Not a similar comparison in that one project was to produce a plan to extend the limits and goals of mathematics in general while in the process of answering "Is it true, circle yes or no". The other project circled "yes" but the output is not ... progress toward goals oriented.
Its like using AI to do your homework in the middle of a class. Yes, in the short term, that solves the problem of completing your homework. But it creates an entirely new problem of if you never did the homework how do you intend to pass the rest of the class or the remainder of college curriculum? A lot of cheaters ... don't.
A project has a long term path for permanent progress across an entire field. An oracle answers a question, sometimes cryptically, then progress in the field permanently ceases.
The value of a research project to determine if a Turing Machine halts with a T or a F on the tape is, to some extent, did it get a T or an F on the tape, but much more so the value is the tendrils of the rest of the field of mathematics pushing into the project at the start and then pushing out to enrich the rest of the field of mathematics at the end.
On the other hand if you have a project to run that Turing machine and see if it ever halts with a T or F as the proof, the result is completely sterile and WRT advancement of the rest of the field the actual result is kinda irrelevant. No postdoc is going to take the skills learned and move on to a position somewhere else and apply those new skills toward advancing something else in the field or describing a new goal or new way to look at the world. We'll get a popular science article about "oh it turns out the answer is indeed 'T'" and thats it. Sterile.
Personally I always thought the theorem proving turing machine would indeed terminate with a "T" and indeed it did. That's nice, and I bet the result settled a lot of bar bets. Aside from that, it will have minimal impact on progress in the field compared to the human project that's actually advancing the field.
Possibly people will be able to parse the 13 million lines of whatever into useful progress elsewhere in the field, possibly not. It'll be hard to get funding for it. OTOH its early days. Might end up useful in the end.
One person complaining on Wired about "... says she ... had seen too many colleagues decline to speak up during internal meetings out of fear of retaliation for raising issues or proposing far-out ideas." that is evidence of at least one anecdotal individual personal issue. HOWEVER, the vote being "overwhelming" would seem to indicate they have a severe company culture problem not just one anecdotal issue, its not like she was the only one voting for the union LOL. I've worked at companies with and without unions and the ones that had a union, severely needed the union due to incredibly toxic workplace culture combined with a total lack of management accountability for their responsibility/behavior. Generally people won't bother keeping a union going unless they badly need it, given the enormous resources stacked up against them against forming and operating a union... It has to be a pretty awful workplace if forming a union against all that opposition is somehow still the better path... The quality of management has certainly not improved over generations or decades, so an era of declining union membership is probably not an indication of there being too many unions LOL.
Your specific question is for resources to improve, but there's no royal road to soldering, or geometry, or going to the gym.
The fastest way to make progress is to practice, there is no pill or wiki or video that makes progress faster; if anything those make progress slower.
Soldering is exactly like the gym where attempting to avoid time and sweat invariably results in slower progress than just doing it. Especially if someone is selling something to make it easier, it won't work.
If you've already started as per the post you've likely exceeded the skill level covered by "how to solder electronics.pdf" by the Heathkit company or similar intro level stuff.
The only specific technique I can think of is debugging your own boards. Debugging time is very motivational for avoiding mistakes. You'll find it harder to learn to solder if you repair stuff, easy if you build a kit or two of similar complexity to what you're trying to repair. You'll learn anyway as long as you put in the time and sweat it'll just be more emotionally motivating if you're repairing your own work than repairing someone elses.
Dollywood can hold more people than a football stadium. Probably will.
Its a nice theme park. She bought it because she thought it would be cool to have a really awesome theme park in TN. She was both correct and successful. It's pretty cool.
See also Britney Spears, who's mom ran a small daycare. Taylor Swift's an in between story, middle class financial services parents, hard to say if they were paycheck to paycheck or not...
Its not necessarily the best thing that big companies have a business model of taking advantage of poor, or relatively poorer, people, particularly attractive young women. See our global Epstein class and global Weinstein class.
Calling Swift middle class and that they were possibly paycheck to paycheck is laughable.
Her father had a huge role to play in her success with his business deals and would largely be considered upper middle class if not higher. If anything, Taylor’s story reinforces the idea that families with wealth offer easier paths in life for their children.
I'm from Pennsylvania and a proverbial stone's throw from where Taylor Swift is also from. Trust me when I tell you that there's nothing "middle class" about her. Her parents are wealthy and this gave her a big boost into the entertainment industry, with lots of expensive coaching, music lessons, and trips to Nashville.
IIRC he worked for a large financial services company (Merrill Lynch?) and was able to transfer to the Nashville office so that Taylor could be closer to the music scene.
