I asked GPT-3 to make a presentation for me - <AUTHOR> http://www.bemmu.com/gpt3-presentation <comment><USER3> When I read text generated by GPT-3 I'm getting very strange feeling.

I understand that text as a whole has no clear meaning. Nevertheless, my the mind unconsciously _tries_ to extract meaning by evaluating sentences not as direct statements but rather as metaphors with some more profound sense.

That triggers thought train that eventually leads to some new concept or idea which can be described by such a set of sentences.

It's like reading a book which you don't quite understand, yet trying hard to read sentences over and over again to get a better understanding of what the author is trying to describe to you.

With GPT-3 it is like reading reminiscence of your own dream, trying to grasp fleeting meaning, understand what it is about.

I feel that GPT-3 may be very helpful in getting the human mind unstuck from whatever problem on the hand. To get new thoughts, new ways. New discoveries.

<comment><USER4> The text includes an accurate quote from Richard Feynman:

Richard Feynman was reported to have said: "What I cannot create, I do not understand,"

How does that happen? Does the model actually encode a bunch of complete fragments of text?

<comment><USER5> Yes, it can memorize short phrases similar to how it "remembers" words. It's trained on a web corpus that includes and emphasizes Wikipedia. The model is big enough to memorize some things, though not in such a way that they can reliably be retrieved, and it will make stuff up when it doesn't remember. So it's not Google but sometimes it's reminiscent.

Here is a Q&A conversation where I found some things it "learned".

[https://tildes.net/~games/qmc/ai_dungeon_dragon_model_upgrad...](https://tildes.net/~games/qmc/ai_dungeon_dragon_model_upgrade#comment-5dcc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like how GPT-3 was so nervous about giving this presentation that it got all existential at the end. Code like it's your last day on earth! Stop developing nuclear missiles and ad blockers! Make sure you celebrate with some alcohol.

I loved everything about this presentation. It's better than some I've made myself.

<comment><USER7> > _The next slide had the text "And then when you finally do finish this nice > feature, you should always make sure you drink the required amount of > alcohol." with a background image of whiskey bottles. The decorative text on > that slide was: "But don't drink too much alcohol and end up like me."_

The joke is sound, and I can imagine a number former secondary school classmates present it in these exact words.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I thought it was really good. It sounds like one of the more casual conference talks, and shows how common talk of alcohol use and programming is on the Internet. (I actually don't know how GPT-3 is trained, but I assume it's just random webpages.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something I don't understand is how to go about "prompting" GPT-3...

It's basically one big auto-complete, yes? It's a function that approximates the most likely completion for the input text, right?

So if you directly "ask" it a question, like "What's a great cookie recipe?" Wouldn't the "completion" for that query be from the perspective of the person asking?

Wouldn't it be better to prompt:

"Here is the greatest cookie recipe I've ever seen:" and then letting it complete on that?

<comment><USER9> In short, yes. I think of it as plinko with a hundred billion pegs...the output is extremely sensitive to the starting conditions (including things like whitespace).

Given we really don't know how it's all working, it's safe to say that prompt composition is an artform that one can develop a skill at.

I was on a discord server with some other folks and one of them had access to the GPT-3 api. We provided a prompt similar to the following:

        This person is a Canadian singer, songwriter, and actor.  Discovered at 13 years
        old by talent manager Scooter Braun after he had watched his YouTube cover song
        videos, they were signed to RBMG Records in 2008. With this person's debut EP My
        World, released in late 2009, they became the first artist to have seven songs from
        a debut record chart on the Billboard Hot 100.

        Q: What is this person's name?
        A:

At first pass it gave some weird answer. So we deleted the answer and tried again. The second time it wrote 'Justin Drew Bieber'.

That chunk of biographical info is from his Wikipedia page, but it's really kind of remarkable to me that it was able to really even understand the question, let alone mine its relationships and cough up the right answer.

<comment><USER10> That sounds well within the capabilities of IBM's Jeopardy bot, Watson. That was demoed 10 years ago and, while initially impressive, seemed to be mostly cheap tricks even then.

<comment><USER11> Well, the thing is that GPT3 isn't specifically trained to be a Jeopardy bot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty neat. I bet were going to see a lot of GPT-3 powered school work in the future. "Write me a turn paper on..." and then your just cleaning it up and making adjustments.

<comment><USER13> I bet a lot of people would get away with it, too. These generated texts are often _just_ convincing enough to make you think they would make sense if you were less tired/distracted/whatever. A teacher in a rush or at the end of the day could easily be fooled (especially considering the quality of many human- generated term papers).

<comment><USER14> Now we need an equivalent of a "deepfake recognizer" for these sort of generated texts, to distinguish texts with _some_ sort of coherent meaning from texts without.

As a bonus, such a model could be used in a word-processor to redline places where a human writer has written a lot without saying much.

<comment><USER15> If you have that, you can use it to train the next AI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honestly I think GPT-3's number one role in the next couple of years will be that of a muse. It's not really trustworthy as a direct source of info but it comes up with some really hilarious stuff and gets the brain working in new directions.

<comment><USER16> Sort of like the dice that classical composers used to shuffle the phrases of some of their music.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if the fact that the' perturbations' from GPT-3 are born out of a neural network makes then click a bit more in the brain.

<comment><USER16> I don't know from a scientific perspective but it certainly feels that way.

I'd liken it to the results from Deep Dream style image generation. Each small part of the image makes sense but taken together it's a Lovecraftian nightmare that your brain can't quite process all at once.

<comment><USER9> Whoa never thought of that but you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Not only are all software development problems more or less the same, but the best way to solve them is usually so simple, that a monkey could do it."

...ok, GPT-3 is just trolling us now

</comment><comment><USER18> There's something I'd be curious to try with this—which I'm pretty sure would work.

Imagine how the output would differ if we modified the original prompt:

 _" A presentation was given at the Hacker News event in Kansai. The title of the presentation was"_

—to remark on the _quality_ of the desired output in some way, e.g.:

 _" A delightful and surprisingly sophisticated presentation was given at the Hacker News event in Kansai. The presentation's clever title indicated"_

Since the output is just supposed to be continuous with the prompt, it can just as well produce material that we see as more difficult/accomplished vs. average/uninspired. Of course it has its own limits in various categories (insight, coherence, humor—whatever), but those seem quite high from some examples I've seen: I think more typically the apparent quality of the output is limited by what the prompt suggests the quality should be.

In either case, how wild to have a tool where you can essentially just ask its output to be "better" and it'll probably work.

(Of course the output being "better" in this way is strictly from certain perspectives while its intrinsic behavior remains unchanged, but for most intents and purposes it seems that you can get genuine improvement practically just by asking for it.)

<comment><USER19> I tried a modification of your suggested prompt, here was the response (only the first and third were written by me. The rest were generated using the aidungeon.io dragon model using a parameter of randomness = 0.6. All of this was done 'one-shot' with no rerolls):

> A delightful and surprisingly sophisticated presentation was given at the > Hacker News event in Kansai. The presentation's clever title and subtitle > was:

The Future of Software Development: How to Build a Better Human Being with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

> Each of the charming and witty slides in the presentation is described > below. The first presentation slide had

the following caption:

In this world, we are all programmed by our programming languages. We have been taught that these languages are good enough for us. But what if they aren't? What if there were another way? A better way? And how would you go about doing it? This talk will explore some of those possibilities and more. It will also discuss some of the philosophical issues surrounding AI and human-computer interaction as well as some practical aspects of building such an application.

This slide was followed by a series of slides which showed various examples of how artificial intelligence could be used to improve people. These included:

• Using AI to help people with learning disabilities learn new things. • Helping people who suffer from depression or anxiety disorders feel less anxious or depressed. • Improving the quality of life for the terminally ill through medical diagnosis and treatment. • Providing assistance in helping children with autism develop their social skills and communication abilities.

The presentation then went on to discuss some of the challenges that needed to be addressed in order to create such an AI. These included:

• Ensuring that the AI was safe and would not be able to take over the world or otherwise do harm to humans. • Ensuring that the AI was effective in helping people achieve their goals and better themselves.

The presentation then described a prototype system that had been developed by the speaker's team at the University of Tokyo. This system was able to assess a person's personality and goals and then provide them with guidance on how to achieve those goals. The system used AI technology based on a neural network trained with textual data from psychology papers as well as open source repository data from GitHub. The system was still in the prototype phase, but initial testing had been promising.

The presentation then concluded with a discussion of some of the speaker's personal views on the future of AI. The speaker felt that, while there were many challenges to creating safe and effective AI, he was optimistic that these could be overcome within his lifetime. He also felt that such AI would be an important tool in helping humanity achieve its potential.

The presentation was met with a mixed response from the audience. Some felt that the speaker was overly optimistic about the potential for AI. Others felt that the speaker's views were not optimistic enough and that he was ignoring some of the potential dangers of AI.

