A first gen product like this is for early adopters and wealthy individuals who status seek

Not sure why you see it as such;

Incompetent and dishonest are characteristics that follow from this professional work, adequately describing an individual who continues to make poor predictions, analyses and false statements refuted by past events.

Far from “shitting on” Zitron

> What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learn

As anyone who’s met Sal will attest, this characterization is incredibly off the mark.

The author extrapolated from the product as opposed to understanding the person and how the product came to be the way it is.

Look at video games and you'll see the surface area of "addictive design" is basically infinite. People have gotten addicted to a huge variety of games, with not all that much in common.

You can still regulate the addictive features that are in common though. Paid Lootboxes for example. Isn't there some jurisdiction that already regulates those?

Kind of a strong statement there. Happy that fasting’s had such a positive influence on your life but:

No: fasting has not been proven to extend lifespan in humans.

Also no: exercise has been far more provably correlated with healthspan improvements than fasting.

You are more correct, but I think the truth lies somewhere between your statement and theirs. We have correlative evidence that lower calorie diets and/or fasting results in longer lifespans, improved insulin sensitivity, pancreatic cell responsiveness, blood pressure, oxidative-stress measures, and more, in humans. We also have animal testing showing causative evidence that fasting produces longer lifespans. Of course, animals are not humans, and correlation does not imply causation. Still, we do not currently have causative evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, and we widely agree that that is harmful for lungs. With enough correlative evidence I think it becomes reasonable to accept it as actionable evidence.

You’re right of course, I was more responding to the very matter-of-fact “only known” phrasing.

Nit: Humans are animals, but those animals were not humans

> I don't think I've had a truly original idea in my life.

There’s no such thing as a truly original idea. It is all just combining A+B!

Sometimes you generalize A into A'.

But often results are incremental and obvious.

But also if you jumped from A to A''''', nobody would understand why or what it relates to.

if someone did have a truly original idea, then everyone would probably think it was terrible anyway and we'd all ridicule them, because we'd have no frame of reference for X + Y if all we know is A and B :)

Cavemen came up with the initial A & B, and we’ve gone from there? (Didn’t think this through much yet!)

Cavemen invented language, language isn't just combination of concepts, it requires defining all the concepts.

The second link here is easily my favorite of the three.

Ha interesting! Well I don't hate it but much prefer the current version ofc

But that's how taste works! It's personal

Im curious how youve set up the multiple puzzle games you have to generate two daily puzzles each? It cant be entirely by hand or entirely AI driven?

For any game that is able to procedurally generate a "random" puzzle, you can simply seed a deterministic PRNG with a seed derived from the date. No AI or hand-generation required.

This is true hypothetically but doesn’t quite work to produce good puzzles like say in Zanagrams without sufficient heuristics/constraints

Latvia and Estonia are Baltics, not Nordics

To play devil’s advocate, intuition is still a physical response to stimuli mixed with knowledge of past experience. Hypothetically it could be modeled- the problem here comes down to how to encode it.

"Encoding" implies some GOFAI symbolic formal rule machinery.

I'd argue that transformers are a pretty good indication that intelligence isn't "encodable" in the way we think it means. Usually, most "model" vocabulary means that we can explain and constrain the "data" from the "rules". Except the mere "data" is trillions of interacting weights.

That may be encoding in a physical sense, but that still doesn't explain the intuition in any legible way to humans.

Cynically, we've been able to encode everything already by just saying everything's a transition in a huge lookup table. Not very informative though.