81–90 of 93 posts
[0] - https://grugbrain.dev/
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Most of the things school curricula touch turn awful. It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.
The vast majority of people vastly overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education. Easier on its own is therefore effectively meaningless when people aren’t actually learning beyond the most superficial layers.
The most incredulous part is how easy it was to learn English on my own. It took less than two years after having failed to do so with 10+ years in school.
It's interesting to see how — even in the 1880s — people were making the same mistakes as companies today: over-engineering to the point of unmanageable complexity ("complexity bad"[0]), and the less solve-all-possible-problems but simpler Linotype won out. [0] - https://grugbrain.dev/
I see that mistake made on literally every level from the automation of 15 minute tasks to analysis of the macroeconomic effects of robots and software.
his bad investments and obsession here was certainly something that brought him down, but I'm going to have to say what probably really ruined his life was his daughter Susy Clemens dying of spinal meningitis in 1896, 2 years after the bankruptcy. As someone with some familiarity with Clemens, and stresses piled upon stresses, I feel it is somewhat insulting to the man to think he just couldn't handle losing some mon…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gutenberg's press was made out of a wine press. Letters were cast in lead, then lined up on a tray under the press. The tray was inked. A piece of paper was set over the inked letters, and the wine press forced the paper onto the letters. This cut the cost of a book by a factor of 300(!). The trouble for Gutenberg was it was too easy to duplicate his press, and that combined with not being good at business led to his…
The paper was still expensive and there wasn't yet as much demand for books.
> The easy moral of the story is that Twain was gullible and Paige a huxster. It absolutely isn't. Paige was actually the engineer/tinkerer earnestly developing this machine, which really worked. One of his main problems is that he always thought he needed to improve it more before it was ready. He didn't understand "release early and often": that time-to-market matters. > Twain felt that he had an insider’s perspect…
> It absolutely isn't. Paige was actually the engineer ... It glosses over it and Twains autobiography goes into more detail. What impressed Twain about it was the demonstration had an operator typing at high speed. When he got the device, he discovered the operator was typing the same phase over and over. They had memorised it so as to type faster. So one of the overlooked lessons is don't believe product demos.
> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an amazingly complex mechanical imitation of the human compositor which attempted to repeat a human worker’s actual movements. By contrast, Linotype simplified the problem by doing something humans didn’t already do. That would in fact be the main argument agains…
This whole episode suggests to me that people are misjudging the future of robotics. Many companies are building robots to exactly imitate humans, perhaps with the thought that the "egocentric" training data widely available will be more useful for this form factor. Look at Tesla, Unitree, Boston Dynamics, or Figure... But humans are just barely adapted to bipedalism and hunter-gathering as it is. The perfect kind of…
He was a writer, he should have stayed in his lane.