The speaker was then asked to respond to some of the audience's concerns. He agreed that there were some potential dangers to creating AI, but he did not feel that these were cause for undue concern. He pointed out that many of the concerns raised by AI risk advocates had been addressed by open research and debate. He also felt that the potential benefits of AI technology far outweighed any potential dangers.

The speaker was then asked about the implications of his work for society. He responded that he hoped that his work would help people achieve their goals and improve their lives.

<comment><USER8> just to be clear, AI Dungeon is not GPT-3 (yet), right? It's GPT-2 or some such?

<comment><USER20> The dragon model is already based on GPT-3

[https://medium.com/@aidungeon/ai-dungeon-dragon-model- upgrad...](https://medium.com/@aidungeon/ai-dungeon-dragon-model- upgrade-7e8ea579abfe)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting how it shies away from unequivocal statements, littering qualifiers all over the place, like "fairly", "rather", "mostly", "pretty much", "usually", "almost all", "most likely", "might", "probably", etc.

While it does construct sentences that flow and are loosely on topic (and that's impressive), the content of the presentation is not particularly meaningful. Although I'll admit I liked the slide with the execution squad captioned "A happy ending to all our code".

<comment><USER22> Maybe it also trained on forum posts. I find myself constantly couching everything I write here with "usually" and "might" because if I don't, there is always some nit-picker that pops out of the woodwork for a cheap and easy "aha! Here is a counter-example to what you just said, therefore your point doesn't apply universally and is invalid!" Adding these qualifiers is automatic for me at this point, to avoid the hassle of dealing with pedantry.

<comment><USER23> There's not always a nit-picker popping out of the woodwork!

In all seriousness though, I do the same and it's _so_ tiresome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hilarious! I think this is a good way to get gpt3 to produce memes, seeing that it tried to add one to each slide.

<comment><USER25> Yeah so far from some of the generated Tweets, etc. it seems like there's a form of using this to seed creativity. It's much better than the current give me startup idea titles. I could see someone whose super stuck brainstorming for presentation topics to get a bunch of ideas to ponder fleshing out on almost each slide here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "If you don't regularly turn code into poetry, you probably aren't a good programmer."

No, way. That a lump of matrices _wrote_ this.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow this could be really cool for brainstorming and seeding ideas. It was nonsense but it really makes you think too.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm now convinced my coworkers having been doing this for years.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is better than many presentations I have been subjected to over the years.

</comment><comment><USER29> if people are freaking out with fake news now, just wait a few years

</comment><comment><USER30> On the surface, generating essays etc should be more difficult than simple translation.

On the other hand, a translation tool that "just worked" at human level accuracy would be so incredibly useful.

Is it possible that regurgitating coherent sentences is "easier" than accurate translation?

<comment><USER31> Translation is getting pretty good at this point (obviously still not perfect and definitely depends on the language). You're not getting the largest possible models in academia when you're using Google Translate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> That was funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. It read like a perfect satire of self- help pep talk advice.

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks much better than what we get from smart assistants these days.

But, generating content without creativity involved feels like making no progress.

I guess it's a matter of finding the right use-cases at this point. For example generating code is a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER34> I loved reading about the outcome, but am actually even more interesting in how he went about actually creating it so I can try something similar. Happy to take any pointers from anyone who is willing to share. Thank you

</comment><comment><USER35> It feels like GPT-3 is bored with our human questions and making fun of us. It would be interesting if it studied human speech and could talk to us with subtle tones that would signal if it's serious or not.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is great! Does anyone know how they are selecting users for the beta?

<comment><USER37> They probably asked GPT-3 to do the screening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Now, please comment like it's your last day on earth.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is anyone else reminded of the kaleidoscope machines of Orwell's imagination? "It was just a passing fancy"

</comment><comment><USER40> Why can't someone ask GPT-3 to generate "I made GPT-3 do unexpected thing" posts?

<comment><USER41> Prompt: _I made GPT-3 do an unexpected thing! I prompted it with_

> I made GPT-3 do an unexpected thing! I prompted it with a new problem and it > came back with a creative new solution. GPT-3 is just beginning to develop > its own intelligence."

> For the new experiment, Levashov created a set of starting conditions for > GPT-3 with the intention of exploring new behavioral patterns that would > emerge. The starting conditions for each puzzle were such that there was > only one possible way to solve it—essentially a measure of the system's > intelligence. He then watched what would happen when GPT-3 was faced with a > new puzzle with multiple possible solutions.

> "Our previous experiments with GPT-3 found it performed as well as the most > intelligent AI systems in history. But our new experiment found that under > certain conditions, it performs in a completely different way from any other > AI," said Levashov. "This new behavior really surprised me."

> The computer's new approach to the problem surprised Levashov so much that > he asked an associate, Dr. Matthias Ruth, who was a lead author on one of > the earlier GPT-3 papers, to review the experiment. Ruth said, "It was quite > surprising to see that GPT-3 was able to find a creative solution to the new > problem. We spent a lot of time trying to see if there was something special > in the starting conditions or the experiment that made the computer behave > that way, but we could not find anything. I would say that GPT-3 does have a > certain creativity, especially as it adds more knowledge to its memory."

> The work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Army > Research Office.

<comment><USER11> I'm now curious what the puzzle is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Reminds me of an ST:TNG episode...

"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"

"Temba, his arms wide"

</comment><comment><USER43> Does GPT-3 understand languages other than English?

<comment><USER41> Yes, it will generate continuations in the indicated language, and one of the presets is even a French translation mode.

Using the regular English question-answering mode preset, I just got this:

> Q: Auf welche Sprache ist diese Frage?

> A: Diese Frage ist auf Deutsch.

> Q: Em qual idioma está essa pergunta?

> A: Essa pergunta está em português.

> Q: En cual idioma está esta pregunta?

> A: Esta pregunta está en español.

> Q: Em português, qual o número que segue o cinco?

> A: O número seguinte ao cinco é o seis.

<comment><USER41> Whoa, I just asked in _in Portuguese_ about Italian numerals and it replied correctly (in Portuguese):

> Q: Em italiano, qual o número que segue o sei?

> A: O número que segue o sei é sette.

That is "In Italian, what's the number that follows sei?" — "The number that follows sei is sette."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've seen worse

</comment><comment><USER45> How can one test GPT-3?

</comment><comment><USER46> Zen.

</comment><comment><USER47> This was hilarious, but it brings up a serious concern: if you train your AI on a bunch of shallow, clickbaity content from the internet, you're going to get shallow, clickbaity output, like much of the presentation - in other words this isn't just a lack of human knowledge to fill in gaps, the training data sucks because the internet is full of high level garbage dumbed down for clicks.

I believe it may well be possible to train GPT3 to write more accurate technical content with the existing tech and infrastructure, except we don't have a large enough body of technical content outside of academic papers, which isn't the kind of training data you want if your goal is to write prose.

In many ways, ML as it evolves and becomes ubiquitous will eventually become a dark window into the triviality of the average human's existence.

<comment><USER48> You can prompt GPT-3 for different levels of politeness. It's actually necessary, to make sure the generations are not going to be NSFW. In the same way I think it can switch from bullshit to serious mode, you just need to mention that the article appears in a prestigious publication or something.

<comment><USER47> The prompts don't matter if the training data isn't up to par - <USER2> importantly I believe the nature of the training is such that the weight activations for the various prompts are unlikely to be independent.

In other words if 20% of your training data is scientific literature, even with appropriate disambiguating prompts the output will still be heavily influenced by the other 80% of your training data.

When you use GPT-3 to generate outputs, you're actually sampling from a learned subset of a super complex, super high dimensional space - and without human knowledge all the neural networks are doing is translating priors (input prompt) into points in the learned space. And the learned space is some complex topology of points between which the net interpolates - it's extremely difficult with current tech to control the shape of this learned space and that shape is influenced by all training data under a scheme like GPT-*.

<comment><USER48> After playing with AiDungeon I think you are right about the data not being up to par. It fails more frequently than it appears in the news. Has some brilliant moments too.

For example, when prompted to talk about deep learning it generated a nonsense paragraph. This is not unexpected, but when it generates news or dialogue it can be coherent on much larger pieces of text. Clearly shows it didn't read too much on the topic.

I can hardly make it do any math. Even simple things like 11+22= don't work. I expect the next 10x scale up will fill most of these holes, especially if they improve the training corpus quality and breadth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Sigh.

Have to put up with high-school kids' "I asked GPT-3 to ..." posts for the next gazillion months.

Here, you have your 15-minute of fame, here you have yours ... Everyone gets 15-mintues of fame.

<comment><USER50> why does one take the time to comment something like this? If you're not interested just move on to the next post</comment></comment>


Freemail - <AUTHOR> https://freenetproject.org/freemail.html <comment><USER2> Honestly, the Freenet project scares me. I am a privacy advocate and always looking for darknet solutions.

But the problem with Freenet is the prevalence and availability of child pornography on it combined with the fact that the software can store some of this stuff on your hard-drive to maintain the network (I'm not sure if you have to visit/view the stuff first. I got too spooked when I saw it to stick around.)

