Technologies: former founder. best at infra, data infra, database (postgres) (including IoT), fan of: Ruby on Rails and "boring technology", Swift UI, developing hardware
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but recent (last ~100 years) evidence and phenomena suggest that consciousness might be fundamental to reality, and thus there could be some other information transfer we would currently consider "woo" going on here. This is hard (if not impossible) to prove, of course, but quantum mechanics has totally bewildered many aspects of the materialist ("reductionist") model of the universe. There is a large and increasing number of physicists and other reputed scientists/researchers who are adopting some variation of the consciousness-as-fundamental stance.
Yes, it's easy to cherry-pick an obviously absurd position that could be articulately argued. But the point is that you are definitely wrong about some things and should generally keep an open mind. Even intelligent people are wrong about certain things, and in fact their propensity for rationalization can lead them into some absurd positions. But some of those positions turn out to be right, like the Earth orbiting the Sun, for example.
The grandparent's point is that articulate prose is irrelevant to the strength/correctness of the argument or intelligence of the author.
I would take it a step further and include that it has no bearing on the morality of the author.
The original claim was:
> But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.
In truth, it does no such thing. Articulate arguments serve neither as proof the person making it isn't a monster nor that they are particularly intelligent or knowledgeable about that which they argue.
Though, I would also point out that monsters can occasionally be right as well.
I think he's using the wrong word here. "Articulate" isn't enough. What you need to do is compare the arguments from both sides about the subject, especially how they address specific things. Who is using facts, who is using emotions? How do claims stand up to time?
I can chime in to say: the scientific method, so far, cannot explain consciousness, and that the whole materialistic basis for physics is facing a crisis in the face of quantum mechanics, etc. Most of us have utmost confidence in a method that so far has nothing to say whatsoever about the most important quality of our existence: that we are aware.
The "scientific method" doesn't explain anything. It's a method for evaluating claims people make.
The fact that there is no scientifically verifiable theory of consciousness has no bearing on the science that helped people create, say, my computer monitor.
the semantics aren't very important to my argument, which is basically: our instruments can't perceive all of reality, thus we can't test theories around the unknown phenomena therein.
switch to a workplace that has higher standards. obviously that can't be done overnight, so in the interim, make sure to CYA (cover your a**) against the transgressions of the incompetent, including being as honest as you need to be in reviews. if assigned a stupid task, maybe try to divert it to one these stupid persons, or do it as quickly and lazily as possible (CYA).
you're probably getting downvoted because there isn't really a temperature 4 million miles away from the Sun (it's mostly just empty space being bombarded by radiation)
2,500º F is merely the temperature the probe is expected to reach at that distance. if it were to stay at that distance indefinitely, it would grow much, much hotter as it absorbed more energy from the sun.
No not necessarily - it will keep growing hotter until the black body radiation emitted by the probe matches the power of the radiation hitting the probe. Then it will stay at constant temperature.
It's a standard undergraduate problem to work out what this equilibrium temperature is for a flat plate at a distance from the sun equal to the Earth's orbital radius.
Interestingly the result is only a few 10's of degrees less than the average temperature of the real Earth - the difference is due to the Greenhouse Effect.
For the probe one could easily do the maths but I could believe that at 4 million miles that equilibrium temperature is 2,500F.
Temperature is so wibbly-wobbly. The probe will reach an equilibrium energy-in vs. energy-out temperature depending on its distance from the sun, its surface area facing the sun, and the materials being lit, vs. its surface area facing away, the thermal radiation rate of various materials, and other factors. You could give an aerospace engineer almost any temperature between the CMB and the surface of the sun and they could probably design a (at least theoretical) probe that would reach that temperature eventually* at almost any distance. My guess is that 2500 ºF probably is the equilibrium temperature of the probe at that distance.
* With "eventually" being "assuming a stable state for infinite years" which is of course not how astrophysics actually works.
You’re talking about heat (think ‘amperage’), where temperature is more like voltage.
You can’t get above a specific temperature merely by transferring more heat, or losing less heat, etc.
Upper bounds of temperature is still going to be limited by the temperature/frequency of the input energy, barring energy loss which can reduce it.
The solar atmosphere layers have specific maximum temperatures that limit the maximum temperature of objects exposed to them or the radiation from them.
Assuming passive systems? It doesn’t work that way.
Once the object has reached the temperature of the source of the radiation (assuming radiative heat transfer), it reaches equilibrium and it will radiate away at the same rate it is absorbing (as a black body). Per the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
It’s why there is a maximum temperature with concentrated solar too - regardless of magnification, you can’t exceed the temperature of the surface of the sun the light was emitted from. Attempted to
do so will actually heat the sun (or some other thing) through radiative thermal heat transfer the other direction.
It’s also why radiative heat transfer can’t be used to produce infinitely high temperatures by having a large emitter near a tiny absorber (like a speck of dust) in a vacuum.
If there is some kind of heat pump or laser or the like which you a providing power, then that doesn’t apply of course, but for pure black bodies it does.
If you have some way to let an object absorb radiation, while emitting no radiation even when it is as hot as the source of that radiation, then you have something pretty special going on eh?
What confuses people I think (practically) is that the actual high temperature (~4500F) is far beyond the limits of a useful highest temperature in 99% of situations we might want in engineering. A spacecraft hitting that temperature is going to be a molten piece of scrap long before it hits that point.
But the limit does actually exist - it won’t somehow hit 10,000F for instance. That is also why we can’t produce infinitely high temperatures with a huge magnifying glass - the highest we can hit, regardless of how big it is, is still ~ 4500F. Higher temperatures need something like an electric arc furnace, or LASER.
Yeah. I subscribe to the theory of conservation-of-cool. You get to either build something cool with something boring, or something boring with something cool.
Are you founding something in "AI-assisted programming"?
Because if you're not, it sounds like you're distracting yourself with shiny things instead of focusing on your industry, on your investors, on your leads and clients, on your team, etc. While common, that sounds like a terrible founder approach.
AI-assisted programming may be something that your engineers bring into your company because they find it improves their work. But like any other tool one's staff may prefer, your role as a leader doesn't involve "keeping up on the advances". At best, it involves sourcing trusted perspectives when you face a decision point (authorizing a request, perhaps), making the choice, and then moving on to other leadership tasks.
Do you have any advice for working around the 10,000 token rate limit when using aider? It seems to be a huge limiting reagent, as it makes it pretty much impossible to use on large files.
As for now, we only need equality operator, so we use deterministic encryption for deks and handle keks in vaults. Kek rotation is kind of a pain, so we index edeks in order to improve our queries, which basically build dynamic UNION ALL or IN statements.
I’m sure is not the most secure schema in the world, but it makes retrieval fast and most analytics can be worked out with dynamic query building, while making the db a scrambled mess for those with partial access.
It sounds like both of you do something very similar to what we do. Our data keys are themselves encrypted by AWS KMS. The data keys are decrypted and kept in memory on application startup. They are stored encrypted in S3.
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Technologies: former founder. best at infra, data infra, database (postgres) (including IoT), fan of: Ruby on Rails and "boring technology", Swift UI, developing hardware
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u-PnhWu9V_YcTJtaOQem2iSEwD4...
Email: thisisbrians at g mail dot com
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