No offense, but "the idea that families with wealth offer easier paths in life for their children" - like isn't this obviously the case?
The amazing thing about America is that there are paths for those not as wealthy, but of course they are harder, as much as we might not want them to be... no?
The thread is about Taylor Swift, arguably the most successful music entertainer of all time. The parents with upper|middle class gave a boost, but you absolutely cannot buy this level of stardom and hasn't been replicated anywhere that I know of.
America is 100% the place to be rich or poor, if this really is your goal, from Dolly to Jackson or Swift.
Nobody is claiming this or ever should. The claim is that there is real proof of "success" from dirt poor to middle|upper class with these music entertainer examples. Nothing ever will be equal chance, and that shouldn't really be the goal [depending on how it's defined and implemented].
> Its not necessarily the best thing that big companies have a business model of taking advantage of poor, or relatively poorer, people, particularly attractive young women. See our global Epstein class and global Weinstein class.
I agree. But are those kinds of abuse a requirement of a system that raises the voices of poorer people, or is it that we have permitted them?
I don't know if Taylor Swift endured similar hardship in her rise, but if she didn't as other replies have suggested, she's an example of how the system should treat those who are less privileged than she was.
No, and this policy goes back to publication in for-profit newspapers. Not an issue in the USA in general.
With a disclaimer that there's one zillion governmental entities on the planet overall, so its plausible that one requires no fee and no signup required.
"management" is the key word. Early diagnosis might help a lot not just with T1 but also T2.
Early diagnosis would save a lot of pain and suffering... and money.
I worked with an older T1 and apparently a bit less than half of kids diagnosed with T1 are diagnosed unconscious during a DKA event in the ER. "Treatment" cost, or at least requested revenue LOL, is at least $30K for an ER visit like that, and it also costs at least some months (years?) off their expected lifespan.
Figure about 0.5% of the population in the USA is T1, you read stuff like "about two million T1 diabetics" in the USA. So early T1 diagnosis would save the country overall about $30B just in DKA treatment alone at time of initial diagnosis.
If you could screen an entire population for less than $30B total lifetime cost, it would be financially rational to prescreen for T1 rather than waiting for ambulances to present incredibly sick kids. And potentially profitable.
Prescreening the entire population for metabolic disorders is quite plausible as a "tech startup idea" as the alternative is waiting for them to arrive in an ambulance while extremely sick/nearly dead. Lets say it could be done for $10B, leaving $10B for startup profit (charge insurance companies $20B which is not bad....) and $10B in lowered health care costs for the country in general, not to mention less suffering in the population. A win-win scenario.
IF blood sugar related disorders could be pre-screened for less than $10B total cost. A solid "maybe"? Plausibly a startup doing blood sugar prescreening would be a "multibillion dollar company" although not a trillion dollar unicorn. Still a good idea.
Its an exciting time to be alive because as of recently we certainly can detect planetary atmosphere major components out to at least 700 or so light years.
There are astronomers actively working on minor component, more biologically interesting spectrographs like chlorophyll rather than spectrograms of carbon dioxide. That'll be harder to detect and limited to shorter ranges.
At some point, probably very soon, like less than a decade, we'll be able to definitively state that we have atmospheric data in an onion layer shaped shell where we have unequivocable proof that out to X lightyears from Earth there's no planetary scale chlorophyll higher than a minimal level aka there's no earth-like plants on that planet. That shell will likely expand over time. Or, perhaps we will find a forested, or at least algae covered, planet, some light years away, which would be very interesting indeed.
The question is rapidly changing from a purely philosophical belief to scientific observation, like right now, in real time, in the 2020s. What a cool time to be alive!
This follows old, old stuff from radio astronomy along the lines of how far away could a 1960s radio telescope realistically detect life on earth. The answer IIRC was not very far LOL. But there's been a lot of progress in radio astronomy, etc.
With respect to fermi filters etc people need to pay attention to how far away the Earth can be detected using radio telescopes. That distance has imploded since the end of analog UHF TV broadcasts. We still broadcast absolute swill, in fact more than ever, but digital detection range is much lower than analog AM carrier detection range from analog TV. The Earth has, to some extent, recently gone radio-quiet, which is interesting because we are still here, in fact more of us than ever. So WRT fermi filters of not being able to detect civilizations, disappearance of 1950s/1960s signals does not necessarily imply disappearance of civilization. Another example, if any aliens are watching the high altitude freon contamination of our atmosphere they're likely really confused right about now.
