Triggered sounds like irrational and unhinged so...if it's what you need to say about other people's views to (in your mind) censor them and protect your own views, I get it, but I'm afraid it makes you a less trustworthy assessor!
It sounds like you've confused "identity" with opinion. I wasn't saying, "you are bullshit", and I'm sorry that you seem to have taken it like that. I was saying "I think that (view you write) is bullshit". I wasn't trying to offend you.
But also, to assume that had I had the experiences you list, I would arrive at your conclusion is incredibly narrow minded (and, to be honest, arrogant), and makes me trust even less that you would be able to see beyond the nose of your existing biases and consider others with different views... Because it's a big world out there, plenty of room for differences of opinion and experience.
The false dichotomy between "the Chinese state/government and the Chinese people" is a common Western propaganda tactic I've noticed to, exactly as I said, seem like you're not being racist when you are. And, unfortunately for you, god bless you, you've done exactly as I predicted, "I'm not racist because look at all the connections I have"
You didn't go on to criticize anything beside saying you don't "trust" the government, but I'm great at reading between the lines, and reading people and I know the type of argument you're hinting at and where it goes.
It reminds me that people don't hold these anti-China views from ignorance, simply because they've carried a Western-propaganda mindset into their own affairs. It seems like in your jaunts you forgot to check your pre-existing biases at the door/luggage-check counter.
Which, so far, has meant, not that you don't have enough experiences to think about and understand China, but only that you've so far failed to properly think about them, being blinded by your biases. So far, you've wasted those experiences you have by not yet thinking clearly about them. I'm not sure where you're from (and I don't care here because it doesn't matter, like it doesn't matter where I'm from or who I am, what matters is the quality of my thought and my ability to think clearly, critically and for myself, as I hope you can too), but here's a video of a white dude saying something that is mostly correct. I don't know him nor anything else about him but this is about right:
Now to everyone else, because it sounds like you will find this very hard to listen to right now, I think a good antidote to the fake narrative that "the Chinese government does not represent the Chinese people" is history. China in 20C had the bloodiest most awfully brutal civil war for the last 400 years. It was a popular revolution overthrowing a corrupt, lazy, anachronistic, incompetent dynasty (and then republic) and basically stretched from 1911 to the end of the cultural revolution. Then, the governing system they created out of this, has gone about in the last 70 years lifting more people out of poverty than anywhere else, and building something truly amazing. I hope you'll, you know, give the Chinese and their system some credit. Anyway...my point is, that if the Chinese people are not happy with their government, there's no other place on earth where the government would be more afraid of their people's wrath than China. Just look at the history. Look at the hunger they have for creating a better life. Look at how the government is forced to deliver. And look at the complacent stagnation and lazy woolly propagandist rest-on-yer-laurels thinking that has metastasized in most of the Western world.
So, contrary to the popular, but incorrect anti-China notion that you can't trust the Chinese government, I think you can trust them more than any other place on Earth right now to deliver as they say, and to deliver results for their citizens. Simple as that, really. And I think most Chinese are proud and happy to have such a system.
This shrieking Western hysteria smacks (to me, anyway) of bitter nostalgia for imperial glory-days where we could pull off stunts like "the treaty of Nanking" and "the Opium War", the "United East India Company" and wiping out native populations of N and S American, and Australian aborigines.
I'm not anti-West. I'm just balanced between both places. And speaking up against the river of fake and negative opinion, which, in my view, only serves to hasten the West's demise by blinding them to what they could learn, and giving them the fake pay off of feeling good by (doing that old colonial thing) of putting other people down and pretending they're better.
But to bring it back to you finally... if you want to make it about identity, then sure, I'm just more cosmopolitan than you are. In your future jaunts, I hope you're able to see beyond the veil and check those implanted biases with other stuff you don't need. So you can finally see clearly. Best of luck! :P ;) xx
Sorry actually it's not an extension, it's a "controller". It attaches to the debugging port of your Chrome instance.
I tried implementing it as an extension but there's a lot of (undocumented) differences to using CRDP [0] over websocket and over chrome.debugger extension API, so for now I gave up on the extension part of it.
Only ~5% of Earth speaks English natively. Another 15% speak it as an nth language.
I think English based programming is an anomaly that came out of the post-WWII US/UK cultural world order, and from that sustained economic boom came modern computers, languages and the internet to a mass market.
20% of the world speaks Mandarin Chinese (not all as a first language tho). And, about the same % as speak English natively, speak Hindi (+ dialects) natively, and again about the same amount speak Arabic, and again about the same amount (all above 300 million) speak French, tho a greater % of those have le français as an nth language.
HN, and programming, shouldn't get carried away with the myopic, "fish in the fishbowel" view of English primacy. It's really not. Not globally. Just like "white people" are not a majority. Only in a very narrow, very opinionated and specific corner of the globe are those things true. It's a big world out there, much bigger, it seems than many of you imagine from your keyboards.
