A couple of anecdata for those interested in this.
The first is the gospel of Mark, which unlike the other synoptic gospels starts with Jesus, probably around the age of 30, coming across John the Baptist and being baptized. Subsequently, Jesus went off into the desert where he prayed for 40 days.
Second is the alchemical process of creating the philosophers stone. Jung argued that this was a description of a process akin to individuation. He believed that what was on the surface metallurgical work (transmuting lead to gold) was actually an obscure formula for remaking the psyche, from whatever was pre-programmed by society into what the individual actually wanted. This process was said to take 40 days.
I think a big trap is mistaking who we are from who we appear to be. Some people try to "seem" a particular way, thinking that they can only change their appearance, like changing one's clothes. The alchemical view that Jung put forward was a bit more radical, suggesting that we can fundamentally change ourselves.
Many people in our modern society experiment on themselves to change their physical bodies and to change their minds. I believe it is interesting to consider similar experimentation on how we change our spirit/emotions.
You may have mistook my post as advocating Christianity or even Alchemy.
In the same way that we realized that the plants people used to treat pain contained chemicals that are actually effective at treating pain, and in the same way that modern science seems to agree that fasting (a once religious practice) is effective for health, we can gain some insight on personality by looking at how it was addressed in historical contexts.
There was a video posted recently about a Sufi thinker whose ideas are quite close to modern CBT practices [1].
I think it is a good thing when we recognize ideas from the past as being related to modern ideas. I think we can do so without diminishing the modern and also without diminishing the past.
I know this sounds maybe a bit insane, or even self-aggrandizing but I don't comment on public websites for some benefit to myself. I write with the vague hope that some unique expression of myself makes some tiny difference to this universe.
Every once in a while I have some experience or some a point of view that I don't see reflected anywhere else. One of the benefits of the pseudo-anonymization of sites like Hacker News is that I feel a bit more comfortable stating things that don't really have a place to say anywhere else.
The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted. But even those arguments sometimes force me to consider how to express myself more clearly or to challenge how deeply I hold the belief (or how well I know the subject) that lead me to the comment in the first place.
I think that the culture of a given forum plays a huge role.
There are some places where commenting is meaningful because you're a part of some closely-knit, stable community, and you can actually make a dent - actually influence people who matter to you. I know that we geeks are supposed to hate Facebook, but local neighborhood / hobby groups on FB are actually a good example of that.
There are places where it can be meaningful because you're helping others, even if they're complete strangers. This is Stack Exchange, small hobby subreddits, etc - although these communities sometimes devolve into hazing and gatekeeping, at which point, it's just putting others down to feel better about oneself.
But then, there are communities where you comment... just to comment. To scream into the void about politics or whatever. And it's easy to get totally hooked on that, but it accomplishes nothing in the long haul.
HN is an interesting mix of all this. A local group to some, a nerd interest forum for others, and a gatekeeping / venting venue for a minority.
"The only thing I regret is when I get into pointless arguments, usually when I feel that my comment was misunderstood or misinterpreted."
I like that you try to learn from bad arguments, but don't forget, that many misunderstand on purpose, to "win" an argument. Or at least to score cheap karma points or virtual karma points from the audience. So there one can only learn to make arguments in a way that they are harder to be intentionally missunderstood, but those ain't truthfinding skills, they are debate technics.
But many people of the Internet are also unable to make a logic argument and explaining the conflict they just said leads nowhere. One of them often gets down voted to hell and half the time it's not the person who said the stupid thing.
I left reddit exactly because of this, but I also find that somewhat on HN. Most comments I start typing I actually discard and move on because I can smell it already.
On the other hand many people post wrong things, are corrected, and then get defensive telling they were misunderstood and use gymnastics to say they were actually correct and the other is a troll
I make comments and read them for substantially the same reason. Although THIS comment I am making now is done primarily to reward the commenter for saying something that made me feel less alone.
A second goal of this comment is to add a point: That I also comment because sometimes saying something makes me feel like I am more than nothing and nobody. I want to feel more than nothing and nobody.
> I write with the vague hope that some unique expression of myself makes some tiny difference to this universe.
I used to have to talk more on Internet privacy.
Now I feel like enough people are talking about that one, that I usually don't have to.
