I've never understood this belief. There are many things I struggled with as a child that are very easy for me to understand now. For instance, calculus. I struggled barely passing my classes originally. A few years ago I decided that I really needed to know calculus so I bought a book and worked through all the problems. Not only was it not difficult but the whole thing just made logical sense; it was all straightforward.
I can believe there are some things that would take me longer as an adult to learn than if I were a child (a new language for instance) but origami folding wouldn't be one of them.
Calculus may have seemed easier because you actually learned a lot more than you thought you did in school. Just having been exposed to the ideas before may have allowed you to develop an intuition that you didn't have access to the first time around.
Ask any SOTA AI this question: "Two fathers and two sons sum to how many people?" and then tell me if you still think they can replace anything at all.
What answer do you expect here? There's four people referenced in the sentence.
There's more implied because of Mothers, but if you're including transient dependencies, where do we stop?
It can also be 3 people, as one person can be a father and a son at the same time. If you allow non-mentioned people to be included in the attribute (i.e. the sons of the fathers are not part of the 2) it could also be 2 people, as long as they are fathers.
If you force it to use chain-of-thought: "Two fathers and two sons sum to how many people? Enumerate all the sets of solutions"
"Assuming the group consists only of “the two fathers and the two sons” (i.e., every person in the group is counted as a father and/or a son), the total number of distinct people can only be 3 or 4.
Reason: you are taking the union of a set of 2 fathers and a set of 2 sons. The union size is 2+2−overlap, so it is 4 if there’s no overlap and 3 if exactly one person is both a father and a son. (It cannot be 2 in any ordinary family tree.)"
Here it clearly states its assumption (finite set of people that excludes non-mentioned people, etc.)
Any number between 2 and 4 is valid, so it's a really poor test, the machine cna never be wrong. Heck, maybe even 1 if we're talking someone schizophrenic. I got to wonder which answer YOU wanted to hear. Are you Jekyl or Hide?
The stocks of a lot of these SaaS companies were priced on the expectation that they could become the next IBM: become entrenched with the customer and then hike prices until their eyes bleed.
A lot of companies have been too smart for that, and a lot of SaaS offerings are too small to be truly entrenched. Arguably the investment horizon is too short (IBM took decades getting to that point).
The only real vendors who managed to become the next IBM are the cloud providers.
One of the weird things is the way manufacturers used emissions regulation as an excuse to lock their engines down.
Older engines had no computers. But computer control allows things that are needed to meet emissions like variable valve timing and whatnot. Also, engines are supposed to detect faults in emissions control systems and throw an error code.
So they brought in ECUs, but they DRMed them. Now they said it's so people can't tamper with emissions, but they DRMed everything to the point where now you have to take it to the dealer for servicing.
Do they need DRM to prevent people from tampering with emissions? No, they could have ringfenced it like some devices with radio transmitters do. Does DRM in the ECU prevent people tampering with emissions controls? Also no. There are people doing EGR deletes and whatnot on Tier 4 engines all the time.
But they were able to use emissions as the wedge to do what they really wanted to do: make their equipment not third-party serviceable.
By the way I think this also is a microcosm of the failure of the liberal order. The government should have cracked down hard on manufacturers doing this to begin with. The fact that they allowed manufacturers to turn their customers into serfs "in the name of emissions" obviously just ended up discrediting emissions control.
Back when Wikipedia was new people had a tendency to spend all day in it clicking deeper and deeper. It was called "ratholing."
It was timewasting or avoidant behavior for sure, and often described negatively. But at least you were learning something.
Silicon Valley then spent the next few decades trying to understand that behavior so they could isolate it, strip all positive value out of it, and make it highly profitable.
There's an Isaac Asimov story where people are "educated" by programming knowledge into their brains, Matrix style.
A certain group of people have something wrong with their brain where they can't be "educated" and are forced to learn by studying and such. The protagonist of the story is one of these people and feels ashamed at his disability and how everyone around him effortlessly knows things he has to struggle to learn.
He finds out (SPOILER) that he was actually selected for a "priesthood" of creative/problem solvers, because the education process gives knowledge without the ability to apply it creatively. It allows people to rapidly and easily be trained on some process but not the ability to reason it out.
Back then he had a PR firm working for him, getting him cameos and good press. But in 2020 he fired them deciding that his own "radically awesome" personality doesn't need any filtering.
Personally I don't think Elon is the worst billionaire, he's just the one dumb enough to not have any PR (since 2020). They're all pretty reprehensible creatures.
Any number of past mega-rich were probably equally nuts and out of touch and reprehensible but they just didn't let people find out. Then Twitter enabled an unfiltered mass-media broadcast of anyone's personal insanity, and certain public figures got addicted and exposed.
There will always be enough people willing to suck up to money that they'll have all the yes-men they need to rationalize it as "it's EVERYONE ELSE who's wrong!"
The watershed moment for me was when he pretended to be a top tier gamer on Path of Exile. Anyone in the know saw right through it, and honestly makes me wonder if we just spotted this behavior because it's "our turf", but actually he and people like him just operate this way in absolutely everything they do
I can believe there are some things that would take me longer as an adult to learn than if I were a child (a new language for instance) but origami folding wouldn't be one of them.
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