"proto-cells that grew on these vents and needed those metallic surfaces to survive didn’t count as “life”"
What makes that argument extremely weak is analogies with contemporary obviously living animals.
For example, humans are not alive, because we get 100% of our vitamin D ascorbic acid by scavenging from the environment, along with a handful of other animals that presumably evolved in an extremely vitamin C rich environment. If any animal, including humans, ever evolve a new ability to internally synthesize vitamin C from glucose like every other animal, then given that there were non-synthesizer animals in their ancestry who we arbitrarily define as not-alive aka dead, then we could say that life evolved twice.
Note that humans could be defined as dead because we can't synthesize our own oxygen and have to scavenge 100% of it from the environment using lungs and so forth.
If you pencil whip the English language hard enough, anything with lungs or stomachs is not alive. A similar line of argument would lead to all saprophytes not being alive, which is pretty ridiculous. Wood eating mushrooms are not alive because they rely on the environment to provide all their wood dietary needs. Yeah OK whatever.
I read the author's entire post and find it interesting that the author attributes success to having a good story to tell based upon some wild youth experiences while sailing. Not being able to type real fast, not some magic sauce from a "how to be an author class" but being able to spin a good yarn, one good enough for other people to pay to hear it.
There was/is a business position as a middleman of sitting between a storyteller and the printing press, called authoring or writing and that's slowly been denigrated for over a century by mechanical typewriters, word processors, spelling checkers, grammar checkers, now LLMs.
However there's always been a shortage of good story tellers with a story to tell, and for at least a century or two been a MASSIVE oversupply of the middlemen mentioned above, who end up failing. They can type, and they insist thats all they need, and the ability to spin a good yarn is just fluff or unimportant. Then they fail, so they're probably incorrect.
I suspect as long as the author can spin a heck of a good yarn based on his personal sailing experiences mixed in with whatever else, the author will have gainful employment in the book biz. As a storyteller. Not as "a guy who types really fast" or "a word processor technician" or whatever.
The middleman author who used to have a job writing generic romance novel #7994126 and was hoping to make money off writing #7994127 is probably utterly doomed. Why does the publisher need him if we have LLMs, or even better, why do we need publishers if we have LLMs and can enter a short simple plot just as well. "Claude generate me a 75K word romance novel similar to 'Just for the Summer' from last year but write all my favorite past characters into it. Especially character Anne she's my favorite."
But lets be realistic, those middlemen were already doomed anyway. Very few people in the book biz can spin a good yarn and that shows up in the stats of "failed writers". LLMs just mean they'll generate more scrap paper along the way to failure. But about the same percentage will sell books and about the same percentage will fail unless AI itself causes a substantial difference in readers tastes (honestly, I think not...)
Compare it to programming, about which we supposedly have more experience. LLMs generate more code that no one is responsible for nor understands fully. But does it make more or less successful startups? Nah, not really. Doesn't seem to have much effect on "idea people" at all. The people whom always generate bad ideas crash the plane with no survivors a little quicker, the people whom always generate good ideas make money a little quicker, most people in the middle are unaffected beyond change for the sake of change, which is always expensive.
Its like using AI to do your homework in the middle of a class. Yes, in the short term, that solves the problem of completing your homework. But it creates an entirely new problem of if you never did the homework how do you intend to pass the rest of the class or the remainder of college curriculum? A lot of cheaters ... don't.
A project has a long term path for permanent progress across an entire field. An oracle answers a question, sometimes cryptically, then progress in the field permanently ceases.
The value of a research project to determine if a Turing Machine halts with a T or a F on the tape is, to some extent, did it get a T or an F on the tape, but much more so the value is the tendrils of the rest of the field of mathematics pushing into the project at the start and then pushing out to enrich the rest of the field of mathematics at the end.
On the other hand if you have a project to run that Turing machine and see if it ever halts with a T or F as the proof, the result is completely sterile and WRT advancement of the rest of the field the actual result is kinda irrelevant. No postdoc is going to take the skills learned and move on to a position somewhere else and apply those new skills toward advancing something else in the field or describing a new goal or new way to look at the world. We'll get a popular science article about "oh it turns out the answer is indeed 'T'" and thats it. Sterile.
Personally I always thought the theorem proving turing machine would indeed terminate with a "T" and indeed it did. That's nice, and I bet the result settled a lot of bar bets. Aside from that, it will have minimal impact on progress in the field compared to the human project that's actually advancing the field.
Possibly people will be able to parse the 13 million lines of whatever into useful progress elsewhere in the field, possibly not. It'll be hard to get funding for it. OTOH its early days. Might end up useful in the end.
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