Agreed. Rust is on track to becoming a practical language for many verification projects. If necessary, perhaps a dialect that focuses on verification could be made and separately maintained (it would probably cut out a lot of normal Rust), or one would just switch to a different technology.
All history lessons are indoctrination at the very least. There's not some "objective history book" where people can just learn "objective history" without zero doubts. Even for things that are taught more or less "objectively", no one alive has firsthand experience of them, unless they are recent. The end result of teaching critical thinking is that you shouldn't trust anyone completely, not yourself, and not your teachers. It's just that adding the layer of government propaganda makes things worse.
There's plenty of money thrown at schools in the US, but the issue is that the students that live in poor socioeconomic conditions tend to not do well. The "simple answer" that addresses the root cause would make individuals not subject to poverty and whatnot. But throwing money at institutions is already on the ropes in the US, let alone throwing money at the "undeserving".
(Yes, this is a political opinion. No, do not blame me for that. Politics does not come wrapped up neatly with a bow tie in a box. If you want to debate the veracity of my claim, go do that instead.)
> If you want to debate the veracity of my claim, go do that instead.
I'd do no such thing because you are completely correct - the only thing I'd add is that poverty, while being very dominant, isn't the only issue that desperately needs to be fixed.
On a general note, if this feels natural and right to you, don't be quick to dismiss others' views as having less substance or credibility and being conditioned. But I appreciate that you earnestly believe this, and for that there is nothing prima facie wrong with your view either.
> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.
I feel like this is not obvious. Many people seem to want to enjoy life more than anything else, and if this biotech means curing cancer so they can do so for longer, sure, but at some point it may be too invasive. Like if you have to undergo a procedure every year to get diminishing returns. A lot of the features you mention are nice to have, but not strongly appealing to me personally. Particularly for something like immortality: if I'm going to have that, I want a lot of other things too that biotech won't obtain.
Also, at that level of biotech, it seems like we could forgo the clones and enhance our bodies directly. That would remove the ethical concerns of cloning, in particular the notion of creating clones for our own purposes instead of letting them reach their own. Beliefs that boil down to "I was here first" or "I beat you" are common, but I find them problematic.
Birth/creation is a fascinating philosophical topic. I have a radical view which isn't quite "life is suffering so being born is a net harm", but I think that life is not all that valuable. I won't go out of my way to harm existing life, but I'm not sure I should go out of my way to accomodate new life. If humans all died off naturally, would that be such a bad thing? Life is great, but it's not that great. If we do gain cloning technology, I think we should afford clones the potential to do as they will, just as we want for ourselves. Again, we could probably obviate clones for the purposes you see.
I disagree with the idea that computer science has an inverted use of abstractions. Unfortunate naming aside, computer science is basically mathematics applied to computation and data (still theoretical!) and software engineering (a good name, if only more people followed it) is applied computer science. Abstractions (models) must be the basis of the codebase. The JVM is an abstraction. Assembly is an abstraction. Threads are an abstraction. And so on. Of course, software engineering adds the complication of changing specifications and hence changing abstractions. Don't confuse poor abstractions for a reason to not have abstractions. Indeed, we have abstractions everywhere.
To be clear, when i mean abstractions in computer programming, i mean things like classes and polymorphism; abstractions that are used to structure code bases.
I think abstractions in CS (Turing machines, etc) or other building blocks in computer systems (OS interfaces,computer languages, etc) are a different story and much more similar to how abstractions are used in math.
I think abstractions for structuring code are just a different kind of CS-math abstraction. Particularly, a programming language is a heavyweight abstraction that provides the ability to create further abstractions. Good abstractions for structuring code have a lot to do with good abstractions elsewhere; the goals and scope are different, but the principles are the same.
It's much easier to see flaws in others than ourselves. Introspection is a habit that must be developed, and it has layers. The average person is not rational (I would say no one is); it's because of education that we have "rational thinking". It's basically "right place, right time" but with the luck being systematized. Just hope that the people being sorta-rational are on the right track and elevate the tide.
You're both right. We don't distinguish between the reasonable middle grounders and the unreasonable ones. More broadly, we don't distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable arguments. We never have. Truth as determined by humans is basically a popularity contest.
It can be, but I think practically it can't be. Maybe that doesn't fit into a nice logical statement, but there you have it. Or: when you build yourself a constantly-accelerating, never-stopping racecar and get on it, it's hard to build a steering wheel or brake pedal for it. Or or: it's a lot easier to get into a deep hole than to get out of one.
Personally, I have a negative opinion of LLMs, but I agree completely. Many people are motivated to reject LLMs solely because they see them as "soulless machines". Judge based on the facts of the matter, and make your values clear if you must bring them into it, but don't pretend you're not applying values when you are. You can do worse: kneejerk emotional reactions are just pointless.
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