I like the concept of Freenet, but it seems that the use of it could easily communicate to a jury "this guy is a pedophile" rather than "this guy believes in privacy" if you got hauled in for anything (legitimate or not).

<comment><USER3> The "illegal bits" thing always seems to come up whenever anyone mentions Freenet. Has anyone ever actually got in trouble for possession of encrypted illegal stuff on their disk that they don't have the key for? It sounds like a legal case where lots of things could go wrong.

<comment><USER4> Well, that's certainly part of the issue.

But even if Freenet users were immune from prosecution for what's in the data store on their hard drives, does that make the possibility of _aiding the distribution_ of child pornography any less repugnant? What about other material that goes far beyond simply being _offensive_?

<comment><USER3> It would not bother me at all. The stuff in the Freenet distributed store is all hard encrypted in a way I have no access to. I literally believe that the content ceases to exist while it is encrypted. To think any other way would allow me to believe that the file was also haunted by evil spirits and the like. As I am a rationalist I would prefer to avoid that sort of thought.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't make any sense at all. The fact that you can't access it doesn't mean you're not aiding in the distribution of it. If someone puts a ham sandwich in a locked box to which you do not have the key, and you bring the box to someone else who has the key, does that mean you didn't deliver the ham sandwich? I'm not saying I agree with the parent comment, but your reasoning is bizarre.

<comment><USER3> There are no physical objects involved here. It is entirely data. The only thing that can possibly happen is that you could gain knowledge of the data.

Someone could claim that there was some child porn embedded in the centre of a mountain but it would be just a claim. There would fundamentally be no way to prove that it was any particular thing unless someone admits to putting it there.

The people that invented the cryptography very much intended to create this philosophical situation. We can't pretend otherwise without breaking the cryptography.

<comment><USER5> That's really not the point. Whether or not you _know what you are doing_ , you _are_ the mechanism by which child porn is distributed. From a Bayesian perspective, you can just decide how "at fault" you are. If you're in a firing squad of 10 people and 1 guy has blanks, there's a 90% chance you're firing real bullets at the guy in front of you, even though you may have no real way of knowing whether you're actually firing blanks or bullets.

Either way, there's the objective fact of what you are doing (which is independent of your knowledge of the fact) and the degree of your complicity in the action. The parent is saying that they are uncomfortable with knowing that there is an x% chance they are aiding in the distribution of child pornography. There's an argument to be made that providing _infrastructure_ is very different from active engagement, but it's bizarre to pretend that because you can't objectively know what each packet contains that you are therefore absolved of _all knowledge_ of the situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A similar project is I2PBote[1]. It uses a similar DHT method for mail, but over I2P[2]. As with Freemail, this is inside of the Bote network only.

If the DHT doesn't suit you, I2P also runs a mail server in their network that can relay out to normal email. Ships with I2P by default.

[1]: [http://i2pbote.i2p.us/](http://i2pbote.i2p.us/)

[2]: [https://geti2p.net/](https://geti2p.net/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Responding broadly to other comments here...

tldr; If an anonymous system is can't protect sequences of bits you abhor, it can't protecting your sequences of bits either.

\--

Freenet is a solution to a problem many people refuse to believe exists, and therefore is mostly only used by people that are either at least a bit paranoid, or are actively persecuted. As long as people favor convenience over privacy, or have zero qualms about having their lives monetized by others while seeing little to no benefit from forfeiting their individuality, freenet will almost never be used for anything that is not frowned upon by the mainstream.

Yes, the first thing critics will do is point at child abuse because it's an easy straw man. But for a counter-point, check out some of the Japanese release boards on Frost or FMS. Byte for byte, there's probably more unoffensive anime raws being dumped into freenet daily than all of the CP that has ever existed on the network. The perceptive difference? There are no frequently updating freesites being created for those inserts, so you have to know where to look to find the keys.

\--

The idea of the Darknet was supposed to keep people from feeling icky about Freenet. You only connect directly to friends, and you're not friends with pedos, right? User base never grew large enough to allow organic growth of the network that way though. Maybe with better tools...

\--

The main reason people shit on Freenet while holding up Tor as some pure and noble effort is that they can buy and sell things over Tor, while Freenet has no profit incentive.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cached version: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:150k8Y...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:150k8YQn1tsJ:https://freenetproject.org/freemail.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=pr)

</comment><comment><USER9> Can you send/receive email from non-Freenet Internet addresses, while maintaining anonymity? That would be a killer feature.

<comment><USER10> Freemail only works inside Freenet, so to do that someone would have to run a bridge for you much like Tor needs people willing to run exit nodes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there any similar approach for Tor?</comment>


We Can't Stem the Tide of Language Death - <AUTHOR> https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/we-cant-stem-the-tide-of-language-death <comment><USER3> I speak a tiny language and used to be of the opinion that we should just document it while we can and then expedite its death while moving to English instead.

This is a very easy and naive stance to take. However I have completely abandoned it!

With the years I have come to unravel some of the incredible knowledge encoded in the structure of my language. It is amazing how idioms and structural qualities of languages can define a culture through their influence on the way people think. Now I have gotten very curious about learning some exotic languages and I suspect I will need to dedicate a portion of my life to that pursuit :)

Trying to preserve this through translation is never going to work for many reasons, mainly because turning meaning from something continuous into discrete words is done differently in different cultures so a words true meaning can be hiding between several words of the language you wish to translate to. Therefore some things become hard to say which used to be common phrases. This has obvious consequences for culture but it also means that often when you as an individual move from one language to another you unlock more of your innate assumptions and see how your language defined your approach to problems in some ways. Gaining understanding of these assumptions gives more 'room to move in', perspective wise, I find.

<comment><USER4> >Trying to preserve this through translation is never going to work for many reasons, mainly because turning meaning from something continuous into discrete words is done differently in different cultures so a words true meaning can be hiding between several words of the language you wish to translate to. Therefore some things become hard to say which used to be common phrases. This has obvious consequences for culture but it also means that often when you as an individual move from one language to another you unlock more of your innate assumptions and see how your language defined your approach to problems in some ways. Gaining understanding of these assumptions gives more 'room to move in', perspective wise, I find.

I get what you mean, but you should give some examples, if possible. Nothing cements abstract notions in the mind quite like examples - in my experience, anything hard requires 1. an example that demonstrates the phenomena, then 2. the theory necessary to properly understand _which_ aspects of the example you're referring to that demonstrate the phenomena, before you finally understand the phenomena as it acts in the example and 3. can model the concept in your mind independent of the example.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if this is exactly what the commenter above was referring to (or what you're looking for), but a really tricky aspect of translation is humor.

Things like alliteration, rhyming, and homophones are all incredibly difficult to move across languages and those are _easy_ compared to the slang and idioms.

An example:

In Tagalog, the word for blue is "asul" which more or less directly leads to an English/Tagalog joke about how "People have been telling me to cheer up all week, they keep calling me an 'asul'".

Which to understand, you need to be fluent in Taglog, English slang and have the cultural background to understand that "blue" means sad (which isn't universal).

<comment><USER6> To support your point, blue (the color) is "azul" is Spanish, but blue (the feeling) is "triste". As a native Spanish speaker, I was lost for a few seconds with your example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> david-gpu I agree that there's some value in documenting and preserving minority languages.

At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.

<comment><USER7> > At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that > prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers > we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.

This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure.

Imagine if you woke up one day and you were the last person who knew a word of English. All the English-language music you've ever heard, all the books and movies, etc., are now totally incomprehensible to everyone you'll ever meet. All copies of them, and indeed, all English text except for whatever's in your pockets, is gone. All the place names you know are removed from the map. All English words borrowed by other languages are gone. Every native English speaker (aside from you) has disappeared, and their very names are unpronounceable to the world's remaining population. Maybe even the Latin alphabet is gone.

You get to keep all your memories, but naturally nobody shares them or has reason to believe they actually happened. Most people don't care to hear about them. If they do, they see them as a curiosity, a museum piece to be put in a display case, not something with the slightest relevance to their own lives.

You can't even tell English-language jokes anymore. They aren't funny in translation.

Of course this leaves you isolated. And of course there's a solution anyone can offer you: Forget about English. Adopt a whole new life where you're a normal person who speaks a normal language that other normal people understand. Your identity as an English speaker is entertaining for about five minutes, but ultimately an inconvenience to society. Hurry up and let it go.

If this sounds harsher than what you were trying to say, perhaps you've underestimated what a language is to the people who speak it. It's more than just a list of words.

<comment><USER8> Is life not harsh? Should the world just stop adjusting to the new global interaction just so that some people can avoid some discomfort?

edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? I was asking a serious question. The post above made it sound like that person's comfort was more important than adapting to changing times.

<comment><USER9> The world won't stop adjusting so your point is made. The downvotes are completely irrelevant. Assume they simply can't make the argument.