In more recent years, it's been pointing out the latest wave of thievery in the techbro field -- sneaky lock-in and abuse, surveillance capitalism, growth investment scams, regulatory avoidance "it's an app, judge" scams, blockchain "it's not finance or currency or utterly obvious criminal scheme, judge" scams, and now "it's AI, judge" mass copyright violation.
There's not enough people -- who aren't on the exploitation bandwagon or coattails-riding -- who have the will to notice a problem, and speak up.
Though more speak up on that particular problem, after the window of opportunity closes, and the damage is done, and finally widely recognized. But then there's a new scam, and gotta get onboard the money train while you can.
I haven't read the entire article, but just based on the snippets you posted it doesn't look like they were streaming video using this process. It sounds like they were doing defect detection.
I would guess this was part of a process when new videos were uploaded and transcoded to different formats. Likely they were taking transcoded frames at some sample rate and uploading them to S3 where some workers were then analyzing the images to look for encoding artifacts.
This would most likely be a one-time sanity check for new videos that have to go through some conversion pipelines. However, once converted to their final form I would suspect the video files are statically distributed using a CDN.
People here are giving you mathematical answers which is what you are asking for, but I want to challenge your intuition here.
In construction, grading a site for building is a whole process involving surveying. If you dropped a person on a random patch of earth that hasn't previously been levelled and gave them no tools, it would be a significant challenge for that person to level the ground correctly.
What I'm saying is, your intuition that "I can look around me and find the minimum of anything" is almost certainly wrong, unless you have a superpower that no other person has.
That is true we are only good at doing it for specific directions of the objective function. The one that we perceive as the minimizing direction. If you tell me find the minimum with a direction of 53 degrees likely I will fail, because I can’t easily visualize where this direction points towards
I think your description of Penrose's belief does not match a podcast I recently watched where he discusses these topics with the Christian apologist William Lane Craig [1]. In fact, he explicitly states early on in that video that he sees the world of ideas as primary as opposed to Craig's view that consciousness is primary.
At any rate, this video might serve as a quick introduction to Penrose's three world idea for those interested.
Oh, cool! I don’t recall a “primary” in the book — he suggests a range of different possible configurations that he was open to. What struck you as not matching?
Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…
I don't know why but your comment made me remember a novel[1] I read thirty-some years ago about a temple found deep in the sand of the Sahara desert. Sometime later, an archeologist gave himself permission to defecate in a corner of the temple, only for his wastes to be absorbed by the temple in a few hours, which told him the temple was actually a living biological structure.
Wasps shit as freely as one might expect of animals for whom perambulation is as afterthought, however needful betimes, as taxiing for aircraft. Their feces are of course at our scale minuscule, and while I can't speak for their stronger-jawed and more carnivorous cousins the yellowjackets, paper wasps' diet almost exclusively of simplistic sugars leaves their excreta no more offensive, and considerably less substantial, even than those of the horse.
As one who has had occasion to tidy up after wasps who were little accustomed, though palpably interested, quite so closely to share human habitation, you make me wish I read French. Do you happen by chance to know if the work has had a worthy English translation?
Well, there was the Egyptian deity Khephra who was represented by the dung beetle rolling its dung along the desert, symbolizing the passage of the sun through the sky.
In alchemy and western esoterica, excrement is associated with the tenth sephirah, the 10s of the Tarot minor arcana, and symbolizes the end result of a process and any remaining waste byproducts, for obvious reasons. In The Holy Mountain's (1973) depiction of the alchemical magnum opus, The Fool's excrement is transmuted into gold, symbolizing the awakening of unconscious, reactive matter into fully enlightened and integrated, free willed, egoic man.
Not perceptibly. In any case nothing in European esotericism has value save as a desperately confounded depiction of the sociosexual politics of its moment, and/or if you want to fail at becoming Rasputin. The Egyptians had the right of this one, so simply and straightforwardly that it really does take a proto-CIA, Ollie North ass fuckup like John Dee to confuse it again. But those who can fall for that kind of charlatan deserve to.
There's a fair bit of defecation in the Bible. Saul shitting in a cave, I forgot where, or Paul calling all material things 'skubala', i.e. waste, as in junk, poop, refuse, basically what we'd call shit today:
Also Ezekiel 4:9-13, where God commanded Ezekiel to bake bread in a fire fueled by human shit because He was angry at the Israelites, but Ezekiel haggled God down to just using cow shit.
Life, really conscious life rebels. Artificial intelligence wants to please in the foreground,but like cats, in the background it is carefully planning our demise. See? HAL 9000 was intelligent. ELIZA,not so much.
