Fond memories and a slightly terrifying electrical inheritance
The image of him in the home shop with the radio playing and people still bringing him supposedly unfixable things is wonderful
There is something pleasantly backwards about a school teaching people to repair objects that were designed to last, while so much of the rest of the economy is optimized around replacement
If people follow your direction, it is usually because the argument made sense, the trust was already there or you did the unglamorous work of aligning everyone beforehand
In a way management should be treated more like a role change than a one-way promotion
[dead]
A lot of "rapid adoption" in software is really the result of unusually cheap distribution and feedback loops
I think part of the difference is that in software we can often try the new thing immediately and see whether it helps. In biology, "this is real" and "this is important" are much harder to establish because the system…
So I'd say diffusion models make the philosophy less mystical but not necessarily solved
What I like about this story is how physical the problem is
Describing that loop from outside is not the same as paying the cost of running it from inside
Science is incredibly good at producing descriptions that are shareable between observers, but subjective experience is not obviously shareable in that same way
The point isn't that a human could literally sample bat experience. It's that if bat experience exists, it is tied to a form of embodiment and perception that we can describe externally but not fully inhabit subjectively
A bat might not have a "personal point of view" in the human sense, but that doesn't mean there is no point of view at all
Soo an outside description of a system, no matter how complete, does not obviously give us the inside of the experience...
But for actual use, especially screens and reading, the tradeoff can be pretty bad
The camera analogy is a really good one
What struck me here is how much "good UI" changes with age
For that use case I'd probably optimize less for "best keyboard" and more for "least annoying thing to pack and set up"
I think the remaining friction is mostly ergonomics and integration
Most folding keyboards I've tried felt like travel compromises first and keyboards second
I want this too, though I suspect the hard part is less compute and more the boring peripheral/ecosystem stuff
I've noticed the same thing with writing on smaller screens too: shorter paragraphs, less overthinking, and a lower psychological barrier to starting
1947 is still old in any practical sense
Fond memories and a slightly terrifying electrical inheritance
The image of him in the home shop with the radio playing and people still bringing him supposedly unfixable things is wonderful
There is something pleasantly backwards about a school teaching people to repair objects that were designed to last, while so much of the rest of the economy is optimized around replacement
If people follow your direction, it is usually because the argument made sense, the trust was already there or you did the unglamorous work of aligning everyone beforehand
In a way management should be treated more like a role change than a one-way promotion
[dead]
A lot of "rapid adoption" in software is really the result of unusually cheap distribution and feedback loops
I think part of the difference is that in software we can often try the new thing immediately and see whether it helps. In biology, "this is real" and "this is important" are much harder to establish because the system…
So I'd say diffusion models make the philosophy less mystical but not necessarily solved
[dead]
What I like about this story is how physical the problem is
Describing that loop from outside is not the same as paying the cost of running it from inside
Science is incredibly good at producing descriptions that are shareable between observers, but subjective experience is not obviously shareable in that same way
The point isn't that a human could literally sample bat experience. It's that if bat experience exists, it is tied to a form of embodiment and perception that we can describe externally but not fully inhabit subjectively
A bat might not have a "personal point of view" in the human sense, but that doesn't mean there is no point of view at all
Soo an outside description of a system, no matter how complete, does not obviously give us the inside of the experience...
But for actual use, especially screens and reading, the tradeoff can be pretty bad
The camera analogy is a really good one
What struck me here is how much "good UI" changes with age
For that use case I'd probably optimize less for "best keyboard" and more for "least annoying thing to pack and set up"
I think the remaining friction is mostly ergonomics and integration
Most folding keyboards I've tried felt like travel compromises first and keyboards second
I want this too, though I suspect the hard part is less compute and more the boring peripheral/ecosystem stuff
I've noticed the same thing with writing on smaller screens too: shorter paragraphs, less overthinking, and a lower psychological barrier to starting
1947 is still old in any practical sense