urusan

urusan, 1 day ago

@RL_Dane Well, you know what they say...plan to throw one away...

urusan, 4 days ago

@tk I prefer the lead free ones for health reasons.

Mmm, tasty.

urusan, 25 days ago

@mike My favorite language, Julia, has a similar issue. It's statically compiling everything it needs together by default to ensure portability. In particular the Rust runtime is pretty substantial (and the case of Julia is even worse since it includes all of LLVM).

You can tell Rust to knock it off and do dynamic linking, but then the target machine will need the Rust runtime installed.

There are other options as well, but I'm not a Rust expert so I don't know the details.

urusan, 1 month ago

@alex One of these days, this will be an incredible archeological find.

urusan, 1 month ago

@deshipu Yes and no.

There's a component to it that's not skill based, you just need the right frame of mind and a source of chaos, whether natural creativity (due to a noisy brain) or externally driven (using random or pseudorandom processes). It's just about accepting the chaos. Even an unthinking process can be creative in this sense.

Then there's a common "design" skill that covers the generalities of effective creativity.

Lastly, each specific skill has specific design skills.

urusan, 1 month ago

@lightspill @deshipu Our brains are inherently noisy. It's so fundamental and low level that we usually don't think about it. At the end of the day though your brain is using hardware which is unreliable in a chaotic manner. There's none of the well ordered and precise operation of a computer in your brain.

That's okay though because you don't need order to get good results, and what you give up in precision you gain in flexibility and creativity.

urusan, 1 month ago

@lightspill @deshipu We experience creativity as intuition, new things popping up in our head, but the low level source of those intuitions is chaos.

Of course, that's not all, your past experience (which is also often chaotic) and other knowledge are critical too, and you can move forward with an intuition and put more careful thought into it, possibly combining it with other intuitions. That's the skill of design.

Without our creative intuitions though, we would struggle to be creative.

urusan, 1 month ago

@lightspill @deshipu Yes, there's definitely external sources. More fundamentally, everyday life is full of little chaos and randomness, which we are great at amplifying massively.

Consider computers, they have zero internal creativity. In contrast to biological brains, any deviation from their program must arise from an external source.

However, you can set up a program to be on the razor's edge of chaos, so you only need the tiniest bit of actual randomness to push it over the edge.

urusan, 1 month ago

@lightspill @deshipu A great extreme example of this is generative AI.

We've designed it to be maximally primed for creativity, all that's needed is a tiny bit of randomness in the form of a seed, which we can provide (or leave it up to the computer clock).

So while the computer isn't creative, you can hook the program up to a source of randomness to get creativity.

Our brains are doing something really similar when we have intuitions, but with much more complexity and internal chaos.

urusan, 1 month ago

@starmaker I've had a really good experience over at aipub.social @urusan

urusan, 2 months ago

@puniko I'm doing some practice rounds and this happened:

urusan, 2 months ago

@lulu_powerful @WhippoorwillSong I work in the life sciences and the issue is that we haven't really had the tools (mental or physical) to really understand what's going on.

Our bodies aren't non-deterministic, but they are chaotic, which is similar. It's like an enormous pachinko machine.

Traditional science only has statistics to deal with this kind of system, they need huge numbers of samples to do anything, and each sample is a person's life, so our tools are weak and expensive.

urusan, 2 months ago

@lulu_powerful @WhippoorwillSong That's changing in two key areas.

The data we're getting is way better nowadays because of improving physical tools. Genome sequencing, constantly improving labs, better cheaper scans, etc. We also have improving ways to make finer changes so we can see what happens.

Then we also have the data analysis part of the equation: we have such powerful computers now and hugely improving data science techniques. We have a lot more capacity to cut through the chaos.

urusan, 2 months ago

@lulu_powerful @WhippoorwillSong One more important note: it's easier to control a chaotic system than to predict it.

If you are exposed to a lot of hard radiation, your risk of cancer goes up, but predicting who gets cancer and who will be just fine is next to impossible.

In comparison, not exposing people to hard radiation is an easy and effective measure to avoid cancer.

We need a different strategy. Instead of understanding how things are we should focus more on what we want them to be.

urusan, 2 months ago

@losttourist A projector.

Seriously, I switched over many years ago and never looked back.

It's not a drop in replacement, it requires some changes compared to a TV, but it has many advantages and the technology has continually been progressing over the decades.