on technically affine users. :-)
Having the knowledge which dark patterns even work well for technically affine users while still being "socially acceptable" can be worth a lot of money to specific companies.
I’m a native English speaker and I have only ever heard “affine” as a technical term in mathematics, e.g. an affine transformation of vector spaces. I would have had no idea what it means outside of math.
However, OP’s usage seems logical, so I wouldn’t be upset if it became popular!
In fact, odds on someone who was complicit in developing many of the dark patterns that have run billions of dollars from consumers is reading this from their phone, thinking they should go to bed so they can wake up to the acai bowl, cold plunge, and early retirement to hobbies in seattle.
How do you explain that electrons have a rest mass, but photons don't (otherwise photons couldn't move with the speed of light according to special relativity)?
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The hydrogenoid atoms and ions, with a single electron, are the exception that proves the rule, because anything more complex cannot be computed accurately.
Rather: there is no known closed-form solution (and there likely won't be any).
If you let the computer run for long enough, it will compute any atomic spectrum to arbitrary accuracy. Only QFT has non-divergent series, so at least in theory we expect the calculations to converge.
There’s an intrinsic physical limit to which you can resolve a spectrum, so arbitrarily many digits of precision aren’t exactly a worthy pursuit anyway.
> Scientists yearn to stumble upon something [that] definitely rules out some of the more fringe theories
The existing measurements at CERN ruled out a lot of the "more natural" variants of string theory. Until now this insight has not lead to a big scientific breakthrough.
> Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money
Unpopular opinion: Google makes an insane amount of money, so they can afford this salary. The CERN (or whatever your favourite research institute is), on the other hand, is no money-printing machine.
Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion. The second we're able to understand and capture this energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective. I'll continually preach that we need to plan for this economically as a species because none of our current government or economic systems will survive the death of scarcity.
Unless cold fusion allows everyone to literally pull infinite energy out of thin air with no maintenance or labor costs, I don't buy that premise. Many other utilities are effectively free already in some places, but you still need metering to deter bad actors, which is what money is. Otherwise I'm going to take all available cold fusion capacity in existence and use it to build my own artificial sun with my face on it.
> Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion.
Is it?
You are assuming cold fusion is possible. We don't know that. It might be one more step before we finally prove it is never possible.
You are also assuming that cold fusion is something this path of research will lead us to. However this might be a misstep that isn't helpful at all because it doesn't prove anything useful about the as yet unknown physical process that cold fusion needs.
We just don't know, and cannot know at this point.
My point is that you shouldn't believe in marketing claims that are obviously too good to be true, like
> The second we're able to understand and capture this [cold fusion] energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective.
I mean obviously this statement is false as we live in a finite section of the visible universe.
This said beyond the marketing there is a reality that if cold fusion did show up that there is a singularity event that occurs that making predictions past that point will almost always fail as the world would change very rapidly.
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Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the characteristics into account (including an understanding of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as intelligent as you think.
Intelligence (which psychologists define as the g factor [1]; this concept is very well-researched) does not make you an expert on any given topic. It just, for example, typically enables you to learn new topics faster, and lets you see connections between topics.
If Karpathy did not spend a serious effort of learning to get a good understanding of people, it's likely that he is not an expert on this topic (which I guess basically nobody would expect).
Also, while being a rationalist very likely requires you to be rather intelligent, only a (I guess rather small) fraction of highly intelligent people are rationalists.
There is the autistic spectrum, and there is understanding of people and psychology. Autistic people might have a hard time understanding people, but it's not like everyone else is magically super knowledgable about human psychology and other people's thought patterns. If that were the case, then any non-autistic person could be a psychologist, no fancy study or degrees required!
Unless your point is to claim that Karpathy is autistic. I don't know whether that's really relevant though, the original issue was whether/how he failed to recognize the alleged hype.
I know it was just an example, but there's research suggesting otherwise. There are things you can do to increase/decrease empathy in yourself and others. If you're curious, it might be worth looking into the subject.
You are what you do. If you want to develop your empathy, spend time/energy consciously trying to put yourself in the shoes of others. Eventually, you will not have to apply so much deliberate effort. Same way most things work.
I would tend to disagree. The tech types have a strong intellectual center, but weaker emotional and movement centers. I think a realignment is possible with practice. It takes time, and as one grows older, the centers begin to integrate better.
Being empathic is different from "understanding people".
Psychopaths and narcissists often have a good understanding of many people, which they use to manipulate them, but psychopaths and narcissists are not what most people would call "empathic".
They dont understand people. They understand how to control people, which is completely different from the context of building products that people want - which requires an understanding of peoples tastes and preferences.
> which is completely different from the context of building products that people want - which requires an understanding of peoples tastes and preferences.
Rather: it requires an understanding how to manipulate people into loving/wanting your product.
> AI can build the thing but it needs to be told exactly what to build by someone who knows how software works.
If AI was following my instructions instead of ignoring them, and after complaining telling me it is sorry, and returns some other implementation which also fails to follow my instructions ... :-(
> Have you never run a team of software engineers as a lead?
I expect juniors to improve fast to get really good. AI is incapable of applying the teaching that I expcect juniors to internalize to any future code that it writes.
Having the knowledge which dark patterns even work well for technically affine users while still being "socially acceptable" can be worth a lot of money to specific companies.
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