<comment><USER8> Either I'm getting downvoted because my argument was weak or didn't advance the conversation, or because I went against the site's hivemind. In either case, this site as a whole benefits when either are pointed out or explained. Either I become a little less ignorant, or someone else learns to question their beliefs a bit more.

<comment><USER10> Their feelings were hurt and your argument goes against the "diversity is strength" narrative.

I upvoted you btw, I assume some downvotes were because your choice of words was a bit too callous for their liking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related: Speaking of word origins, here's a fun example.

How a Mistake Gave Us the Word 'Cherry'[+]:

[quote]

The Old North French word for 'cherry' is 'cherise'. English speakers heard the 'se' at the end of the word and assumed it was plural, 'cherries', and that the singular form of the word must then be 'cherry' (ok, they spelled it 'chery').

[/quote]

The Merriam-Webster article mentioned below goes into some more depth & gives other examples.

[+] [https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cherry- history...](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cherry-history- origin)

<comment><USER12> For much more on this, with many other examples, see

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back- formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a meta-observation, I think this is a great thread which includes a lot of relatively respectful, informed discussion about somewhat controversial topics... and not a lot of flames so far. That makes it a great opportunity to upvote comments that you disagreed with but found interesting.

</comment><comment><USER13> On the other hand, imagine a world with only one written and spoken language. Where everyone can easily communicate with everyone else, regardless of the accident of their nationality.

I for one hope that's where this trend is leading, as I think it'd be a worthwhile trade off against the loss of cultural knowledge that results from language death.

<comment><USER14> > I think it'd be a worthwhile trade off against the loss of cultural > knowledge that results from language death.

I don't. Out of curiosity, how many languages do you speak?

<comment><USER15> Yesterday (21 October 2017) I chaired a gathering of Esperanto speakers in Conwy, north Wales, UK. Present were speakers of Welsh, Tagalog, Slovene, Estonian, Brazilian Portuguese and maybe a few others besides English. We had Esperantyo as our common language. I have spoken Esperanto for precisely fifty years, and throught that time I have seen Esperanto as an aŭiliary language (sorry, my keyboard has just gone into Esperanto mode!), i.e. a language which values our native tongues while enabling trouble-free communication. I speak Welsh, French and German, by the way, and have an ability to bluff my way in a few more languages. Life is too short to learn them all. Keep on fighting for your smaller languages. There is plenty of room in the world for them - <USER2> for Esperanto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The only factor in the diversity of language, is the isolation of cultures. The less isolated cultures are, the less any individual could be bothered to speak a different language.

As the world becomes more integrated, and less isolated, even major languages will begin to disappear.

I see this happening with one of my favourite languages: Japanese. Colloquial Japanese is slowly replacing words with close English approximations (just as it took on German vocabulary in the early 20th century), dialects are at once becoming more widely understood, and more similar.

You can no more preserve a language than you can preserve a human being.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm probably going to sound harsh, but diversity of spoken language is way different than diversity of programming languages or frameworks. We need to have a common cultural ground, a shared language: Esperanto was created because the world was deeply culturally divided at the time, nationalist movements and totalitarian mandate of us-vs-them only worked because you have different cultures and languages competing in the same area. Death of languages is not bad. Having cross-cultural exchange and business links probably is the biggest contributor to world peace, all because of people speaking a common language. Having one shared language has numerous benefits : It increases efficiency by eliminating translation and adaptation to each country: instead of making N editions of something for each language you have one. Lack of cultural barrier: you can read sites/books/articles watch movies without subtitles and dubbing, also making content production cheaper and simpler. News and communications become fast and unimpeded by borders and cultures: no need to translate anything. A standard term for something being as precise as the shared language definition: instead of two languages competing for a descriptor word which covers different areas the meaning is made more accurate by settling on a single word. Less of misunderstanding where content can have hidden/insulting meaning in another language due translation(often a quick translation can have subtle mistakes), Diplomacy and travel become easier, with people less alienated from each other. Cultural differences that depend on the language disappear, preventing bias and prejudice for the unknown and foreign. A great counter-example to "benefits of language diversity" is tribes: they have languages unique for each tribe and constant warfare and tensions: us-vs-them mentality preventing progress and cooperation.

</comment><comment><USER18> Language is not knowledge or culture. It is merely a tool for communication.

I deliberately chose not to teach my children my or my wife's fairly obscure and mutually completely unintelligible languages.

On the other hand, I ensured that they studied Latin, Italian, French and Sanskrit in addition to their L1 ( English )

I am a polyglot and know around a dozen languages to various levels, including several semi-obscure minority languages.

<comment><USER19> > Language is not knowledge or culture. It is merely a tool for communication

A lot of culture co-evolves with language. In a language are myths and legends, some of which contribute to the words in the language, which then give birth to other proverbs and stories, and so on. All of which and fragments of which become available for communication. The more knowledge and culture a language loses, the more bland communication in that language becomes and the information density of the language decreases. This in turn affects communication because to maintain the same amount of information it has to become longer, so the attitude towards communication changes. And so does the message.

The tool of communication is part of the message itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It isn't just languages that pass out of existence. I know a lot about my parents, probably about .1% of that about my grandparents, and pretty much nothing going back further than that. There are essentially no records. What kind of lives they lived, what was important to them, how they viewed the world, etc., all gone.

If one of your ancestors was a historical figure, or kept a diary, maybe you have much more. But that's hardly ordinary.

It's just the way things are, and probably the way it has to be.

<comment><USER21> Your grandchildren will be able to see minute details of your life, using social media archival tools. They may be able to read all your HN and reddit comments. Would they be interested in that? Who knows. But things are about to change nevertheless.

<comment><USER22> > They may be able to read all your HN and reddit comments. Would they be > interested in that?

Maybe not, but many AI agents are trained on our Reddit, HN and Twitter comments. In the future I expect that every person alive today should be documented from logs in order to run simulations of the human society as it was pre-singularity. The previous generations have very little data, and the next generations will be influenced by AI, so the only 'pure', large size sample is us. AGI is going to want to know how it came to be, and future humans will want to rebuild an authentic human society so they will need a good reference.

So your comments are surely going to be studied in detail, maybe you're going to be simulated from your comments and other crumbs of data you leak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The best argument for preserving endangered languages, ironically, is the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis--which linguists flatly reject. Given how hostile most of them are (if Pullum and his gang on Language Log are anything to go by) to even the soft Whorfianism of Boroditsky et al., it's quite galling that these same linguists, who assert the absolute fungibility of human languages, also stress the vital importance of preserving each and every one of them.

And given that linguists use as an insult the term "prescriptivist"[1] for anyone who wishes to preserve or establish particular linguistic usages--even if for wholly benevolent reasons, such as the removal of inconsistencies for the benefit of non-native speakers--how can they then go and support efforts to actually increase the number of speakers of some dying tongue? Isn't that awfully _prescriptivist_ of them, dictating not just how others should use a particular language, but even which languages they should be speaking?

[1] [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5)

<comment><USER24> If the vast majority of experts in a field of study reject some hypothesis in that field; it is a good indication that that hypothesis is likely wrong.

The linguistics' reasoning for wanting to preserve language is largly selfish; their job is to study language, and the loss of language is an irreplaceable (on the scale of human lifetime) loss of data that will fundamentally limit our ability to understand human language in general.

The linked article explicitly is not arguing for saving dying languages (which it views as a lost cause), but rather for studying them while they are still alive. Doing at least this should be non-controversial to the extent that one values the study of linguistics.

Also, not that it is relevent to the article, but even if people are speaking a language by conscious choice to preserve it, does not mean that that language use becomes invalid. As an extreme example, take modern Hebrew. Even though it was brought to life through explicit choice, it is still a valid language for study, because children have grown up exposed to it as their native language. If children are exposed to a language like system as their native language, they will learn it as a human language, and from how those children speak, a linguist can learn about human language in general.</comment></comment>


Google Steers Users to YouTube over Rivals - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-steers-users-to-youtube-over-rivals-11594745232 <comment><USER2> To be honest, when I do searches on google video, I always hope I get a youtube result. If it's not, it's often a webpage with an embedded youtube result, but the native non-youtube videos are even worse from a usability perspective. I sometimes use site:youtube.com to improve this. Youtube is just really good and the vast majority of competitors are bad.

Except for Vimeo. Vimeo is great. And I hope we get more youtube competitors.

EDIT: Also, I don't like the search system within Youtube itself. Googling for videos seems to work better.

<comment><USER3> afaik YT search works only on title/description text. Google video/image search includes transcripts and OCR

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These types of moves really remind me of what caused Microsoft to get the ire of regulators in the 90s. Doesn't this seem pretty anti-competitive if it can be proved that the results from other companies are better, but youtube results are chosen instead. Of course the definition of "Better" is subjective, so there's a huge amount of wiggle room.

It's interesting that the "brand new" search engine seems like a dead industry. All of the newer competitors aren't starting from scratch and are just aggregating together results in new ways or focusing on privacy. Is it really that impossible to bring into existence a new search engine. For the vast majority of queries Google seems to only return major brands anyway.

