141–150 of 421 posts
So, is Bel finished or still changing? Are there other programs that depend on it? If Bel is developed "axiomatically", maybe not programs, but more thinking about the theory of computation may be its driver of change.
> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, ve…
Rather than an outright hoax, I like the term "fad". There are fads in technology, some of which are directly inspired by what has become possible and some of which are mutations of of other ideas. Some fads have more worth or more longevity than others -- in the world of clothing, denim jeans are now a foundation on which to build; I might consider object-oriented language features to be similar.
> How should I choose what to do? But this long essay does not really answer that.
> Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there. I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. I haven't seen it…
As a Lisper, I had not been able to understand what Bel was when it was released, and still do not understand it after reading the shorter explanation in this post. Does anyone else feel the same ? Perhaps this project just needs to be "sold" a bit better.
Bel will most likely not gain traction; but the fact that Mr pg spent four years and enjoyed his time developing it, makes it to me a highly successful outcome for himself:) outward Success is not a requirement for a successful project, the only thing matters is whether we achieved our internal goals on it.
I hope the sub-text I picked up is all in my head, and that everything is fine.
May PG live long and prosper :)
Quote: "This was in 9th grade, so I was 13 or 14" You went to school at 4 years old?
If you start 1st grade at 6, which at least in my day was normal, you’d be 14 in 9th grade.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pg has a whole essay[0] where he dismisses practically the entirety of Western philosophy and the value or use of the study thereof. consider the difference between, “All I knew at the time was that I kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring.” and, “All I knew at the time was that I kept taking philosophy courses and I kept finding them boring.” recasting the first as the second puts some of the onus…
Yes, pg comes across as remarkably uninformed about philosophy. But, it is a general tendency I notice among programmers, including myself, to dismiss philosophy as vague speculation. The accusation is as old as Aristophanes' play The Clouds mocking Socrates for his questioning of the status quo. Yet you don't condemn bumbling absentminded professors to death, as Aristophanes did to Socrates during his trial. I belie…
Hume foreclosed on the possibility of metaphysics altogether. Kant disagreed but considered all metaphysics prior to him a failed project. Since Kant we've burrowed into the human mind and into human language. It's not clear that this has borne fruit. It's also not clear that it hasn't. But informed people can disagree.
> Regarding PG's essay, I don't think it is fair to say metaphysics is a failed project. For instance, deeply thinking about whether things can be infinitely divisible led to the concept of the infinitesimal, which led to the discovery of calculus. If any field of math can be said to be useful, calculus surely is. None of our modern IT would exist without it, nor things like rockets, flight, material engineering, etc. Yet calculus is based on the non physical notion of infinite division that Aristotle discussed in his metaphysics.
I think your perspective is perfectly valid (and well-represented). You're saying "even if metaphysics is impossible, the pursuit of metaphysics has proven useful". Fair enough.
I don't share the sentiment here. I find the essay too long and boring. I usually enjoy reading his valuable essays but this one is too much about his life which is not that interesting to be honest, given I don't know him personally. But that's OK, not every essay needs to appeal to everyone.
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That is absolutely correct, but is sadly the case in a lot of fields. It doesn't mean that the practical results we see (AlphaFold, Imagenet Performance, NLP performance, Robotic control with RL) isn't amazing progress. Luckily due to so many people using ML these days, what's useful vs. fluff gets sorted out over time.
Is AlphaFold a practical result? Winning a competition isn't the same as production use. It would be interesting to read about how it's being used. This is a good list of promising work, but showing practicality would need more explanation.
(similar for Boston Dynamics, and IBM Watson)