There are Byzantine Armenian dimensions to this story that I suspect not many people know. Cyrill and Methodius were taught by Leo the Philosopher and Photios, in the University established by Bardas, all Greek-Armenians who clearly knew the transformative effect of having your own writing system (it saved Armenians from assimilation just a few centuries prior to these events). It took Hellenic culture of Byzantine period and Armenian experience to give birth to the first Slavic writing of Moravia and Bulgaria, and later most of Eastern Europe.
Incidentally, the first writing system (Glagolithic) didn't stick nearly as well as the subsequent iteration (Cyrillic) because the latter was so much closer to Greek, and every educated person already knew how to read/write Greek so it was a much easier sell. Regardless, this invention and its promotion was very much a planned and well-understood Byzantine project.
> Thus Bardas founded the Magnaura School with seats for philosophy, grammar, astronomy and mathematics, supported scholars like Leo the Mathematician and promoted the missionary activities of Cyril and Methodius to Greater Moravia.
Oh he's "solving the problem efficiently", just not the problem he purports to be solving. It's all about misaligned incentives in large orgs: people act out of their own self interest, and if the incentive mechanisms are designed incorrectly (or evolved over time into a misaligned framework), you get situations like these. The higher-levels in big orgs typically do play an outright zero-sum game for positions of power, with the object-level problem/domain being mostly a nuisance.
This looks great! What are some of the verticals you think this will be most immediately applicable in, and are you integrating with any? I am thinking a lot of ads/marketing work can be jump-started with these notebooks.
Well, you can ask yourself what is "real value". In fact, more likely than not, it's just some imaginary stuff you ascribe value to, just like "prestige".
I actually think that interdisciplinary work like this can shed light into common structures across physics, biology, neuroscience, CS, etc. If anything, I wish there were more attempts to explore the connections between these disciplines.
Complex/imaginary numbers are just badly named for historical reasons, they represent an objectively central concept in math and physics, and can be derived from axioms of what we expect from a well-behaved number field. For reals, we have: (A) expected properties of addition and multiplication, (B) total order and other order-related nice properties (Dedekind-complete). Any mathematical structure satisfying (A,B) will be equivalent to real numbers. Now if we extend it to get (C) algebraic closure, so that all polynomials have roots, we get the complex numbers.
Arguing against AI's "existence" or its dangers is cheap/free: if the whole thing flops, you get minor cookie points, and if it doesn't, people will have bigger problems to worry about than you or your opinion. AI is not gonna flop, and we better prepare.
> able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do it in real time
most brains I run into don't do that much at all, mostly just existing and adaptation-execution
It's not a strong argument to say "what could it be other than X? therefore, X"
> What could it be?
Sense of community is gone. Trust is at an all-time low. Traditional social institutions and scaffolding that held society together are gone. Families are more broken apart than ever. It's an entire regime change, and we're still operating with our old instincts/hardware, which expects to be raised in a village by a largely familiar and empathetic community. The farther we get from that model, the more we'll be stressed out (until and unless we upgrade our hardware somehow, or, more likely, die trying).
Social media is small potatoes in comparison to the changes that have happened already, and especially to those that are coming.