CurtMonash

vor 10 Tagendiscuss

No scale at which it really took off. Village-wide stuff requires a bit of politics, and anyhow there are donors out there for capital equipment and even a bit of organizing help. Factory-level stuff -- well, the product idea isn't the hardest part of a new business, is it? Etc.

CurtMonash

vor 12 Tagendiscuss

I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by inventing very simple yet useful things that could realistically be made in poor/underresourced countries or villages.

CurtMonash

vor 13 Tagendiscuss

My grandfather told me that it was deemed time to stop drinking when you couldn't see over the pile of coasters.

CurtMonash

vor 14 Tagendiscuss

Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump were all born within a 2 month period in 1946.

JFK, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41 all served in fairly junior roles in WW2, even if Reagan just made training films and so on. LBJ pretended to serve in the same war. (He went out on one bombing mission as some kind of observer and was awarded a Silver Star, after which he stopped bothering the military and went back to his real career.)

CurtMonash

letzten Monatdiscuss

Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)

CurtMonash

letzten Monatdiscuss

There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent.

But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.

CurtMonash

letzten Monatdiscuss

I first encountered it in the 1981 James Clavell novel Noble House. The character using it was a well-educated Hong Kong gangster, or something similar to that.

(The plot of the book revolves around massive favors that a certain character is obligated to fulfill. At one point it is argued that "the ask" for one of them, while greatly annoying, could instead have been worse yet.)

CurtMonash

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

For a mainstream boss example I nominate the Lonely Giant in Elder Scrolls Online.

There also are plenty of cute-animal mobs that weren't going to bother you unless you started something. An example that still stands out for me is the first set of sleeping bears in LOTRO.

CurtMonash

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Lovely man. I wanted him to be my adviser, but he was on leave my second year of grad school, and I changed direction greatly.

When I visited Japan as a tourist in 1979, I asked him in advance to write me a generic letter of recommendation. It was full-page, handwritten. It opened every door that needed opening. He was also nice enough to exaggerated the importance of my thesis when talking about it with my parents. ;)

He told me once that as a teenager he pursued both math and piano. When he had to pick one, he obviously picked math.

His wife becoming a significant politician surprised me. I just recall her bringing sushi she'd presumably made to a math department party at Harvard. She seemed perfectly nice, but didn't talk much. I don't know how good her English was or wasn't at the time.

CurtMonash

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

My first thought on seeing the headline was: Charlie on the M. T. A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdymgQmdK_A

CurtMonash

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Who has that kind of attention to detail? :)

CurtMonash

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Thanks! It's been a while since I read the book -- I'm guessing a little less than 40 years -- so my memory is beyond foggy on the details.

But even though I recall little about its specifics, that book was very influential on my approach to epistemology.

CurtMonash

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Thanks for finding that!

CurtMonash

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

There's something of a connection here to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Two examples come to mind:

1. The narrator thinks it's important to have in your toolset hammers of multiple hardness, because your hammer should be softer than whatever material you're hammering on at the time.

At least, that's how I remember it; I might well be wrong about -- well, about the DETAILS of that example. Please correct me if I am.

2. A student gets and assignment to write an essay about a particular brick wall. He can't see how to fill the assigned length with anything interesting.

The instructor then says OK, write instead only about the left-topmost brick. The student has so much to say about it he has trouble making his essay SHORT enough to meet the assignment's requirements.

CurtMonash

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Those are very different skills. When I was a stock analyst, well before Reg FD, it was about getting information other people didn't. Same is true now that I'm a self-employed industry analyst. It's about relationships, and having the relationships be productive in specific ways.

Self-promotion generally takes some cleverness. It shares aspects with my previous example -- you use people who like you in ways that are productive, that don't harm them (or, much better, explicitly help them), and don't cause them to stop liking you. This requires understanding of other people's needs and motivations.

I did some clever negotiating things back in the day -- getting a game theory PhD in 1979 pretty much guaranteed that I was a negotiation "expert" in the 1980s, although subsequently general understanding of game theory and negotiation advanced and obviated such an advantage.

The first time a company threatened me with a scary libel suit I got their arch-competitor to, the same day, offer to pay my legal fees. That may have been my flashiest hack of all. :)

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