Even tho HN is in English, many HNers are not native English speakers. I see people associating programming languages with English and thinking it's simply natural (if just by convention), but for most of the world, this simply isn't true, and it could have been another way. In the future it might be another way.
So I really feel it's not accurate to say there's some "problem" with people on Earth creating languages that are founded in Chinese, or Japanese, or Italian, or Russian, or Hindi, or any of the many other languages people speak. For a large corner (or even a small corner) of the world, it would not be a "problem", it would be perfectly natural.
I just don't think it's that accurate, or that useful, to think of programming and English as being somehow a natural match.
When people speak about "representation" in the "tech industry" they ought to consider this factor as well. I'm not just talking about SV, I mean "global representation in engineering". Of course, if Japanese people decide to embrace a language that somehow uses Japanese letters or characters then, there's probably not much you can do about it.
I'm just saying, don't assume it's a bad thing and don't think somehow English and programming has to go together. Certainly at the level of logic, and CS, programming is completely independent of English (tho interesting to think about how the grammar of English maybe constrained and drove initial language structures, concepts and flow control and do a comparative study of differences to languages that emerged from cultures and used other human languages.)
> 20% of the world speaks Mandarin Chinese (not all as a first language tho). And, about the same % as speak English natively, speak Hindi (+ dialects) natively, and again about the same amount speak Arabic, and again about the same amount (all above 300 million) speak French, tho a greater % of those have le français as an nth language.
What are your sources for this because cross checking with wikipedia, which uses Ethnologue as a source, I find several discrepancies. For example the number of people who speak french isn't "the same amount" as native english speakers, it's 53% and that's if you include 2nd language speakers. You make it sound like Hindi and English are comparable but Hindi has very few 2nd language speakers.
In fact looking at [1] the choice of english looks a lot more logical than I would have thought.
Really? You're gonna fight over some discrepancies in sources, as if that changes things.
The main point is that there are huge numbers of people who speak these languages and there's nothing special about programming and English beside history.
I disagree with your conclusion from your [1]. Any of those groups could create code based on their own languages. There's nothing at all logical about English.
For my sources, just type "X speakers" or "X speakers in the world" into google and the infobox results is what I use.
Your wikipedia source is way outta date. 1.12 Bn Chinese speakers? Come on. China's population is ~ 1.5 Bn now (was 1.4 in 2018).
French is 270 million. Sorry I said above 300m, but it's within 100% of the number that speak English natively, is what I was saying.
Programming and English a natural match, no. Programming and a global language, or the global language as a natural match, maybe.
There's nothing super special within English itself that makes it particularly well suited for programming, but the fact that it's the global language of business, tourism, air travel, diplomacy, etc. makes a good case for it. English has far, far more non-native speakers than any other language.
You're asking the wrong person. I don't know that much about languages, and from what I do know, there isn't really an obviously better language, other than maybe a constructed one like Esperanto (but then you get into the whole thing where it's hard to go off a language with so few native speakers).
Chinese Mandarin has ~ the same number of speakers as all English speakers, it's just your Englo-centric bias that makes you see the world in your skewed way, where English is the center of everything, which is exactly what I'm railing against (in English no less)!
It does have international currency, but that's blurrier than you might think. French and Arabic both have enormous regional currency in EMEA. It's not the only candidate. Spanish in South America. There's plenty of places where English is few and far between (try Japan).
But the point is, even if you can say it's global (which it's not if you're taking a truly global perspective and thinking you can "go anywhere and speak English and you'll be operating fine!"), so what? There's huge populations of people who are not speaking English and they're just as good programmers, so why not have programming languages arising from their language? It's a possibility.
It's a historical accident that English with coding, that's all.
Written English is by far the best language among the globally popular ones and the European languages because it's easier to learn due to its small alphabet with no special ligature rules, small frequently used vocabulary, and low number of word variants.
Spoken English is not so good due to complex and unintuitive pronunciation, but that's not very relevant nowadays where most media is text (and also, it would be easier to popularize a new pronunciation for English, e.g. pronouncing it as if it were Latin, than a whole new language).
Characters are not a problem at all. They can be learned in a week or two. For me, Spanish is much easier to learn - I can read it without a problem, even if I don't know Spanish at all. I can take text of an unknown song in Spanish and then start to sing it immediately. In contrast, I struggle to pronounce English words even today, after 32 years of learning English as programmer. English poetry can damage my brain.
I think that's good logic about suitability, but it shouldn't mean it's universally the only language that programming languages use. By the same logic, I think an argument could be made for Japanese. Or Korean!
THat's probably the best fucking explanation in a HN comment I have ever read. Mind expanded. I actually feel like I get this stuff, which I didn't study at college, a little bit. I took chem... physics always seemed impossibly strange.
Saying AGI will be like iPhone and therefore underwhelming, is not to demean iPhone. But to place in correct perspective the overinflated ( I think ) sense of self importance and impact of so-called AGI.
It's not underwhelming wrt an average week in Techcrunch, but it's underwhelming wrt to the mythos and delusion that surrounds AGI.