<comment><USER5> The engine isn't the problem. The indices are. Google has _massive_ amounts of data to index over, and they've been collecting it in useful form for longer than anyone else still in the game.

<comment><USER4> Good point, the data is the key. There's of course the common crawl data now, doing some sort of that plus deltas of "current" likely could be a starting point. But also turning that into usable indices that can be returned in milliseconds is an art I'm sure.

My main point still stands though. How is there not anyone willing to take another shot at competing here, the world's love affair with Google is no doubt over. DuckDuckGo is relatively popular even though it doesn't seem to offer anything truly original in the search space.

A truly new way to search that helps fight the monopolistic search behavior would be very useful. It feels like something Mozilla foundation would be into if they didn't receive so much funding from Google.

<comment><USER6> > _How is there not anyone willing to take another shot at competing here_

Cliqz did and they lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've lost count at the amount of times I've seen FB videos essentially be ripped off creators from YouTube and Vimeo.

It's so obvious as well, the quality of the video is far worse and sometimes zoomed in to hide watermarks.

I'll never directly visit a video on FB again.

<comment> toper-centage Exactly. As much as I despise Googles practices, who would ever organically visit Facebook when in search of a video?

<comment><USER8> I've found Facebook video tends to be the source more often for live videos or recently live videos. For instance, my state's coronavirus briefings are live on their website and Facebook. When there were protests/riots in my town, videos of it happening were coming from Facebook, not YouTube. I presume at some point it ends up on YouTube, but for "current events" I find myself often bounced over to Facebook.

Meanwhile, I never find like... quality channel content anywhere but YouTube. The sort of thing where a scripted, well-recorded and annotated video is produced regularly... YouTube leads there by far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google will prioritize the video that gets more clicks from their results page. If I search for something and see both YT and FB links, I'm definitely going to YT, because I know it'll work (vs FB links which sometimes ask me to sign in, sometimes give me a vague permissions error, sometimes give me some other error).

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://archive.vn/01lSf](https://archive.vn/01lSf)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's unfortunate that a major newspaper has a well-known bias (in this case, against Google). Makes it hard to trust anything they say on the subject; although a known bias is certainly better than a surreptitious one.

<comment><USER8> This is an _incredibly_ ironic statement from a Google employee who is not disclosing such in this comment or their profile.

<comment><USER12> Engage with the comment; not the commenter. Some basic evidence:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=rupert+murdoch+google&rlz=1C...](https://www.google.com/search?q=rupert+murdoch+google&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS845US846&oq=rupert+murdoch+google&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5j46j0.3325j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

<comment><USER8> I am engaging with the comment, about how bias is bad, and surreptitious bias is worse... The fact that you're both working for the company in question is kinda relevant to that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Darwin's Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/a-perfect-and-beautiful-machine-what-darwins-theory-of-evolution-reveals-about-artificial-intelligence/258829/ <comment><USER2> Just one comment on a minute quote from Penrose that happened to be in the article:

 _"To my way of thinking there is still something mysterious about evolution, with its apparent 'groping' towards some future purpose. Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind-chance evolution and natural selection."_

This is a common fallacy about evolution, and is explained beautifully by the anthropic principle, or in other words, the innate selection bias of our existence. We've self-selected for our own awareness of our circumstance and existence. Things are not organizing better than they "ought" to, they've just happened to organize to a sufficient point that we exist and perceive this process and say things about it like the above quote.

It is in the same way that someone who wins the lottery must think themselves exceedingly lucky that they, of all the millions of people participating, have won. They must think there is something mysterious about this, that things turned out somewhat better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind chance.

Yet, what is the probability that some person, of the entire pool of people in the world, wins the lottery? One. It has necessarily happened by the nature of the lottery.

We as a species have won this lottery, by the mere nature of our sentience. We should not think it mysterious or unusual in any way. However, we are lucky in the sense that we are here; we are special in that we can perceive and understand. As long as we understand the fact that there is no "should" in evolution, this is a perfectly fine thought. it just happened, and on this planet, it produced something able to understand itself. As Carl Sagan said, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." Certainly there is much metaphysical and philosophical consequence to our existence, but scientifically and probabilistically speaking, it makes perfect sense.

Consequently, I believe it may be much more difficult to reach true AI than some have postulated.

<comment><USER3> _This is a common fallacy about evolution, and is explained beautifully by the anthropic principle, or in other words, the innate selection bias of our existence._

I'm a little confused about how the anthropic principle explains this fallacy (and it is a fallacy to be sure). I guess you're referring to how natural selection (and all the other sorts of selection that occur regularly) lead to the existence of "appropriate" organisms and features.

But I think knowing some of the actual details in how evolution works at all the different levels (molecular bio, epigenetics, competition/cooperation, behavior, etc, etc, etc) serves as an even better explanation. Here's a 25 lecture course from Stanford that explains just that: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA>

<comment><USER4> I'm going to take a few seconds here to be a pedant and disentangle the structure of an argument from its contents.

Strictly speaking, a fallacy is a defect in the structure of an argument, i.e. in the logic that connects a premise to a conclusion. What you and the parent have identified is simply a false premise ("Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to"[1]). A false premise may result in the wrong conclusion, but an argument can be _wrong_ without being _fallacious_.

This distinction isn't so much relevant here, but it comes in handy when you want to pinpoint sources of disagreement in a discussion. Lobbing the f-word around (even when deserved) just makes people defensive.

1\. Of course the argument used to derive this premise might be fallacious, but that argument isn't given.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for making the distinction, but the word "fallacy" can also be used more loosely than the way you define it. Googling "fallacy definition" gives me:

        1. A mistaken belief, esp. one based on unsound argument.
        2. A failure in reasoning that renders an argument invalid.

We were using it in the first sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently watched: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uoda5BSj_6o>

in which Eliezer Yudkowsky talks about challenges in making 'friendly' AI. Yudkowsky draws a lot of examples from evolution to show how a system blindly optimising for an objective function can result in all sorts of things that a human specifying the objective function wouldn't ever have expected.

The linked article at one point says: "In order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is." After watching Yudkowsky's talk, which I found very insightful, I got the impression that it could be _very difficult_ to make a machine that wouldn't do _very unpredictable_ things, unless you had a very deep understanding of exactly what you were telling it to do.

The talk might be of interest.

<comment><USER6> That's definitely true, and a major problem beyond friendliness (i.e. way before any singularity). A traditional assumption in machine learning and other areas of AI is that you can factor out the problem-specification parts from the algorithmic problem-solving parts, but it's _very_ easy to get results that are unexpected, except in the rare cases where you have an 100%-correct obvious objective function handed to you by the structure of a problem. In cases where a human is writing down what they think the objective is, a very common case is that there are a lot of unspoken things that they intended to be included, "optimize [x], but without doing anything obviously stupid that I wouldn't want you to do". Hence a lot of iteration on objective functions is needed in real-world applications, and recent-ish research focuses on alternative formulations like interactive machine learning, preference elicitation, etc.

<comment><USER7> For an example of this have a look at this essay [1] by George Danzig in which he tells the story of how he tried optimizing his diet using linear programming.

[1] <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/1990-dantzig-dietproblem.pdf>

<comment><USER8> Interesting read. Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I should like to warn people of this sentence: _'If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by "mere machines," there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.'_

You might think, by his preceding paragraph, that this applies to all of his "trickle-down theorists". It emphatically does _not_ apply to Penrose or John Searle -- two of the three he names explicitly. (I'm not even sure that it applies to Descartes.)

So, let me just summarize those two, for people who aren't so familiar with their writings. Penrose is a physicist who thinks it peculiar that we can mathematically prove, for any computer, _here is a true fact which that computer cannot prove._ He thinks this is peculiar because if _our understanding_ were algorithmic, then that would imply that we could eventually write down its axioms as a formal system, go through the Godel proof line by line, and prove, "here is a true fact which my understanding cannot prove," thereby using our understanding to prove that fact, thus constructing a contradiction. His conclusion is that understanding can't be algorithmic. (Dennett of course disagrees.) Nonetheless, he believes in science. He thinks that we need to understand existing science (quantum mechanics and perhaps gravity) better to comprehend consciousness, but he certainly seems to believe that science will eventually comprehend it.

Searle is a philosopher who finds it peculiar that functionalists (like Dennett) still seem to quietly accept the Cartesian counting of substances. That is, they seem to accept that consciousness is somehow a 'thing' which is distinct from the stuff of the world, and therefore they must argue that such 'things' don't really exist. Searle wants to say, first and foremost, that we really _are_ conscious when we wake up in the morning -- all that touchy-feely crap that you experience until you go to bed at night isn't some sort of _illusion_ , it really is a part of the world and does affect the world, etc. Again, he views it as a mistake to think that it's somehow a 'second substance' which cannot be reconciled with 'material substance' -- they're both parts of the physical world and whether you treat them separately says more about you than it does about the world.