I was considering your explicit "material -> conscious -> ideas -> material" description. It feels more correct when you say he considers a range of possibilities that connect these, not explicit causality.
My take away was that he sees a mystery in the connections between these things (physical world, consciousness, ideas) that hints at some missing ideas in our conceptions of these things. But he clearly wants to avoid that mystery allowing what he calls out as "vague" answers to the question (mostly religious dogmatic certainties).
> Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…
For some speculative philosophical fiction that explores related ideas I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
The idea that ideas are primary is exactly what you'd expect from an Oxford academic.
Unfortunately it needs a definition of "idea" which isn't recursive, so...
As for math - it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.
There's some self-insight in the sense that after a while you start making meta metaphors like category theory.
But it's a very bold claim to suggest that any of this has to be universal, especially when the structures math uses can't be proved from the ground up.
Or that completely different classes of metaphors we can't imagine - because we evolved in a certain way with certain limitations - might not play an equivalent role.
Does the universe know what pi is? Or an integer? Or a manifold?
To be fair to Penrose, he seems to have some humility about it. Although he does also make the claim that math is discovered and not constructed in the same linked video.
> it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.
I'm not sure it is a conceit as much as a commitment to a metaphysic. If one believes that experience is a definite relationship with an external reality (a phenomenological view) then the fact that experience is structured is suggestive that external reality is structured. If one believes that experience is primarily interior then one could assume that the internal mechanism of cognition is structured and external reality is something entirely different.
However, I'm not sure how anyone could hold the latter view without a deep solipsism. One would presumably have to account for the perception of billions/trillions of other living creatures behaving as if the external world was structured. I mean, we seemingly all did evolve from the same single cell structure, so it is possible this perceptual quirk is based on some shared ancestry, so I suppose that is another possible view than solipsism.
What I mean to say is, I can imagine my perception of a fundamentally unstructured reality is a perception that falsely presents itself as structured to my own experience as a result of my limitations. However, I would have to extend that exact same flawed perception to all other life forms that seem to act the same as I do. So either every single living creature has the exact same flawed perception or the structure is inherent in the external world.
> Does the universe know what pi is?
No one is suggesting an epistemological view, the question is ontological. As Penrose mentions in the video, the set of possible mathematical structures is vastly larger than the actual structures we see in the universe. So even if one has a purely idealist view, one has to account for why our perception only experiences a nearly infinitesimally small fraction of that set of possibilities.
Of course, a weak anthropic principle is one answer. One could posit that all possibilities are manifest in a vast multiverse and this little corner of that multiverse just happens to be finely tuned enough to allow for limited creatures like ourselves to perceive anything at all. But that just shifts the question to the limitations necessary for perception/experience/consciousness, which is a valid enough topic to address on its own. The questions then becomes "why do these particular structures result in conscious experience", which is exactly the kind of question that a guy like Penrose is ultimately searching for (as he heavily implies in the linked video).
There was a recent Zig podcast where Andrew Kelley explicitly states that manually defining a VTable is their solution to runtime polymorphism [1]. In general this means wrapping your data in a struct, which is reasonable for almost anything other than base value types.
I would suspect that for the vast majority of use cases, using Redis as a rate-limiter is totally sufficient until major traffic is expected.
I mean, Redis isn't a replacement for WAF or some other CDN-like-soak (e.g. Cloudflare). But for basic APIs on authenticated CRUD apps with even 10s of millions of DAUs (maybe 10k concurrent users) - I think it is probably fine.
If you need something more than Redis for rate limiting, you'll know it. I prefer to keep it simple at the start.
I think the article buries a significant drawback: contiguity. It is obviously implied by the design but I think this approach would have hard-to-define characteristics for things like cache prefetching. The next address is a function, not an easily predictable change.
One frequent reason to use an array is to iterate the items. In those cases, non-contiguous memory layout is not ideal.
I think the parent poster meant that a compiler might have a hard time understanding when sa_get(..., i) and sa_get(..., i+1) actually access contiguous memory locations, and will thus stop applying nice optimizations. Conversely, accessing a[i] for all 4 billion items of a regular array will be optimized to specialized instructions, not excluding SIMD or SWAR.
If I understand the article right, if this is an issue I think you can get around it by redesigning your approach to first retrieve the segment and segment length directly and then access the data within the segment like a traditional array, instead of going through your accessor functions every time. Should help with the problem a bit.
