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Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say

deadneurons.substack.com

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Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say

#51

Post by waveforms »

znnajdla wrote: post #28

Absolutely agree. And this is why America cannot simply bring outsourced industries like manufacturing back. Expertise is built through hard-won experience and there is no easy way to transfer or replicate it. And this is why the best forms of instruction are akin to apprenticeship. You can’t teach expertise through a book, but you can guide a person to develop their own expertise and speed up the process.

This seems to be a negative form of American exceptionalism. If Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China and Vietnam can do it, what is it about the USA that makes you think the USA cannot do it. At the very least we could bring experts from other countries in to demonstrate, teach, etc.

Manufacturing in the USA is slowly improving.

"The Manufacturing PMI® registered 52.7 percent in March, a 0.3-percentage point increase compared to the reading of 52.4 percent in February. The overall economy continued in expansion for the 17th month in a row."

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/manufacturing-pmi-a...

Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say

#52

Post by waveforms »

ilaksh wrote: post #10

Thinking about this in the context of machine learning.. We can discover the dimensions and relationships between them through training over a set of examples. What we are generally getting though is a network with extremely high dimensionality trained on many domains at once, at least as far as the commonly used ones like LLMs and VLMs. We do have mixture of experts which I guess helps to compress things. Going back…

This highlights to me the compounding of knowledge networked AI experts working with human experts will bring.

"But I wonder if someday there will be a representation that is more easily interpretable like language but is able to capture high dimensional complex functions in a standard and concise way"

Perhaps we can train AI experts to show us what parameters they found most useful in contrast to what human experts used. That could be a start at filling in the human knowledge gaps.

Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say

#53

Post by saghm »

justonceokay wrote: post #43
darkerside wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always been like this, just on a smaller scale. Every time you join a group, some people can read the room, learning and sensing the cultural implications, while others step in all the landmines and don't even hear the explosions. How do you do this? Not sure how to explain it, mostly calibration through experience!

Not being self-centered is helpful.

If you think that everyone else who is worse at you than reading social cues is self centered rather than your way of experiencing the world maybe just not being universal, I feel like you might be the one acting self-centered.

Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say

#54

Post by fgfarben »

com2kid wrote: post #47
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>IMHO every other 3d modeling program has a trash UI compared to the absolutely amazing UI that Rhinoceros 3d has. It's not just you. There is something about it that is qualitatively different.

I don't know why, aside from pride, every other 3d modeling program doesn't just copy Rhino's UI. EVERYTHING is awful compared to Rhino3d. Viscerally painful to use bad in comparison.

I had to force myself to forget about rhino after they deprecated the only version I had a license to, and I moved off Windows, because I would have been destroyed if I realized what I had lost.

Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say

#55

Post by com2kid »

fgfarben wrote: post #54
com2kid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why, aside from pride, every other 3d modeling program doesn't just copy Rhino's UI. EVERYTHING is awful compared to Rhino3d. Viscerally painful to use bad in comparison.

I had to force myself to forget about rhino after they deprecated the only version I had a license to, and I moved off Windows, because I would have been destroyed if I realized what I had lost.

I really wish they had a hobbyist license. I'd pay $100 for a non-commercial copy.

Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say

#56

Post by perilunar »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #5
robocat wrote: post #2

I would call the difference intuitive knowledge versus rational knowledge. I've never seen the word calibration used this way: different modes of learning. The first is instruction: the transfer of explicit models, rules, and relationships from one person to another through language. The second is calibration: the development of internal models through repeated exposure to feedback in a specific environment. Judgemen…

You raise an interesting question. How do we keep the meanings of words from diverging so dramatically and so rapidly? A little bit is natural and expected, but this kind of change in meaning feels like a consequence of a culture that in the last decade has accelerated the practice of re-framing specific words and concepts as something that's "actually a positive" or "actually quite negative if you think about it". P…

> How do we keep the meanings of words from diverging so dramatically and so rapidly?

By reading and re-reading old books. You learn the original meanings and usage of words and then recognise when someone tries to twist them.

Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say

#58

Post by specialist »

com2kid wrote: post #47
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>IMHO every other 3d modeling program has a trash UI compared to the absolutely amazing UI that Rhinoceros 3d has. It's not just you. There is something about it that is qualitatively different.

I don't know why, aside from pride, every other 3d modeling program doesn't just copy Rhino's UI. EVERYTHING is awful compared to Rhino3d. Viscerally painful to use bad in comparison.

TLDR: Michael Gibson is the brain child for Rhino3D's UI.

Yup. I know some of this story.

It's been a minute, so I forget some details...

Ages ago, Robert McNeel & Assoc had been working on the geometry kernel for years. They had high value customers who needed very correct results, not available (from other kernels) at the time. By that time, being a VAR, McNeel had experience with most commercial offerings.

Not having their own front end, they had to import/export to other CADD systems. One of their motivations for reverse engineering AutoCAD's DWG format.

McNeel stumbled onto Sculptura. A mesh modeler written by a solo dev. As I remember it, Sculptura's UI was innovative, amazing, and norm breaking. Exactly what McNeel was looking for. They bought it asap. (Gods, I wish I could quickly remember that guy's name.)

McNeel's intent was to synthesize Sculptura's UI and their state of art kernel.

McNeel had the dual luxury of time and no installed base (legacy). Their initiative motivation was a correct kernel. Like correctly joining 3 curving surfaces. (Their canonical example at the time was to accurately model a styrofoam egg carton.) Which took years of R&D.

So they had time to really nail Rhino3D's UI.

Aha. I just found the official history. My memory wasn't too far off.

https://www.rhino3d.software/the-history-of-rhino-3d/

Michael Gibson! Yay! I now recall him grinding away on Rhino. Whenever I visited McNeel, he loved giving demos, talking about ideas, etc. Great guy. (We were both young, surrounded by olds, so had that connection.)

Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say

#59

Post by bad_username »

This is a reason why, before LLMs truly become contenders for replacing humans, the sharp distinction between pre-training, fine-tuning, and providing context in a conversation has to disappear. The model must be able to update itself (learn!) by calibrating all these massively multidimensional parameters on the fly, as they operate, like people do.

Re: Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say

#60

Post by specialist »

com2kid wrote: post #55
fgfarben wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to force myself to forget about rhino after they deprecated the only version I had a license to, and I moved off Windows, because I would have been destroyed if I realized what I had lost.

I really wish they had a hobbyist license. I'd pay $100 for a non-commercial copy.

Contact McNeel and ask. Email Bob some examples of your work. Definitely include some/all of your unpublished book.

Bob is how I got started in CAD. As a student, I pestered him until he found me a job (at one his clients).

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