Serious question. Are there any alternatives to HN? Been reading HN on and off since 2010 and the decline to this is painfully obvious. Used to learn a lot from reading on here but now only check or post out of habit and lack of a high quality alternative.
But, the floor of profits for a company is not denominated in dollars. It is shit you put in your mouth and eat or a useful product like a refrigerator which you can put things which allow you to not die.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is some electricity, and arguably a waste of it.
At this point, I think people who can say 1. with a straight face are either intellectually dishonest or just repeat things others say.
The majority of teachers make a median US wage fairly early into their career and plenty make a multiple of it later on, on top of great benefits. Their job is no more challenging than nearly all other professions. “But they have to”… yes, everyone else has shit they have to deal with. The fact that the Waltons, crypto lottery winners, etc. exist is a separate problem that doesn’t mean teachers are underpaid.
Education majors are easier.The sky is blue. If we even remotely believe in a meritocracy (liberals often really don’t when you dig into their beliefs, granted) starting teachers should not make as much as a starting EE major. Nobody in their right mind would or should pursue an engineering career if teaching paid equivalently.
Trump tried to ban TikTok (and quite a lot more), but he’s orange and bad, so Biden repealed it. And tariffs are racist, so there’s that. America is not functioning well at this point and nothing indicates it will improve.
I’m not going to win any upvotes for saying this but I think it’s worth mentioning that this study is dishonest, blatantly politically-themed, and likely intended to score points within the authors’ circle. In other words, it’s meant to be printed off and used as toilet paper. Seeing papers like this is a frightening reminder, at least for me, about how inefficient and wasteful our society has become, in that we continue to funnel large amounts of resources to professions or groups like this.
Literally your post, the top comment on the thread, leads with an unabashed claim that humans have already discovered all of the “major advances” in the sciences. It’s flabbergasting.
That is completely inaccurate. They didn't say anything like "humans have already discovered all of the “major advances” in the sciences".
They said that the big obvious discoveries have been discovered. There's very little in physics now that doesn't require thousands of person hours, millions in equipment and unbelievable amounts of computing resource.
The stuff that could be discovered by someone working alone has pretty much all been done, because we've already thrown millions of person hours at it.
That's not to say there aren't major advances to be made, it's just REALLY HARD.
They absolutely did not say anything about “obvious” discoveries. That is even more ridiculous of a claim. Which major breakthroughs in stem were “obvious”? Or are you speaking from hindsight, where in this brave new world we’re smarter than all previous generations?
They also did not say there are major advances but they are “really hard” (your words), they said there are no major advances left (by comparing them to continents, which we’ve already all discovered). There is no other way to interpret their words, unless you believe there are additional continents on earth to discover. Maybe atlantis?
The OP is not commenting on individual contributors vs large groups but I will comment on that as I disagree. You are describing the current state of physics (and many other stem fields) and the popular consensus about future advancements. While certainly having hundreds of researchers is necessary on many projects, you have no basis to claim an individual will not make a major breakthrough in the distant future. And frankly, as much as they are necessary, giant labs are strongly encouraged by our current culture. Large profits from monetizing research into products, corporate involvement and funding, staggering bloat in universities, fame-chasing, printing off papers like buzzfeed articles, unprecedented levels of organized fraud in academia… very little of the current culture is conducive to modest, brilliant individual contributors in many fields.
You have no idea how the culture will change in science, how much more intelligent and capable people will be than we are in the distant future with natural selection and gene modification, and whether there will be any more breakthroughs by individuals or small groups that will seem “obvious” in hundreds of years. To say otherwise is frankly dogmatic caveman thinking.
“Obvious” was probably the wrong word there. I think “achievable” is probably more apt.
Poor choice of words aside, the point stands.
And as for humans being far more intelligent in the future, I don’t buy it. Maybe in millions of years with evolution, but I’d bet on humanity either killing itself or replacing itself before that happens.
A million years? Let’s crunch the numbers. I think the intellectual honest would acknowledge ashkhenazi intelligence differences. That took quite a lot less than a million years. And certainly intelligence is being selected for more than ever. We’re just, as a race, starting to experiment with gene modification. Would it really surprise you if minor modifications in intelligence aren’t made? It’s not going to be a million years for a significant leap bud.
As for the other point, it is indeed standing, on air.
Regarding replicability, I disagree this is a problem at all. Writing shit code is not going to prevent someone highly capable from replicating your results. If anything, I empathize with researchers writing sloppy code. It’s a creative field and they already have to do enough editing and documentation. Omitting code or fabricating/manipulating evaluation results is what prevents replication.
Frankly, unlike the author, I think there’s too many people in the field. They produce a handful of papers worth reading every year along with thousands upon thousands of models that may or may not slightly improve performance on a specific task and then have no general value beyond that. And I don’t believe this will change much- ml is likely the most monetizable PhD path by a safe margin, so there is too much profit incentive to churn out crap at any cost.
I find this take ridiculous. This is the liberal equivalent of “no systemic racism”. What would you call it when a significant portion of your company believes in woke values and promotes some of these individuals into influential roles where they have power to pressure people? I’m sure their influence on product always rationally optimizes shareholder value and is not influenced by their beliefs.
How can homotopy type theory, as opposed to non-homotopy type theory, help us with "verification of systems/hardware and formalization of math" outside of homotopy theory itself?
From my experience ability to turn equivalences to equlities and vice versa is very usefull. Without this you are ending in setoid hell - intracable mess of isomorphism. I suspect that also Higher Inductive Types have lots of potential to simplify practical verification effords (apart from obvious usecases of quotients and truncations)
