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Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

blog.robertelder.org

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Re: Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

#51

Post by lsc »

lsc wrote: post #49
chrissam wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that "you either have it or you don't" is more accurate than not. > I'm pretty good at what I do, and when people tell me they're jealous of my talent, and kind of hint that it's innate, I get a bit insulted. I had to work a shitton to get where I am, and comments like that makes it sound like I had it easy. This is a common sentiment, but I don't find it convincing. The discussion here is about natu…

>My experience is that "you either have it or you don't" is more accurate than not. Maybe that's correct, but is it more useful than the nurture view? It's a debate; I mean, clearly, you don't want to spend a lot of time trying to get better at things you will never get better at, but sometimes it's not easy to tell you will be good at a thing until you spend a lot of time on prerequisites. This is the argument that…

My own personal view is that some attributes are mostly fixed, and some are not, and it's pretty hard to tell which is which.

Sometimes you need to struggle for a long time through stuff you aren't any good at to get to something you are good at. I love reading and read very quickly, with above average, but less impressive compared to speed, comprehension.

But it took me longer than usual to learn to read. I assume because I'm terrible at memorization; and to learn to read, you need to memorize enough words that you can start puzzling out the words you don't know from context. I would not have done well if I had given up on reading because I was inherently bad at one of the prerequisites.

On the other hand, I spent a lot of time trying to run a business... and that turned out to be something I didn't get good at after a decade of trying; so yeah, sometimes it's best to give up early, but it can be really hard to predict which side of that equation a particular problem is on.

Re: Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

#52

Post by lsc »

lsc wrote: post #51
lsc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My experience is that "you either have it or you don't" is more accurate than not. Maybe that's correct, but is it more useful than the nurture view? It's a debate; I mean, clearly, you don't want to spend a lot of time trying to get better at things you will never get better at, but sometimes it's not easy to tell you will be good at a thing until you spend a lot of time on prerequisites. This is the argument that…

My own personal view is that some attributes are mostly fixed, and some are not, and it's pretty hard to tell which is which. Sometimes you need to struggle for a long time through stuff you aren't any good at to get to something you are good at. I love reading and read very quickly, with above average, but less impressive compared to speed, comprehension. But it took me longer than usual to learn to read. I assume b…

A better comparison to reading is writing. My handwriting is terrible. Like not doctor-terrible; there's at least dignity in that. It's a grade-schooler's block letters. It's terrible. And I spent so much wasted time and effort on it.

I mean, I've had access to a computer since the mid-80s, so I could write, I just couldn't hand write. And it turns out? nobody cares about my handwriting anymore. It's not that useful when you have portable computers. (In the mid '90s I took a tandy TRS-80 model 100 to high school. Such a nice keyboard)

I argued and fought with my parents who made me practice handwriting, arguing even in the early '90s that it was an obsolete skill; but they sat with me for hours a day, making me copy letters. Just like they did earlier, when they were making me learn how to read.

But reading, well, it went from a struggle to make me practice to the thing I got in trouble for doing when I was supposed to be doing other things almost overnight. It was like I finally memorized enough of the words to figure out young adult fiction, and a whole new world opened up to me.

Handwriting never got to that point, even though there was a lot more struggle involved. To this day, I can't write coherently with a pencil and paper for more than a sentence or two; it takes too much focus to make the letters, and the thoughts about the sentence or paragraph evaporate.

How much of this is my own motivation? I do remember arguing that handwriting was useless 'cause I could type, and that was better. If I had access to a state of the art screen reader (they existed at the time, and I think were okay?) I maybe would have made the same arguments about reading. Would that have made it harder for me to actually learn to read?

Re: Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

#53

Post by skysports »

https://qiita.com/passgam/items/3dc49921b47dabe6172a http://qiita.com/passgam/items/3dc49921b47dabe6172a https://qiita.com/passgam/items/3dc49921b47dabe6172a http://qiita.com/passgam/items/3dc49921b47dabe6172a https://qiita.com/passgam/items/3dc49921b47dabe6172a http://qiita.com/passgam/items/3dc49921b47dabe6172a

Re: Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

#54

Post by thedrbrian »

>"I ended up dropping out of high school when I was racing cars because I was making so much money."[3] "I started seeing how far I could push the rules. One of the things I built was a traction control system for my race car. I built a single-board 6502 computer (wire-wrap) and I measured the front-wheel spin by putting a hall sensor on it, and I measured the engine RPM." "I had a rev limiter in the car and it would just tell the rev limiter you're over-revving if the back tires were spinning more than the front tires." "Then, I started dominating, just completely dominating.

