sennight · HackerTrans

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Put more bluntly than I was willing, but pretty much. I think this would be the case for the majority of the envious complaints, and the remainder would be a laughably unrealistic over-estimation of the power of money. As in: it doesn't suddenly make you smarter, more industrious, or gift you the ability to perform complex project management involving large organizations.

sennight

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

I worded it exactly as intended when I said "meaningful achievement" instead of "wildest dream". If the scope of your ambition is to push the envelope in astrophysics, you probably already have enough resources at your disposal - and if you don't, a very sophisticated radio astronomy setup is easily within the reach of most individuals and certainly a handful of friends. But if your ambition is very specifically to build a radio telescope on the dark side of the moon... well yeah, that would take a lot of money that you don't have and never will. But even if somebody gifted the amount to you, that radio telescope still isn't getting built - because it was never something that could be achieved at the individual scale in the first place. So the money wasn't the showstopper. Same story with chip fabrication. If somebody is whining about their inability to execute their dream design due to lack of resources - dropping a $500M EUV stepper on them won't fix their problem.

sennight

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Not that long ago the vast majority of scientific progress originated from rich men doing it in their free time. Does it really matter that they published their results for bragging rights instead of a need to fulfill some goofy academic pipeline requirements? Because those that think that money is the only thing standing between them and meaningful achievement... well, no amount of money will change that for them.

sennight

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

Oof, as somebody who has studied the AI winter - that article hurt, suggesting that an unsupervised NN-centric approach is going to lead somewhere other than tool-assist... its the 1970s all over again.

> I would

Well you're going to have a problem describing actual automation when you encounter it. What would you call it when NLP results are fed into an inference engine that then actually executes actions - instead of just providing summarized search results? Super-duper automation?

sennight

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

I wouldn't describe keyword search engines or cross reference managers as "quite automated" - so I would expect little market change from whatever LexisNexis is currently selling.

sennight

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

Nor I, which is why I said so. A SaaS will pop up called "Co-chair" and that'll be that. It would definitely be a lot easier to trust than any of the black box neural networks we are all familiar with - as the field of formal logic is thousands of years old and pretty thoroughly explored. I used a SAT solver just last night to generate an exhaustive list of input values that result in a specific failure mode for some code I'm reverse engineering - I have no doubts about the answer the SAT solver provided. That definitely isn't the case with NN based solutions - which I trust to classify cat photos, but not much else.

sennight

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

huh... I've found that people who tend to describe their occupation as "knowledge work" are the most blind to the fact that white collar jobs are the first to get optimized away. Lawyers are going to have a really bad time after somebody manages to bridge NLP and formal logic. No, it won't result in a Lawyerbot-2000 - it will result in software that enables lawyers to do orders of magnitude more work of a higher quality. What do you think that does to a labor market? It shrinks it. That or people fill the labor glut with new, cheaper, lawsuits...

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