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isolli commented on I miss thinking hard   jernesto.com/articles/thi... · Posted by u/jernestomg
gyomu · 5 days ago
This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me:

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080

"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."

isolli · 5 days ago
This is very insightful, thanks. I had a similar thought regarding data science in particular. Writing those pandas expressions by hand during exploration means you get to know the data intimately. Getting AI to write them for you limits you to a superficial knowledge of said data (at least in my case).
isolli commented on Golden Ratio using an equilateral triangle inscribed in a circle   geometrycode.com/free/how... · Posted by u/peter_d_sherman
AceJohnny2 · 12 days ago
Edit: years of searches and minutes after I post this I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaasbfdJdJg thanks to using "continued fraction" in my search instead of "infinite series" X(

Original: Tangentially, for a few years I've been looking for a Youtube video, I think by Mathologer [1], that explained (geometrically?) how the Golden Ratio was the limit of the continued fraction 1+1/(1+1/(1+1/(...))).

Anyone know what I'm talking about?

I know Mathologer had a conflict with his editor at one point that may have sown chaos on his channel.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Mathologer

isolli · 12 days ago
Complete tangent, but, for me, this is where AI shines. I've been able to find things I had been looking for for years. AI is good at understanding something "continued fraction" instead of "infinite series", especially if you provide a bit of context.
isolli commented on The hidden engineering of runways   practical.engineering/blo... · Posted by u/crescit_eundo
isolli · 13 days ago
Every time I fly, I marvel at how much engineering and know-how went into making the airport that I'm using. From the oddly shaped trucks with various functions, to mundane elements (elevators, escalators, ...) to advanced technology (radio communication, radars...) to the sheer organizational feat (thousands of people coming in every day to execute their carefully planned tasks). This text will give me one more thing to think about :)
isolli commented on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant   media.mit.edu/publication... · Posted by u/misswaterfairy
carterschonwald · 18 days ago
idk, if anything I’m thinking more. The idea that I might be able to build everything I’ve ever planned out. At least the way I’m using them, it’s like the perfect assistive device for my flavor of ADHD — I get an interactive notebook I can talk through crazy stuff with. No panacea for sure, but I’m so much higher functioning it’s surreal. I’m not even using em in the volume many folks claim, more like pair programming with a somewhat mentally ill junior colleague. Much faster than I’d otherwise be.

this actually does include a crazy amount of long form latex expositions on a bunch of projects im having a blast iterating on. i must be experiencing what its almost like not having adhd

isolli · 18 days ago
Indeed, I feel like AI makes it less lonely to work, and for me, it's a net positive. It still has downsides for my focus, but that can be improved...
isolli commented on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant   media.mit.edu/publication... · Posted by u/misswaterfairy
mcv · 18 days ago
This seems to confirm my feeling when using AI too much. It's easy to get started, but I can feel my brain engaging less with the problem than I'm used to. It can form a barrier to real understanding, and keeps me out of my flow.

I recently worked on something very complex I don't think I would have been able to tackle as quickly without AI; a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using Brandes-Köpf for node positioning. I had no prior experience with it (and I went in clearly underestimating how complex it was), and AI was a tremendous help in getting a basic understanding of the algorithm, its many steps and sub-algorithms, the subtle interactions and unspoken assumptions in it. But letting it write the actual code was a mistake. That's what kept me from understanding the intricacies, from truly engaging with the problem, which led me to keep relying on the AI to fix issues, but at that point the AI clearly also had no real idea what it was doing, and just made things worse.

So instead of letting the AI see the real code, I switched from the Copilot IDE plugin to the standalone Copilot 365 app, where it could explain the principles behind every step, and I would debug and fix the code and develop actual understanding of what was going on. And I finally got back into that coding flow again.

So don't let the AI take over your actual job, but use it as an interactive encyclopedia. That works much better for this kind of complex problem.

isolli · 18 days ago
This mirrors my experience exactly. We have to learn how to tame the beast.
isolli commented on SETI@home is in hiberation   setiathome.berkeley.edu/... · Posted by u/keepamovin
MontyCarloHall · 19 days ago
>Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further.

That's not true. Non-directional radio transmissions (e.g. TV, broadcast radio) would not be distinguishable from cosmic background radiation at more than a light year or two away [0]. Highly directional radio emissions (e.g. Arecibo message) an order of magnitude more powerful than the strongest transmitters on Earth would only be visible at approximately 1000 light years away [1], and would only be perceptible if the detector were perfectly aligned with the transmission at the exact time it arrived.

[0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/245562

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0610377.pdf

isolli · 19 days ago
Thanks, these rules of thumb are very useful.

When you say perfectly aligned, what kind of precision are we talking about? If we aimed a receiver at a nearby star, would we be able to achieve this kind of precision?

isolli commented on String theory can now describe a universe that has dark energy?   quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/nsoonhui
kakacik · 20 days ago
If you want to bash badly-spent potential look at people doing cutting edge ad research and optimization, or HFT. This is at least good base research that others can build on.
isolli · 20 days ago
Fair point, but waste in one domain should not be used to excuse waste elsewhere. Unless your argument is that it's generally hard for human societies to know where to best invest their scientific talent without the benefit of hindsight.
isolli commented on String theory can now describe a universe that has dark energy?   quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/nsoonhui
isolli · 20 days ago
I don't know who wrote the title for this submission, but adding a question mark that is not in the linked article seems like a terrible editorial decision.
isolli commented on String theory can now describe a universe that has dark energy?   quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/nsoonhui
boxed · 20 days ago
It has produced some good math though. That's something.
isolli · 20 days ago
At what opportunity cost?
isolli commented on String theory can now describe a universe that has dark energy?   quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/nsoonhui
isolli · 20 days ago
Hm, string theory can describe a lot of things, but it's not testable with current technology. I'm pretty sure that other mathematical constructs exist that could also describe a similar set of properties, but we just happened to stumble upon string theory first, and got enamored with some of the nice properties it had initially.

u/isolli

KarmaCake day3265July 1, 2016View Original