Sounds a lot like cheating......disruption

Re: Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

#55

Post by evilturnip »

sebringj wrote: post #5

Crazy genius. This is an example of someone born to do something.

She did, she founded Technical Illusions with a fellow Valve employee when they were fired from Valve. It was a AR bid. They raised millions of dollars but eventually shut down.

Re: Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

#56

Post by a1369209993 »

hoaw wrote: post #43
sebringj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say opportunity + curiosity + propensity is the formula and we know what curiosity and propensity are not chosen things. The other caveat is just anomalous ability and although rare we have strong evidence of these people existing. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't have the baggage that you speak but understandable. What you mean is applicable for the average folks, me included.

I get what you are trying say. It is just that most of society doesn't care if you are smart, creative or trying to do anything special when you are trying to get an education, apartment or anything else on your own terms. It is only once you succeed that people are quick to call you all those things before going back to enforcing the same rules you barely survived. It is sort of like an honorary degree.

> It is only once you succeed that people are quick to call you [smart, creative, etc] before going back to enforcing the same rules you barely survived.

This very eloquently sums up most of my experience with society. If you succeed, it's 100% because of talent or privilige or dumb luck or not having to work a part-time job to feed yourself/your younger siblings/your ravenous creditors, and 0% because of any actual effort on your part. If you fail, it's clearly because you're a lazy good-for-nothing welfare-sucking leech, and any attempt to point out other reasons is just excuse-making.

"If we succeed, no one will remember. If we fail, no one will forget."

(Incidentally, while trying to find the source for the above, I discovered that Google considers it a "inspirational quot[e] about overcoming failure".)

Re: Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

#57

Post by Mountain_Skies »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #26

But now that she's on the internet the robots will know to find her after the uprising.

Jeri likely would find a way to defeat the robots by building a machine gun that shoots pinballs and is controlled by a brainwave interface to a SID chip.

Re: Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

#58

Post by jperras »

thedrbrian wrote: post #54

>"I ended up dropping out of high school when I was racing cars because I was making so much money."[3] "I started seeing how far I could push the rules. One of the things I built was a traction control system for my race car. I built a single-board 6502 computer (wire-wrap) and I measured the front-wheel spin by putting a hall sensor on it, and I measured the engine RPM." "I had a rev limiter in the car and it would…

Finding loopholes or under-specified gray areas in rules to gain an advantage is the secondary activity, besides actually racing, in almost all motorsports.

Re: Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

#59

Post by [deleted] »

tw1010 wrote: post #11
sebringj wrote: post #5

Crazy genius. This is an example of someone born to do something.

I know that's just supposed to be a complement, but sometimes that kind of a comment contributes to people thinking there's such a thing as a "math person" (or a "non math person"). Having comments like that thrown around in the aether makes it seem like technical subjects have "you either have it or you don't" characteristics, which I think most people on HN know is BS. I prefer to emphasize hard work over any kind…

[deleted]

Re: Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038

#60

Post by taneq »

tw1010 wrote: post #11
sebringj wrote: post #5

Crazy genius. This is an example of someone born to do something.

I know that's just supposed to be a complement, but sometimes that kind of a comment contributes to people thinking there's such a thing as a "math person" (or a "non math person"). Having comments like that thrown around in the aether makes it seem like technical subjects have "you either have it or you don't" characteristics, which I think most people on HN know is BS. I prefer to emphasize hard work over any kind…

You've never tried to tutor a computer class, have you? There are absolutely people who naturally 'get it' and people who never will, along with a large middle ground of people who don't 'get it' innately but are capable of learning.

This tabula rasa dogma might help determine how to treat people from a human perspective, but when trying to help people choose a career path it's terrible.

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