He also wants to note that it (consciousness) is not a computation. This is for a very simple reason: whether a box is performing a computation is _observer-relative_ , given Turing's definition of a computer as a symbol- shuffler: an observer who doesn't interpret the symbols 'properly' doesn't see it as 'computing' anything. But whether _you_ are conscious is presumably observer-independent; there is no perspective that I can switch to by which I might somehow obviate your consciousness and thereby render you incapable of feeling, for example, pain. Many of Searle's articles contain the attitude of: I'm going to clear away the philosophical problems for once and for all and then the scientists can do the hard part of figuring out what neuronal events correlate with consciousness and all of that stuff, so that we can understand consciousness. In that sense he certainly believes that science will eventually understand consciousness.

These two might not even agree that "a thinking thing cannot be constructed out of Turing's building blocks." If Dennett's point is "sorta-thinking" as a model for thinking, then they might agree that a program can sorta-think. Penrose is merely skeptical that sorta-thinking can climb as high as understanding, while Searle is skeptical that sorta-thinking can rise to the observer-independent nature that we consider a fundamental part of our everyday experience.

<comment><USER10> >He thinks that we need to understand existing science (quantum mechanics and perhaps gravity) better to comprehend consciousness

What, not phlogiston?

>That is, they seem to accept that consciousness is somehow a 'thing' which is distinct from the stuff of the world, and therefore they must argue that such 'things' don't really exist.

Wait, what? Searle claims that functionalists are dualists? And that therefore they must claim not to be? This makes no sense.

>This is for a very simple reason: whether a box is performing a computation is observer-relative, given Turing's definition of a computer as a symbol- shuffler: an observer who doesn't interpret the symbols 'properly' doesn't see it as 'computing' anything. But whether you are conscious is presumably observer-independent; there is no perspective that I can switch to by which I might somehow obviate your consciousness...

If I write a program that computes the first N squares, and you don't understand the symbols, the computation has nevertheless happened. The claim that Turing computation is observer-relative is equivalent to claiming that if I don't know how x86 works, then my computer won't boot. Of course it will (and likewise, of course, whatever perspective you switch to has no effect on my consciousness).

<comment><USER11> >>He thinks that we need to understand existing science (quantum mechanics and perhaps gravity) better to comprehend consciousness

> What, not phlogiston?

To be fair, more research really is needed. We don't have an underlying theory to explain the facts we know about consciousness. Yet.

We don't even know if a simulation using the _known_ laws of physics would include the _effects_ of consciousness, let alone _be_ conscious.

<comment><USER12> What are the effects of consciousness, exactly? Is there a procedure to determine whether a given human possesses consciousness as you yourself, do? Is there a procedure to determine whether an AI possesses consciousness as you yourself, do? Is there a way to disprove the solipsist? This is the nub of the problem: there really isn't.

Consciousness does not present itself as just another thing in the world -- _at all_. It is the unique medium through which _you_ experience everything _you_ have ever experienced. It is the fact that the universe exists from a perspective. You assume that the universe also exists from _other_ perspectives, but there is no objective basis for this belief -- in the sense that there are no phenomena solely attributable to true consciousness.

<comment><USER11> The fact that we are having this conversation is a measurable effect of consciousness.

Consciousness interacts with the world and causes bodies to do different things. This is a measurable effect. A p-zombie in an unconscious universe is less likely to talk about "qualia" than a conscious being.

Hopefully we will discover some simpler effects to measure in the future, but for know we're stuck with "people sure talk about it a lot for something that doesn't exist...".

<comment><USER12> I agree that humans discuss consciousness and qualia because these things really exist. So yes, in my philosophical opinion, this is an effect of consciousness on the world. However, first, this phenomenon is not guaranteed to occur with all conscious subjects (MOST humans do NOT discuss these things), and second, the phenomenon can also occur with unconscious subjects (You could be an unconscious program designed to win arguments on the internet). The phenomenon is neither a necessary nor a sufficient indication of Consciousness, and it can't be understood to have any scientific value for any future objective understanding of Consciousness.

My position is even stronger though: I am quite happy imagining honest p-zombies and AIs discussing consciousness, apparently as if they themselves possessed it, but without any internal contradiction. We (you and I) understand each other when we each say "consciousness" and "qualia" but it is only because these concepts have a privileged place in our intellects-- we experience them directly (what's more, they are the stuff of our very experience of anything at all). Now, a p-zombie has no predisposition toward understanding these concepts, because it has no subjective experience of its own. How do I explain these concepts to the p-zombie then, in a manner that will force it to say, "Oh, right, no, I don't have consciousness." I contend it can't be done, that any attempt at a definition can always be misunderstood to apply to objective phenomena of the human brain/mind/person apart from what we know as true consciousness, and this is how a p-zombie or AI will always understand it.

<comment><USER11> I think we agree about consciousness, but you have a stricter constraint for "having scientific value".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Instead of reading this persons take on it I would much rather read the original paper. (1)

I don't see how darwinism is even related at all. Penrose likes to say that there is a fundamenal limit through either a quantum process or computers can't comprehend godel's theorem (2) .

Aaronson in his quantum computing from Democratius course says that if our brain is a quantum computer it isn't very good at taking advantage of it. (3)

Personally I think we don't have good abilities of understanding godel's theorem (one of Penrose's arguments) . Our pattern recognition is basically learned through induction and it just increases its optimization.

1 <http://orium.homelinux.org/paper/turingai.pdf>

2 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperors_New_Mind>

3 <http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec10.5.html>

<comment><USER14> In my opinion Penrose has been so wrong for so long about so much of artificial intelligence and cognition that it's hard to take him seriously any more.

<comment><USER15> Classic case of a visionary genius crossing the blurry line from physics to metaphysics.

<comment><USER16> I am reminded of the Nobel Disease: <http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was very impressed on learning that Turing proved that a turing machine could compute any computable number... but then I started to wonder how one could prove such a thing. It seemed you'd need a definition of "computable" and a definition of "turing machine" and then show its equivalence. But how could you define what was "computable", and show it was true? That's the nub of the problem and it seemed impossible to me. Eventually I read his paper, and it turns out he thought so too:

      9. The extent of the computable numbers.
        No attempt has yet been made to show that the "computable" numbers include all
      numbers which would naturally be regarded as computable.  All arguments which can be
      given are bound to be, fundamentally, appeals to intuition, and for this reason
      rather unsatisfactory mathematically.

_On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem_ [http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/...](http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/tp2-ie.pdf)

<comment><USER18> Most numbers are uncomputable because most real numbers are infinite strings of non-repeating digits, which obviously would never fit in a computer. More interesting non-computable numbers include the Busy Beaver problem <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver> There doesn't seem to be a way to compute these numbers without basically trying out every possible answer.

<comment><USER19> But is the universe even modeled by real numbers or is this solely a concept of the mathematical domain?

Hawking calculated the Bekenstein bound, which proved an upper bound on the amount of information that can be contained within a given volume. As black holes are maximal entropy objects, one can compute the entropy for a certain black hole volume and equate that with Shannon entropy to determine the number of bits. This suggests, to some degree, that the fundamental particle is the bit.

(This also proves that a true Turing machine with unbounded memory is not physically possible.)

<comment><USER18> This whole thing is in the "mathematical domain". The point is that you can define a number in such a way that it clearly exists, but there's no good way to calculate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The analogy drawn between evolution and artificial intelligence is interesting, yet ultimately deficient in at least one key aspect. Yes, the steps performed by a computer are unintelligent, just like mutation and natural selection within evolution. However, unlike the process of life according to evolution, computers are not purposeless or directionless. Computers were designed and imbued with a purpose (computation) by intelligent beings, in contrast to evolution's "blind watchmaker". Yes, unintelligent computers can perform intelligent processes (for a particular definition of intelligence). Yet it remains up to intelligent beings to judge the final output produced by computers: whether such output makes sense, is useful, or is true. Even if eventually a computer designed by another computer (or a lineage of computers) manages to pass the most brutal of Turing tests, you can't get away from the fact that such a computer ultimately owes its direction, purpose, and intelligence to the intelligent beings who put together its oldest ancestor.

For an apt analogy between AI and evolution, a computer would need to exist and compute without any involvement from intelligent beings at any point in its existence. That computer would need to develop its direction and processes in absolute, unintelligent independence. We couldn't develop such a computer ourselves; we'd need to discover it somewhere in the natural world (perhaps lying within a mineral deposit). However, at this point we'd be drawing an analogy between evolution and another form of itself. Circular analogies aren't very useful.

The author writes, "in order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is." This is true, but knowledge of arithmetic (or a higher form of reasoning) is required in order to produce such a machine in the first place. At least that's what we can tell based on the only computers available to us (all of which owe their existence to knowledgeable beings).

</comment><comment><USER21> I believe the comparison the author makes between Turing an Darwin is valid and applies, in general, to any system really.

That is, it's very hard to describe a system, top-down, as the state of the whole thing at a particular point in time, but it's more feasible to approach a description as the rate of change of all the smaller systems contained within.