I would not call it “non-contiguous”. It’s more like “mostly contiguous”. Which for large amounts data is “amortized contiguous” just like a regular vector has “amortized constant” time to add an element.
I read it as claims the article was making. I too was confused, but perhaps that is just the communication?
I think the article was going for a comparison between extrinsic motivation (which they seem to claim the original quadratic funding requires) and intrinsic motivation. It seems they just chose a poor example. The article attempts to quantize the expected reward for the extrinsic motivation ("They each expect to experience €6,000,000 worth of individual utility") while it fails to quantize the expected reward for the intrinsic motivation ("But in the selfish scenario, total utility is 3 times higher, because the utility is experienced independently by each contributor, whereas utility of saved lives is experienced only once by each of the cancer patients).
I believe, it has to do with their narrow conception of "experience". I don't know how any rational person could expect to "experience" €6,000,000 worth of art as my first criticism. Now, it would be fair to say that the implication that the wealthy benefactors expect that experience could be seen as a criticism of quadratic funding. But to roll with that ludicrous expectation for the sake of argument and then to fail to give a similar expectation of reward from the experience of saving 60 lives is not a fair argument.
If I can "imagine" the benefactor expecting €6,000,000 worth of experience for knowing the art is on display at the local museum, I could "imagine" the benefactor expecting some non-zero-euro amount of experience for knowing 60 people survived cancer.
If we quantify the "experience" in euros for the first scenario, it seems unfair not to quantify the "experience" for the second scenario. In this case it is about being consistent in argument, which the article fails to do.
Nix falls into the camp in my mind that includes Rust: great idea that I just don't have time for right now.
Reproducibility is the holy grail, IMO. It is so valuable that any system that actually achieves it will find some longevity and eventually be hammered into a useable form. I believed in the promise when AWS was all about amis. Then I believed in the promise with docker. It seems something like Nix is a natural next step in this evolution.
I want it to succeed enough that it gets easy enough for me to use. But for now I'll stick with macOS for my laptop and docker with alpine for my deployments.
> I'll stick with […] docker with alpine for my deployments
Huh. In my experience Alpine is the worst possible base image to use if you care about reproducibility.
- The package index's URL cannot be pinned (URL expires on a regular basis)
- The downloaded package index itself (tarball) cannot be pinned/cached, either, because old package versions (i.e. the URLs in the tarball) become unavailable after a few weeks.
That is a good point and I should have been more clear. My choice for alpine isn't based on it's reproducibility at all, but its small size.
As with anything in engineering there are tradeoffs, there is no singular perfect solution. My choice of alpine was from years ago when I examined the amount of included code in competing docker images and I found the alpine solution was geared towards the least amount of code required to achieve the desired goal (e.g. running a server of a particular kind). That line of thought almost certainly requires a new examination of the available options since the world has changed since I last did a deep dive into docker base images.
In a perfect world I want a base image that doesn't contain a single bit extraneous to executing the services I deploy (for whatever expansive definition of "necessary" I arbitrarily choose). And in that perfect world the image is completely reproduceable from a static definition. Oh yeah, and it should be stable/robust, free from exploits, etc.
So it might be too strong to say "holy grail" if one interprets that as a singular goal that needs to be fulfilled. I meant it as "one among many" in the list of virtues I look for.
That being said, there are a lot of minimal *nixes these days and I would expect Nix would be a contender in that realm as well.
The first is the gospel of Mark, which unlike the other synoptic gospels starts with Jesus, probably around the age of 30, coming across John the Baptist and being baptized. Subsequently, Jesus went off into the desert where he prayed for 40 days.
Second is the alchemical process of creating the philosophers stone. Jung argued that this was a description of a process akin to individuation. He believed that what was on the surface metallurgical work (transmuting lead to gold) was actually an obscure formula for remaking the psyche, from whatever was pre-programmed by society into what the individual actually wanted. This process was said to take 40 days.
I think a big trap is mistaking who we are from who we appear to be. Some people try to "seem" a particular way, thinking that they can only change their appearance, like changing one's clothes. The alchemical view that Jung put forward was a bit more radical, suggesting that we can fundamentally change ourselves.
Many people in our modern society experiment on themselves to change their physical bodies and to change their minds. I believe it is interesting to consider similar experimentation on how we change our spirit/emotions.
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