I can't do these one-sentence-per-paragraph, you-have-zero-attention-span we-have-AI articles. If I wanted LinkedIn I'd go there. This has no right being #1 on HN.
I have the album on my phone. When I get called in to put out a fire and save the day, I like to put on March Of The Stroggs in the car when arriving at the destination. It's a great soundtrack for two reasons - the first one is sweet, wasted youth and the second is it's a great soundtrack.
Read/watch this interview [1] with Ada Palmer on her new book about the Renaissance. Florence did this for a time.
> You put names in a bag. You examine all of the merchant members of guilds. You choose which ones are fit to serve, meaning not ill and dying, not insane, not so deeply in debt that they could be manipulated by the people whom they owe money to. Their names go in a bag. You choose nine guys at random. They rule the city. They are put in a palace where they rule the city from that tower.
> They’re actually locked in the tower for the duration of their time in office because if they left the tower, they could be bribed or kidnapped. They rule the city for two or three months. At the end, they are thanked for their service and escorted out, and then a different nine guys share power for the next three months. It’s a power sharing that is designed to be tyrant-proof because you need consensus of nine randomly selected guys to decide to do anything.
Venice's system also involved random selection, though in a very convoluted way.
There were multiple repeated iterations where they selected a random group of eligible people and then that group voted to select a group who would then have a random selection taken who would then elect another group and so on.
The mouse cursor binning special case is starting to look like how animals perceive, where we detect patterns and develop predictive models over time in how they are going to act, and that confidence leads to more deeply encoding those patterns for lower energy usage. Obviously the mouse cursor is a hand-rolled example in a controlled 2d environment, but it makes me wonder what efficiencies lie in identifying patterns in 3d environments once you construct an accurate enough 3d scene out of the images you have.
Do you have other examples of special cases you're looking at? Any 3d ones?
Love the effort here, been thinking about what this kind of tool might look like for a while. Something like this coupled with better prosocial affordances in the medium will do a lot to improve discourse online. I wrote up one a while back [1] but things like that are only a small part of a much bigger picture.
The overall problem needs to be tackled from all angles - poster pre-post self-awareness (like respecify but shown to users before posting), reader affordances to reflect back to poster their behavior (and determine if things may be appropriate in context vs just a universal 'dont say mean words'), after-post poster tools to catch mistakes (like above), platform capabilities like respectify that define rules of play and foster a enjoyable social environment that let us play infinite games, and a broader social context that determine the values that drive all of these.
The ownership of "I made a mistake" (you noted responsibility) is important. I feel strongly in the value of accountability, not in a blame or even necessarily consequences sense but in an integrity and character sense. The way you phrased it there is important. You noted this and other aspects, but that part struck me.
Also: a forgiveness button. I sometimes feel like society has forgotten forgiveness: we seek revenge and punishment more than redemption and growth. So your Forgive button: I love it.
Yep. From what I recall from my time in education about a decade ago, Common Core standards were generally considered excellent. The rollout of Common Core tests wasn't that great, but that should have been a one-time adaptation period, but everything got mired in politics and bit by bit got torn apart as states all went their own way.
Eh, disagree. If kids can't read, write, or do math, they won't be able to adapt to whatever is relevant in their adult lives. These are the foundations of every other skill, and schools teach these and are assessed by them.
And if they don't need to read, write, or do math in their adult lives, it's likely something has gone horribly wrong for the human race and the only way out is to learn to read, write, and do math.
I haven't dug into the gritty details of the article and the testing, but it's easily conceivable that "read" means Shakespeare, "Write" means fiction, and math means ... well actually pretty much all math is important :lol:
As a marginal choice I'd rather every kid know how to write a good opinion piece on current events, or a technical document closer to RFCs, than writing some fiction.
Of course, even better if we fund and train them to do both.
I think you vastly underestimate the importance of fiction. Fiction may be the best canvas for creative and abstract thought, the place where possibility is explored and the 'what' and 'why' is established, without being mired in details. Before we invented things, we thought of things to invent, and in those moments we were writing fiction.
Technical writing is 'how', and that's being absolutely consumed by AI. When AIs can build anything, the question of what we should build and why is the most important.
Yeah there’s balances to be struck. Tho I would push back a bit on the notion of great works being outdated. Think of them more as having survived the gauntlet of time, crushing generation after generation of newer writing with their undeniable superiority, emerging as the strongest and most adaptable ideas & stories that couldn’t be stopped even by the churn of centuries of change in language, culture, ideologies, wars and more.
Eg Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will eat alive nearly anything written today, it accurately critiques a future it never saw like a laser beam cutting across time. Few if any works today possess such original and enduring foresight.
This is especially true as a generation of people are now getting deskilled by AI. Even if we have the writers capable of such feats, we likely lack the audience for those works because that requires a societal sophistication we may have lost. And so those works may never be adequately appreciated to let them ever break out of this little moment in time.
1000%. One of the big reasons I love Halt & Catch Fire is because their reach exceeds their grasp and they were too early for the ideas they dreamed of. I wrote a piece, partly inspired by the show, on category-defining products and how many factors have to line up for a product to become category-defining:
Thank you! It's difficult to convey an environment where everyone wants to be right instead of finding the right answer, while the company accelerates towards a wall