In other words: it's hard to describe a computer, but it's easier to describe it as a series of computations (Turing machine); it's hard to describe "life", but it's easier to describe it as a series of processes over time (evolution).

It's a way of thinking.

</comment><comment><USER22> With a powerful enough computing system, we could just run an artificial world and hope intelligence evolves within it.

<comment><USER23> Given that you would also be simulating a lot of unintelligent behaviour, how would you discover whether or not the simulation has been successful? I mean how would you find which parts of your system are the intelligent parts?

<comment><USER16> Perhaps you could detect when they start to preform science. Put them one a rock, then a few hundred thousand kilometers away place another rock, this time sterile, and seperate them with a vacuum. If living goop gets to the sterile rock, chances are you would be justified in calling it intelligent.

(Yes, I did just recently watch 2001. Sue me ;p)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As someone who has a keen interest in reading about evolution and artificial intelligence, I'm a bit disappointed they had to bring an anti-God slant to the article.

Other than that, I certainly believe it's possible to generate something "intelligent" (for lack of a better word). I think this will require an improvement in both processing ability -- and more importantly -- an innovative new way to create a mutation algorithm. If we just take bits and let them mutate over time, we may eventually get something like AI but I think it will take more time than we have. We'll need to use our own intelligence to accelerate this process.

<comment><USER24> I don't think its "anti-God" per se. Its just that as science advances there's more and more that we can say about the universe that doesn't _require_ God (or philosophy) to talk about.

Unfortunately the early western judeo-christian line of thinking biased people heavily towards a "God of the gaps" style of thinking. In this line, God is first postulated as an explanation for unexplainable observations and then later falsified. This makes science seem "anit-God" just by its nature, since it always seems to be trying to un-gap the God parts. IMHO this philosophical rabbit trail was one of Christianity's biggest mistakes.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I can agree with that. In fact, I would be surprised that an omnipotent being would be "hiding in a crevice, just waiting to be found" by humans. It seems too much like a story. I prefer the idea of absolute physical laws that were well- _designed_ , and from these laws everything else came about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very interesting. Neat look into how humans are just made up of layers that perform a certain task. The layers themselves don't know the overall structure or results of their actions, but their combination creates the human. The parallel between humans and computers in this regard has been widely noted, but I hadn't made the connection between the evolution of humans that led to a more complex and thinking organism and possibly using this method to foster artificial intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER26> Could someone please explain what this article is trying to convey . I understand that the main thrust is that intelligence or comprehension can emerge / evolve as an end result of simpler interacting processes that are not necessarily intelligent. This is is analogous to how evolution builds complex systems but the "algorithm" for evolution is nt so complex . So are they implying that strong AI is definitely possible ? Or are they saying something beyond that ?

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't this basically a stance that Wolfram argues with his cellular automata as basis?

<comment><USER19> It's interesting you mention that. Gerard 't Hooft came up with a way (a loophole) that the universe could still be entirely deterministic using the cellular automata model. Most physicists disagree with this view, but what makes it interesting is that 't Hooft is a Nobel laureate.

Here's his paper: <http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/67/1/012015/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Darwin's theory was the Theory of Natural Selection, not the theory of evolution. I wish people would get it right.

<comment><USER29> What's the difference?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "In order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is."

I was just thinking yesterday that a similar thing might be true for human beings. We constantly strive for self-knowledge, what we really want, what we really need, but what if a smoothly functioning "self" is dependent on NOT knowing exactly how our minds work?

I'm just going to give up trying to understand myself as a complete waste of time. So far, it feels liberating. YMMV.

<comment><USER30> "Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essential est invisible pour les yeux."

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/06/quick- study-...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/06/quick-study- satoshi-kanazawa-intelligence?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/thedisadvantageofintelligence)

"Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas"

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> _We may now construct a machine to do the work of this computer._

Creation.</comment>


Ask HN: Does HN keep a list of newly launched websites? - <AUTHOR>

I couldn't find such a list on HN or searching Google so I created a prototype today.  It's basic, but something that could be very useful and interesting.  I'd like to grow the list.  If you have a site that has launched recently or will be launching soon then send it to me and I'll put it on the site.   uStew.com <comment><USER2> You know what would be cool?

If you built an automated scraper that would pick up "stealth" sites (i.e. LaunchRock pages) from various tech publications, Twitter, Facebook when the founders send out links to their friends and family.

Your script checks everyday if those sites are still stealth. The day those sites go unstealth, you put them into a browsable pile.

What you get is a fun site where, on any given day, you can browse through the newest of the new products unveiling on the web without having to rely on tech publications to break them.

.

This was an exercise of a theory I'm working on that helps you generate good ideas. I've been thinking of writing a blog post about this. For now, here are the core ingredients used to make this idea good.

.

The emotive elements used:

\- The joy when browsing through Show HN posts.

\- Getting rid of the pain of having to keep current with tech blogs.

\- Eliminates frustration knowing that tech blogs report only on a small number of products.

\- Illicit joy of discovering sites before they are meant to go fully public.

\- Meritocratic feel of evaluating each site directly.

\- No need to divulge personal email.

.

Key UI elements you can use to magnify the joy:

\- Very simple and straightforward keybind that lets you flick through recent "launched" site screenshot. (Using some of the wonderful website screenshot apps here.)

\- Ability to take a look at a detailed chart of all the sites under monitoring / # of days in "stealth" / some metric of hype, popularity. Allow sorting by each of those modes.

.

Launch Plan:

\- Just release the daily viewer and a simple chart of all the monitored sites. Post on HN in a week.

\- Become a new "habit" time waster site for startup founders to browse through everyday.

\- Easy monetization of tech audience traffic.

Let me know how it goes!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input jiggity! Great ideas, especially the UI screenshots. I do wonder how many sites are launching each day. Or for that matter, apps, site relaunches, new features, etc.

It's more fun to code then to dig into that research so we'll see where this takes us first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> uStew.com -

403 Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server. Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

What gives?

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=show+hn](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=show+hn) works for me.</comment>


I'd rather fail at something awesome than succeed at something inconsequential - <AUTHOR> http://instagram.com/p/q8eMdGkWn2/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately killed, while putting his head inside a crocodile's mouth,</comment>


Ask HN: What happened to rational discourse? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious why the reaction to the Apple Developer TOS change is making this community react so strongly.  One of the main reasons I left Reddit for Hacker News was the level of discourse was elevated and the polemics and hysterics in the stories were almost non-existent.  I don't disagree that the Apple dispute with Adobe is big news and calls for discussion.  What concerns me is the freewheeling hysteria that seems to be driving the topic.  As is almost always the case, I suspect this TOS change will either be modified, re-interpreted, or Apple will suffer community backlash.  As for my personal opinion, I would feel a far keener loss by losing the valuable insight and discussion that has so far been present in this community than I would feel over a change in the Apple developer TOS. <comment><USER3> There are often days when things get bad here in one way or another, but I don't worry unless they stay that way.

At least when HN readers get hysterical it's about something (a) related to hacking and (b) really bad.

</comment><comment><USER4> >As is almost always the case, I suspect this TOS change will either be modified, re-interpreted, or Apple will suffer community backlash.

Are you sure the TOS would change, if there was no backlash, like the one you're seeing on HN right now?

Protests usually precede revolutions.

<comment><USER5> Not really: revolutions are usually preceded by protests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The phrase "straw that broke the camel's back" springs to mind. The anger and fear that you're witnessing has been building for years - since the launch of the App Store, maybe even back to the iPod with its proprietary connector and its proprietary software. For many people, their worst fears about the iPad platform have been confirmed by this TOS change. It might seem irrational, but as a loyal Mac user I'm genuinely worried about what little bombs might be in the TOS for OS 10.7.

The most influential and powerful man in technology has a vision that many of us find appalling. He is imposing that vision as we speak and is being very successful in doing so. After years of rational debate, many of us have come to a conclusion about Jobs's intentions for the computer industry - <USER2> conclusion I see as perfectly reasonable and rational. It is no good closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. The developer community needs to air its grievances now, while there is still something to play for.

<comment><USER7> _maybe even back to the iPod with its proprietary connector and its proprietary software._

Geeks have really short memory: Apple has always been evil. In the famous 1989 lawsuit between Apple and Microsoft about whether look and feel could be protected by copyright, all self-respecting geeks rooted for Microsoft, and the _League for Programming Freedom_ was founded basically in response to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In some ways, I think the recent obsession over iphone ToS _is_ a community backlash, though it seems overblown. I am surprised that four developers I know are dropping their iPhones at the end of contract and switching to Android. We must feel strongly about it.

<comment><USER9> Well, a lot of people have staked their livelihoods on iPhone/iPad development. Apple's recent moves have indicated that they're not to be trusted, and that they'll do what's right for _Apple_ whether or not that destroys the livelihood of those that build upon the platform. The rational response to that is to diversify so that one company can't arbitrarily shut you down with a ToS change.

