Mathematicians always define their terms exactly, in order to begin their discussion. Philosophers never define their terms exactly, because then they would have nothing to discuss.

Deontic - `Relating to or expressing moral duty or obligation`

Deontology - `normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong`

That's the is-ought fallacy. We know humans can survive on many different levels of oxygen saturation, and it's clear that very high oxygen content is sometimes helpful. We are not "adapted for ice caps", and they are clearly not a requirement for our survival. Sure, ice caps help maintain Earth in a climate that is favorable to us, but think about all the many different climates that humans have existed in for thousands of generations. There's no real reason to assume ice caps are necessary for a favorable climate. Not to mention the fact that ice caps seem pretty common in the universe.

Similarly, the ozone layer is not a requirement, the requirement is that we have some protection against harmful radiation. I don't know how many different possible ways there are to produce a world with minimal UV light, but I'm sure it's more than 1. And besides: are you seriously suggesting that Earth is clearly optimally habitable regarding UV light, when a large percentage of all humans have to take active measures to protect their skin from frying every time they go outside for more than 30 minutes? It's actually very easy to imagine worlds where it's much more pleasant to be outside.

Why would you even think humans require tectonics, vulcanism, and erosion? This is the most obvious is-ought fallacy. Humans cannot live on a planet unless it has earthquakes and giant death-gas-spewing lava mountains? What?

Abundant fresh water I'll give you. This is something that all our evidence suggests Earth is definitely S-tier at, and rare in our neighborhood of the universe.

Sure, if you want empty, soulless writing, akin to TikTok mind-rot and engagement bait. Get your reader's emotions up so they hate-read it. A/B test your blog for which sentences, jokes, and moral stances get the most engagement. Sell your soul to the lowest common denominator. To fight the AI slop, you must become the AI slop.

Or write something that actually provides value to your reader, communicate that value effectively, and trust your reader to recognize that value. Which would you rather read: writing that was optimized for psychologically capturing your eyeballs, or writing that was optimized for providing you something of value?

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

Thanks for the reply.

I really didn't mean to encourage emotional manipulation, soulless optimization, listicles, etc., although I agree that a lot of writing online falls in that bucket, and it's even likely that the advice I uncritically quoted was aimed at that bucket.

I obviously should have thought more carefully and written more clearly.

But I don't think that "Write each sentence to give the reader a reason to keep reading" and "Actually provide value to the reader" have to be mutually exclusive. Instead, I think of it as (like you said) communicating the value effectively: dispense with the throat-clearing, meandering intros, irrelevant personal details, weak thesis statements, etc., and write tight, well-crafted prose that respects the time and honestly maintains the interest of those who'd benefit from the value you can provide. (I certainly don't claim to be an expert here! Appreciate the video link.)

> if you start very publicly shipping a cryptographically secure hash, you better keep it cryptographically secure

So if my API happens to return text strings that always happen to have an even number of characters, I better make sure that all future versions of it also always return an even number of characters, just in case some moron decided to bank their application's functionality on that? No. If you decide to write a fragile application tethered to some incidental property of some upstream software, your application deserves to break.

> No. If you decide to write a fragile application tethered to some incidental property of some upstream software, your application deserves to break.

Just because you never made any promise regarding one aspect of your API doesn't mean that you're absolved from responsibility when you choose to change it. If you know for a fact that many users rely on it and you choose to break it, you need a good reason. That kind of balancing act is part of your job. If you don't respect your users, perhaps development wasn't the right career choice.

As developers we're of course constantly tempted to rename things that we named poorly, or change a schema that is no longer optimal. But we must always take a step back and think about the downstream impact.

> I better make sure that all future versions of it also always return an even number of characters, just in case some moron decided to bank their application's functionality on that?

Oh yes, this does happen. There's even a name for that: ossification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_ossification). You can't change your API/protocol, because "some moron" started depending on implementation details.

It's easy to say "your application deserves to break" from an ivory tower, but it's often not easy or viable to fix it (for instance, it might have different owners, it might no longer be maintained, it might be more expensive to change, etc). And the change which broke that application was not in it; the blame naturally goes to what was changed last.

Hey, I'm just the messenger here, if you don't like it, take it up with Hyrum ;)

But seriously: If you can afford to break your user's applications if they "deserve to be broken", sure. Many API maintainers can't, or at least don't want to.

In the latter case (which is honestly the norm rather than the exception, at least for public APIs), yes, you should better think about all implicit API contracts your API shape might be projecting. That guideline has served me very well through my career, at least.

> He does correct for the efficiency of both electric cars, and heat pumps in later chapters.

There's something really important to understand when evaluating non-fiction books: nobody reads the later chapters, and the authors generally know this. They can present tremendously one-sided information in the first few chapters, giving the spin that they want, and then in later chapters give a more balanced approach to shield themselves from criticism. Almost everyone who reads the book will read only the spin, but any criticism levied against the author will be met with "but I specifically say, in the later chapters ...". It's a slimy technique that you start to see everywhere once you're aware of it.

Although in this case, iirc the argument that using renewables in isolation would be challenging came in an even later chapter

> There's something really important to understand when evaluating non-fiction books: nobody reads the later chapters

Asserted without evidence, and I very much doubt that it's true. I suspect it varies dramatically by subject matter, intended audience, book length, data density, and more. I have no evidence for any of that. Do you?

There was some statistics on capital in the 21st century by Picketty (maybe from Kindle readers?) that most owners of the books only read the first 10 pages or so. Am on mobile but should be easy to find.

Not necessarily saying this generalises to all non fiction books though

I don't care how hard it was to live in Abyssinia. This is absolutely the worst time to try to make a life in the United States since WWII ended 80 years ago, and there's every reason to believe it is going to continue to get worse for a long time. I have no idea why you are dismissive of people saying this is a difficult time.

The standard of living/real GDP per capita or per hour of work is about as high as it's ever been.

This company's goal is to ... change an aspect of hundreds of different million-dollar highly regulated machines made by dozens of different multi-billion-dollar worldwide companies? And somehow make money doing this? Good luck, I guess.

That's a major theme repeated several times in the article. Like, what?

It's almost a certainty that LLMs have a "core" that will essentially never become obsolete, possibly even 80% to 90% of their parameters. The rules of English and other languages, core ideas in math and science, all of history, nearly all literature, etc. We don't really understand what's going on inside LLMs enough yet to make good use of this, but one day we will have "core logic" neural networks with stable weights burned into ASIC that are doing the heavy lifting, with more dynamic continually-tuned models manipulating the inputs and outputs into those core models. There are also likely stable expert models on topics that don't change much that we could already do this with.

Inference costs cannot keep falling forever, but they do still have a long way to go.

it doesn't work that way though

The danger of AI has always been the recklessness and maliciousness of the humans who wield it, rather than some Skynet or paperclip maximization fantasies. So yes, just like with guns, with mass media, with any other powerful tool.