I had a CalDigit TB dock -- maybe 2021-ish? -- that every time I unplugged my MacBook would take my internet offline. I thought I was insane. How is that even possible? But I finally gave up and returned it.
For what it's worth, I don't take that framing of intelligence seriously either. It's useful to have a word to describe the far-future state of the increasing capabilities of Computers.
I'm just saying that I don't think there's any point on that line where we will be comfortable admitting that the machine is "intelligent" or "conscious" or "AGI," or whatever, and that I appreciate attempts to quantify (or at least qualify) what we MEAN when we say that, rather than just goalpost-moving.
I appreciate this paper for relatively clearly stating what "human-like" might entail, which in this case involves "reasoning about the causes behind other people's behavior" which is "critical to navigate the social world" as outlined in this citation:
I get frustrated often when people argue "well, it isn't really intelligent" and then give examples that are clearly dependent on our brain's chemical state and our bodies' existence in-the-physical-world.
I get the feeling that when/if we are all enslaved by a super-intelligent AI that we do not understand its motives, we will still argue that it is not intelligent because it doesn't get hungry and it can't prove to us that it has Qualia.
This paper argues that gpts are bad at understanding human risk/reward functions, which seems like a much more explicit way to talk about this, and also casts it in a way that could help reframe the debate about how human evolution and our physical beings might be significantly responsible for the structure of our rational minds.
There is always space for options for "fast and easy" vs "robust and maintainable."
Nothing will ever beat the following as tech demo for how easy it is to make interactive UIs, but anybody who ever tried to reason through a large Angular 1 application would seriously hesitate to want to use it for something much more complicated.
It is possible with React to write an application where components have no internal state, every component is "read only," and all UI changes are state transitions in (something like) a redux store.
This is rarely done, because there are pragmatic reasons (e.g., animations) not to, but it is possible.
The other mistake alternatives make is to try to make components having internal state "easier." It should not be easier! Every single useX() is a statement that "I am violating the proper design pattern of this application," and it's a feature not a bug of React that you have to be obvious and intentional about it.
"Lots of people are still using it, but nobody can quite remember why."
I can remember why. This, and every other article I've ever read arguing to replace React with Web Components, completely misunderstands the point of React. It isn't about JSX. It isn't about encapsulation. It isn't about reusability.
It is about enabling a design pattern where *the user interface is a pure functional transformation of the application state.*
I kind of feel like people get tripped up by the fact that "virtual DOM" and "shadow DOM" sort of sound similar. They have literally nothing to do with each other. The React "virtual DOM" allows you to *completely re-output the entire user interface* on every state change, which is not possible with any other design pattern, and is not possible without a framework, because actually re-rendering the entire tree on every state change isn't performative (or usable).
Anybody who is advocating an alternative to React needs to do one of two things:
(A) Make a convincing argument that a different design pattern is better. Some things we've tried, which most people think are worse:
1. Using the DOM as your data model (jQuery)
2. Manually writing virtual representations of every view (Backbone)
3. Auto-magically two-way binding some data structure with the DOM (Angular 1)
4. Observables (Ember, maybe Angular 2+?)
(B) Advocate a framework other than React that uses the same pattern as React, but improves the usability. I think the two places there is the most room for improvements are:
1. Animations
2. useEffect() in general
I have not seen anybody successfully do either A or B.
Just take the whole compressed, square, package-shaped "patty" of ground meat from the plastic and drop it into a ripping hot pan intact, and don't touch it until it browns pretty darkly on the bottom, then proceed to break it up and cook as normal. This gets you quite a lot of Maillard flavor without having to cook crumbled meat within an inch of its life. (As with most good ideas, this one came from Kenji.)
This relates to my biggest objection to this article, which is that the best cooking tip for ground meat (blind or not) is that it's really easy to hear the difference between the "hiss" of water evaporating as steam and the "sizzle" of it frying/browning, and the two things do not happen at the same time. Alternative title: "how to slowly steam ground meat flavorlessly without vision."
Ted's booklist/review websites have been my go-to for "I need something to read" for years now. He appears to not be maintaining them and some of the domains have expired, but here's "The New Canon" (fiction since 1985):
The top comment here is about him giving the impression of being "massively up his own arse." Maybe -- but I think his attempts to create something useful for others, which I have found genuinely useful, outweighs that. What does it say that he's letting those attempts link-rot and writing on substack instead now?
I don't know. I just know he has good taste in literature.
I thought this was going to be about "Moose Boulder," whose existence was (rather unconvincingly, I think) "disproven" a couple years ago, and which begs the interesting question about how we define "Largest Lake."
Thanks for finally answering this mystery for me.