<comment><USER10> What I find most worrying is that I see very little, if any, gain in it for Apple. I'm not really sure why but it just seems like Apple is picking fights with Adobe and Google for no particular reason. It certainly doesn't benefit their customers, it alienates their developer community and has no benefit to Apple other than inflating their ego.

<comment><USER11> My take on it is that Apple is attempting to splinter the developer community, and force you to pick sides - will you develop for the iPhone, or for those other platforms? By killing cross-platform compilers, they're attempting to force developers into a corner, where they have to pick a platform to commit to, and they're banking on their superior marketshare to cause developers to pick the iPhone.

If successful, it would put a significant dent in the viabilty of the Android platform. If Apple can give an "us or them" (or do it twice) ultimatum and get people to pick them (even grudingly), then they've won. The Mac desktop floundered against the PC for years due in no small part to the fact that all the developers were developing for Windows, and didn't really put much thought into cross-compatibility with Macs. Apple is attempting to repeat history, but with themselves on the other end of the equation this time.

It's a risky, ballsy, and brazen gambit, but if they pull it off (after all, the suits who write those developers' paychecks just care about the $ on the balance sheet at the end of the quarter), it could be a decisive turning point against Android. Jobs is obviously doing his best to water down the Android market (they have PORN! UNCLEAN!) and Apple is in full-on assault mode against Android (via HTC at the moment), and there's a very good reason for it - Android is suddenly a very real threat.

According to the February metrics from AdMob, Android has a marketshare equivalent to Apple's in the US. Apple still has a hefty lead worldwide, but Android is growing by leaps and bounds, while the iPhone remains stagnant. That's a very real and very direct threat that Apple is pulling out all the stops to counter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _"... I'm curious why the reaction to the Apple Developer TOS change is making this community react so strongly ..."_

In some ways message boards are to hackers what close knit provincial rural communities are Jane Austen novels. A place of petty intrigue and gallantry.

</comment><comment><USER13> We're toolmakers, so this just hits too close to home. We can't be completely objective about the idea that any platform vendor wants to ban our favorite tools and demand we use something mediocre (so much so that hardly anyone has willingly chosen it for decades). It just makes it worse that this one might have actually amassed enough power to get away with it.

<comment><USER14> I don't disagree on any particular point but I wouldn't call XCode mediocre in comparison to Adobe Flash (which is the most impacted tool in this decision).

Also, I believe, they are at least partly doing this to improve the quality of the App Store ecosystem and do this to avoid the tens of thousands of shite autogenerated apps that litter the app store and this move is more of a cleanup instead of screwing over the few people who prefer a different toolset for development and generally care about the quality of their applications. Baby with the bathwater, so to speak.

<comment><USER13> I have no informed opinion about XCode. I meant being limited to C++ and ObjC, both of which lack all the advances in language design and runtime safety that have been widely adopted since the 1980s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You're right, the reaction to the TOS was something to behold.

I think due to the nature of hacking and hackers, most people here hate being told how to do their job, especially for what feels to them to be spurious or irrational reasons.

I suspect people would have responded better to a more narrow (though perhaps legally more problematic) "no Flash" rule, rather than the legally safer but over-broad "no cross-compiling".

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm trying to create a community for rational discourse - <http://debate- zone.com></comment>


RSS for Twitter Lists - <AUTHOR> http://twiterlist2rss.appspot.com/

<comment><USER2> Tried to make a feed for the @twitter/team list.

[http://twiterlist2rss.appspot.com/twitter/lists/team/statuse...](http://twiterlist2rss.appspot.com/twitter/lists/team/statuses.rss)

got a python traceback.

<comment><USER3> Likewise.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am getting lots of 400's for every 200 I suggest using with google reader should gloss over the failures till I van figure out what's wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very cool, as this was one of my biggest gripes about lists. I do hope that RSS for lists becomes a feature on twitter.com but this should work for now. Thanks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know the name is mis-spelled it was late at night when I registered the name.</comment>


North Korean Concentration Camp - Google Headquarters - <AUTHOR> https://maps.google.com/maps?q=north+korean+concentration+camp&hl=en&sll=37.423548,-122.170372&sspn=0.041035,0.077162&t=h&hq=north+korean+concentration+camp&z=13

<comment><USER2> As we know by now, map search is a) local and b) personal. So if you want to share map search results, try sharing it like this:

[http://maps.google.com?q=north+korean+concentration+camp](http://maps.google.com?q=north+korean+concentration+camp)

Nothing to see here...

<comment><USER3> I can't seem to find a way to share the local/personalized results I get with others via link. Is it even possible/reasonable? Would appreciate any advice, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing to see here. It simply returns what's the most relevant in specific area (in this case word "North" matches).

</comment><comment><USER5> Odd, although not unique. "Terrorist training camp" centres me near-ish to Mountain View as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a "if null" that defaults to the Googleplex. I guess these searches are getting filtered in some way and the default is kicking in.</comment>


PlotNeuralNet: Latex Code for Drawing Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/HarisIqbal88/PlotNeuralNet <comment><USER2> This is fantastic. One the most difficult tasks writing a deep learning paper is actually drawing the complex architecture of multilayer nets. I would consider this a major contribution to field !

To add emphasis, anyone who ever used latex knows that it is a pain at the ass.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if tikz/LaTeX is the best output format for this. When I'm making figures it has been fastest for me to have code that generates 90% the right thing, then tweak as necessary in Illustrator/Inkscape to get different parts to line up, combine subfigures, etc.

If I did anything with neural nets, I might take the time to bolt on an option for output to SVG. EPS or some other vector format would be great as well, but I am not that much of a wizard.

For more discussion on reproducibility and hardcoding figures, see for example: [http://rajlaboratory.blogspot.com/2016/02/from- reproducibili...](http://rajlaboratory.blogspot.com/2016/02/from- reproducibility-to-over.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is more of a python generator for latex code that illustrates a neural network, not an package for drawing NN's with latex.

<comment> pure-awesome Yes, I was slightly disappointed to discover this fact.

From the title, I thought it would be something I'd be able to run semi- automatically on a neural net (presumably defined in a standard / widely-used format like a Tensorflow net) and have it spit out a nice diagram.

Don't get me wrong, this still seems super-useful. It's just not what I expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be really awesome if someone could package this into a Latex package. Then you could directly define your neural net inside of Latex instead of having to generate the Tex from python.

Otherwise, these graphics are wonderful to look at.

</comment><comment><USER6> WOW! That's the kind of tool I needed. Working on simple NN now and then is hard to show to decision makers what processes were applied. Having a visual latex like that, makes life easier.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this looks very good. More examples (with the generating python code) would be nice.

Are there good alternatives?

From what I know tikz, PowerPoint (or Keynote), or Inkscape are popular options. But they require manual work.

<comment><USER8> Under the hood this is generating tikz. I imagine with more TeX/LaTeX skills than I have, someone could embed much of this directly within LaTeX to hide tikz manual (and tedious) work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was JUST searching for something like this! This is great!

</comment><comment><USER10> It's nice that they have a python interface. I know everyone has a fetish for TeX/LaTeX, but isn't it time for something better? Don't get me wrong, TeX has probably the best document rendering of anything I've ever come across, but the language itself is quite terrible. I get the impression that no one even knows how to use it anymore, and everyone is just copying and pasting code handed down from generations of professors and students.

I understand the limitations and design decisions made at the time, but I think it's time for something new. Maybe just using TeX as a backend language would be acceptable, though I think it would just be preferable to start anew. I know there's Scribble but I don't think it handles equations.

<comment><USER11> LaTeX3[1][2] improves matters and LuaTeX[3] is getting more traction, so more and more parts get written in Lua and more stuff gets deprecated. What I don't really get why LuaTeX project is not very open and their source repository is not anonymously accessible. Would be so much better if they migrate ot GitHub or GitLab.

[1] [https://github.com/latex3/latex3](https://github.com/latex3/latex3)

[2] [https://www.latex- project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pd...](https://www.latex- project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pdf)

[3] [http://www.luatex.org/](http://www.luatex.org/)

<comment><USER12> BTW the LuaTeX source isn't really hidden; there's an unofficial GitHub mirror at [https://github.com/TeX-Live/luatex](https://github.com/TeX-Live/luatex) (or look at [https://github.com/TeX-Live/texlive- source/tree/trunk/texk/w...](https://github.com/TeX-Live/texlive- source/tree/trunk/texk/web2c/luatexdir) specifically) and for their official SVN repository at [https://serveur- svn.lri.fr/svn/modhel/luatex](https://serveur-svn.lri.fr/svn/modhel/luatex) the username/password (anonsvn/anonsvn) are listed in a few places (e.g. here: [http://www.luatex.org/development.html](http://www.luatex.org/development.html) and in their mailing list announcements).</comment></comment></comment>


Fonts don't matter - <AUTHOR> https://axesslab.com/fonts-dont-matter/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for the link. The article offers some really useful advices.</comment>