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Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

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Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#51

Post by sokoloff »

ThisIsMyAltAcct wrote: post #38
physicsguy wrote: post #18

"It all started when I invented cellular automata, this thing that will revolutionise computing... at some point."

Is this an actual quote from the video? I'm not going to scrub through 4 hours of footage to find out, sorry.

It's not (as far as I can tell). The closest thing I can quickly find in the transcript is the following:

Copied from transcript and lightly reformatted, but otherwise not corrected (girdle for Gödel, etc all left intact):

1:40:2x

in the fall of 1981 and I spent that time kind of studying The Works of people like bonan and girdle and bunch of stuff about neural Nets and I was that was all in kind of the can I understand foundationally how complexity shows up in the world and that caused me to um uh to kind of um uh try and develop sort of the simplest model that might do something interesting and it led me to these things called cellular autometer which are very simple uh systems where like tiny programs where you just have a row of black and white cells and you just have a rule that says how to update those cells and um I started looking at those things in the fall of 1981 and

"It led me to" does not imply "led me to [discover/invent]" but rather "led me to [start studying]"

His own notes here directly state that they were considered long before he studied them:

https://www.wolframscience.com/reference/notes/876b/

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#52

Post by Mistletoe »

jack_riminton wrote: post #9

Somehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me. Contrast with Roger Penrose and you couldn't meet a more humble, interesting and interested conversationalist

Feynman never needed to tell you how smart he was, it just flowed out naturally as he talked about things in his beautiful clear way.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#53

Post by aleph_minus_one »

jack_riminton wrote: post #9

Somehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me. Contrast with Roger Penrose and you couldn't meet a more humble, interesting and interested conversationalist

> Somehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me.

I know some people who are great in their area of research, but are, to put it very midly, not the most humble persons (to give an example of one such person (a great research): "the people who could learn a whole lot from me are all tenured professors in my area of research"; just to be clear: his judgement is right :-) ).

In my experience, great researchers who are full of themselves nearly always had to work/fight very hard for where they are now, and are thus very bitter about worse researchers who have it easier.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#54

Post by rafram »

Shrezzing wrote: post #29

This is somewhat off-topic, but does Wolfram have a degenerative muscle illness? He puts his right hand down at around 30 minutes, and then doesn't move it again for hours. That and his unmoving legs are strikingly reminiscent of a friend who had MS.

He gestures with both his hands frequently throughout the entire video, not just before the 30 minute mark. I think this is just confirmation bias. And frankly, if he did have a degenerative muscle illness, that would be nobody’s business but his own.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#55

Post by lkdfjlkdfjlg »

Interview with Stephen Wolfram on his favorite subject.

EDIT 1: Maybe I'll update this as I listen, maybe not we'll see.

But so far:

- Doesn't remember anything he used to talk about with his parents. Doesn't remember any particularly interesting conversations. Doesn't know anything about his parent's political inclinations.

- He a brother younger by 10 years. Says he was an "only child for about 10 years". For the rest of the conversation says his parent's experience with children were data size 1.

EDIT 2: getting super tedious. I'd like to hear what his kids or his brother think of him.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#56

Post by looofooo0 »

dachworker wrote: post #47
martinky24 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- They pay like shit (compared to "sexy employers") - Headquartered in Champaign, Illinois (not a bad town, but not sexy) - As "cool" as their software is, not a lot of people use it. Python is eating their lunch, ESPECIALLY outside of academia. Although, they're losing ground in academia as well - Stephen Wolfram isn't a charismatic leader who is fun to work for. There's no shortage of stories of him short circuitin…

Thanks for the insight. I used to be a mathematician and looked a bit into working as a numerical mathematician on numerical or optimization software. What I noticed is that salaries do tend to be significantly lower than FAANG. Maybe that's because it is a niche and there aren't lots of employers around doing that sort of work.

I know some mathematician working for big chemical company which has a huge internal Fortran Software stack for numerical optimization.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#57

Post by namirez »

dachworker wrote: post #47
martinky24 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- They pay like shit (compared to "sexy employers") - Headquartered in Champaign, Illinois (not a bad town, but not sexy) - As "cool" as their software is, not a lot of people use it. Python is eating their lunch, ESPECIALLY outside of academia. Although, they're losing ground in academia as well - Stephen Wolfram isn't a charismatic leader who is fun to work for. There's no shortage of stories of him short circuitin…

Thanks for the insight. I used to be a mathematician and looked a bit into working as a numerical mathematician on numerical or optimization software. What I noticed is that salaries do tend to be significantly lower than FAANG. Maybe that's because it is a niche and there aren't lots of employers around doing that sort of work.

I believe the main reason is that the skillset in this domain has a small overlap with what is needed at FAANG. This is done mostly in academia and as such the salaries are in line with the salaries at universities.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#58

Post by submain »

Whitespace wrote: post #6

I respect the work that he's done and the contributions he's given to humanity but for once I would like to see something by Stephen Wolfram that didn't involve at least 50% of the content being a form of self-aggrandizement. I find that everything I try to consume from him contains his autobiography interspersed in the giant wall of text. This video is exquisitely cringeworthy.

His book "A new kind of science" is quite fascinating and has some interesting ideas about cellular automata. But I couldn't finish it because of how every few pages there is something about how great the author/his ideas are.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#59

Post by sneed_chucker »

I do not care that Stephen Wolfram is full of himself.

Every tech CEO is full of themselves too, but because Stephen is an awkward looking nerdy guy who is less business oriented people dislike him for it.

He's an interesting guy, even if he isn't as interesting as he thinks he is.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#60

Post by schiffern »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #23

So, story time. I once interviewed Stephen Wolfram for IEEE's software engineering radio and I had a lot of fun doing it and he did to. We ended up running way overtime because he was having fun showing me things with Mathematica. He is a fascinating person, I successfully kept him off talking about his math / physics theories and on the idea of a programming language leading to better thinking and more break-through…

  > having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever.
If you like this sort of thing check out Frink. https://frinklang.org/

I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them. -- Professor John Frink

The units file itself is a worthy read just for the commentary.

https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt

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