Underwhelming does depend on perspective. But my perspective is not to demean iPhone, just to bring AGI big heads back down to earth.
I think it's possible. Certainly when they draw the timeline in history textbooks in future, GPT-3 could be somewhere at the start, like one of the "ape men" to human transition species. :)
I think this is wrong (not to say you are wrong but this idea which is very common).
The idea that we develop AGI and it is this program that is what we run on a regular device, and then we can make it 10x smarter effectively by running it on 10 devices or 10x as fast. I think more likely will be AGI will be achieved first on the biggest teraflop supercomputers that we have, and it will for a long time be the app that takes a lot to run. And probably the first AGI will not be quite as smart as a human, but basically we will have no other reference point for what it is as smart as so we will call it that.
Also, I think there will be some sort of non-linearity effects that mean that you can't just "scale up" intelligence by adding more processors. It will work to a point, but then the curve flattens. Consider that the global total IQ is already approx 800 billion, but our planet is still pretty dumb. I mean this to also apply to scaling a "single" AGI up in speed. Linear speed gains will have diminishing returns I think.
Also, I speak about the productization and allocation of it. It will not be this "come one come all" "gather round" everyone can partake sort of thing. It will be a product, like night vision or GPS, and the secret government military uses will get the best quality, and the rest of us will get smarter shopping.
Further, if it really is linearly scalable, then it certainly will be controlled. It will be more controlled than enriched uranium in that case, and even if not so scalable is still going to be very controlled if it is at all transformative.
I think the various technological, political and commercial realities will distinctly flatten/soften/smooth the predicted "singularity" discontinuity blast wave into a humdrum speed bump that appears to most of humanity as a better iPhone (basically).
I didn't suppose that it would run on your laptop. What is possible on top end supercomputers scales up as well as technology improves.
In regards to scaling why can't we use more compute to run the a single ai faster and faster instead of simulating more AI especially if its running on a supercomputer with a high bandwidth communication between nodes?
If between point A and point B you have 100 times the compute why don't you effectively simulate a century of thought for your single AI instead of simulating 100 AIs.
I think there will be some limit that means it's not about speed. I think we can't just scale up the speed factor (even if we reach speeds that are fast enough for this in the first place).
Maybe it's related to experience/embodiment. What's a 100 years of thought if you don't have the experience, OODA feedback loop to inform it?
But maybe that's not it, and it's related to something else. I just think the simplistic idea that "once we have it, we only need to make it faster" will not work for some reason. I don't think creating ASI will be that easy. It's basically creating a god. I think if you sped up how an average human thinks, they don't become a god.
Consider psychological trauma and issues. Something that happened 20, 30, 40 years ago, people are still obsessed with and scarred by today. That's not adaptive, and in many ways, that's highly stupid. But it's so common in intelligent humans. If we could have compressed that 40 years of thought (and even experience) to 1 second, they still have made no progress wrt that factor. It's not just about speed, it's about the quality or nature of thought.
But I'm not saying that analogy explains it. I just think there will be some reason why simply adding speed will not some spectacular revolution make.
Another, but still too glib way of saying it is, say we create an AI equivalent to a human. Still humans are pretty dumb, all things considered. Say we speed it up. Now we just have a AI that's more quick to be dumb than a regular human. Do you know what I'm saying?
It sounds like you've confused "identity" with opinion. I wasn't saying, "you are bullshit", and I'm sorry that you seem to have taken it like that. I was saying "I think that (view you write) is bullshit". I wasn't trying to offend you.
But also, to assume that had I had the experiences you list, I would arrive at your conclusion is incredibly narrow minded (and, to be honest, arrogant), and makes me trust even less that you would be able to see beyond the nose of your existing biases and consider others with different views... Because it's a big world out there, plenty of room for differences of opinion and experience.
The false dichotomy between "the Chinese state/government and the Chinese people" is a common Western propaganda tactic I've noticed to, exactly as I said, seem like you're not being racist when you are. And, unfortunately for you, god bless you, you've done exactly as I predicted, "I'm not racist because look at all the connections I have"
You didn't go on to criticize anything beside saying you don't "trust" the government, but I'm great at reading between the lines, and reading people and I know the type of argument you're hinting at and where it goes.
It reminds me that people don't hold these anti-China views from ignorance, simply because they've carried a Western-propaganda mindset into their own affairs. It seems like in your jaunts you forgot to check your pre-existing biases at the door/luggage-check counter.
Which, so far, has meant, not that you don't have enough experiences to think about and understand China, but only that you've so far failed to properly think about them, being blinded by your biases. So far, you've wasted those experiences you have by not yet thinking clearly about them. I'm not sure where you're from (and I don't care here because it doesn't matter, like it doesn't matter where I'm from or who I am, what matters is the quality of my thought and my ability to think clearly, critically and for myself, as I hope you can too), but here's a video of a white dude saying something that is mostly correct. I don't know him nor anything else about him but this is about right:
https://twitter.com/chinascio/status/1299172383027200001