Please accept my critique to Smithsonian Mag made in good faith: never use the word 'mysterious' [a nod to the magical thinking] in a science context. Really looks like CNN-ish dark pattern. The URL slug has a better word choice:
mysterious: adj. difficult or impossible to understand, explain, or identify.
While magic requires mystery, mystery does not require magic and they are not synonyms. It is perfectly valid to state something is a scientific mystery without implying magic is involved in some way.
Would you be able to explain the mystery = magic thinking connection? I've not heard it before. I've obviously heard magic being described as mysterious, but not that mysterious stuff implies magic.
I don't see the connection between mysterious and magical thinking. It just means it is a mystery and I don't see anything that implies magic about a mystery.
>>The root for ta’rif is ‘arafa, which means "to know". (from TFA)
It's interesting that in the Portuguese world [like Brazil] there is still a document in logistics called "Conhecimento" == "Knowledge".
It is also a brutal historical irony that the arguably main tenet of capitalism, "Laissez faire, laissez passer", has been destroyed from the inside [Trump].
I am reminded of Lenin's dictum: ‘The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.’ -And wonder if it applies to populist leaders as well as the soviets.
I think about Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg quite a lot in this context. They hitched their wagon to the Trump train, and now they are hoist on their own petard.
>>I've been living in Brazil for the last 20 years.
Lucky you. I've been living here since i was born. :(
Pix is surreal. It was launched in the Bolsonaro (mal)administration, designed by the proverbially incompetent public work force, and is as Orwellian as can be. Its code is nowhere to be found.
The funniest thing is that is has been adopted feverishly by the rabid right wing crazies, the same lot who want to destroy everything 'government'.
I take pleasure in listing three of the problems:
1. Lack of Transparency
2. Potential for Abuse
A government-controlled payment system centrally-controlled, with no auditability? Oh please give me more (/s)
But i have said nothing about Bolsonaro's lack of awareness -- his monumental ignorance is a known fact, mind you, and that is not the core of my argument.
Correcting the blatant misinformation about the topic:
- PIX project started in 2016, public launch in 2020
- It was not "launched" by any President; the Brazilian Central Bank is an independent authority, with it own mandate, not a branch of the executive power
- PIX was co-developed with institutions of the financial sector
- It's a protocol that participants must implement, not an app. The specification is even on GitHub. I don't know what you mean by "its code is nowhere to be found".
- The Brazilian Central Bank is acknowledged as a benchmark, rather than "proverbially incompetent public work force"
Your arguments are pretty lame. Pix was indeed launched in the Bolsonaro administration, but it is incidental. You are flailing around the bulk of my argument, which is about the source code openness, without actually attacking it.
It might as well be illegal today.
Art. 16 da Lei nº 14.063, de 23/09/2021: estabelece que os sistemas de informação e de comunicação desenvolvidos exclusivamente pela administração pública são regidos por licença de código aberto, permitida a sua utilização, cópia, alteração e distribuição sem restrições por todos os órgãos e entidades públicos.[0]
Art. 16 of Law No. 14,063, of 09/23/2021: establishes that information and communication systems developed exclusively by the public administration are governed by an open source license, allowing their use, copying, alteration and distribution without restrictions by all public bodies and entities.[0]
This project is fantastic, but you also deserve congrats for the 'Lens Maker'[0].
"If we have a compound optical system made of a series of lenses, mirrors, etc., we can treat each optical element as the layer of a neural network." Kudos.
>>It seems like quite a paradox to build something but to not know how it actually works and yet it works. This doesn't seem to happen very often in classical programming, does it?
Well, it is meant to be "unknowable" -- and all the people involved are certainly aware of that -- since it is known that one is dealing with the *emergent behavior* computing 'paradigm', where complex behaviors arise from simple interactions among components [data], often in nonlinear or unpredictable ways. In these systems, the behavior of the whole system cannot always be predicted from the behavior of individual parts, as opposed to the Traditional Approach, based on well-defined algorithms and deterministic steps.
I think the Anthropic piece is illustrating it for the sake of the general discussion.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my feeling is this all started with the GPUs and the fact that unlike on a CPU, you can't really step by step debug the process by which a pixel acquires its final value (and there are millions of them). The best you can do is reason about it and tweak some colors in the shader to see how the changes reflect on screen. It's still quite manageable though, since the steps involved are usually not that overwhelmingly many or complex.
But I guess it all went downhill from there with the advent of AI since the magnitude of data and the steps involved there make traditional/step by step debugging impractical. Yet somehow people still seem to 'wing it' until it works.
"As for c, that is the speed of light in vacuum, and if you ask why c, the answer is that it is the initial letter of celeritas, the Latin word meaning speed."
7000-year-old-skeletons-from-the-green-sahara-reveal-a-previously-unknown-human-lineage-
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