Lots of engineers are lapsed physicists who have hobbyist interest in this stuff.
Also lots of HN readers are actual physicists or mathematicians. It's not all techies.
Also, lots of engineers have at some point learned some computer graphics and so been exposed to quaternions in that setting. Since they're mysterious and hard to wrap your head around most people don't really 'get it', leaving a sort of standing curiosity that articles like this tap into.
The list of literary devices on Wikipedia is a tiny subset of the list of literary devices in reality. Although in this case it is a well-documented one: it's just a rhetorical question.
anyway it is just a writing style. if you don't like it, fine. If you can't parse it, well, now you can.
That's the sorta standard socially accepted way of thinking about this. but uh... to a lot of people it doesn't ring quite true.
For example: if your life objectively sucks, why aren't you doing anything about it? Some people whose lives suck fix their lives, and other people get depressed and do nothing; what's the difference? And: all of us know somebody who appears to have a good life and therefore their depression is presumably a chemical imbalance thing but if you're being honest the vibes in their life are a bit off, actually, like you can tell they're not really getting everything they need out of it, that they're clearly good at masking (for example people who are clearly not thriving in their relationships) .... in which case sure medication could help but you can't shake the feeling that facing the reality of their life would help a lot more.
However! Questioning this stuff becomes a bit of a moral minefield. "Believing" in the chemical imbalance theory is part of why it's medically helpful. If your life has sucked for years and you could find no way of fixing it and then SSRIs helped, then you basically need to believe that it really was a chemical imbalance, because believing that it might not be threatens to take away the thing that's making your life work. So much so that I would bet at this point there are already readers of this comment who are ready to angrily reply to my preceding paragraphs, because the model I just described threatens their existence. (If so, wait a sec and read the rest...)
On the flip side, for some people not believing in the chemical imbalance model for some particular case might be important. Maybe they want to feel responsible for their life being bad, so they will be motivated to do something about it, and being happy due to drugs would make them feel complacent and okay with years passing by at a shitty job or something. Or picture someone whose parent has gone their whole life unable to take them seriously as an adult, which as a result means the child and parent have a bad relationship, and then picture the parent complaining about depression and taking medication for it. This can be really infuriating: the child thinks about the parent, "your life sucks because of the tension created by not treating people around you with respect, and you're so incapable of recognizing this even when it's told to your face regularly that you're taking drugs to feel better despite not fixing the problem". Now ascribing depression to medical problems seems like avoidance, and having people write off your frustrations and say that you're just depressed and need to take a drug for it is frustrating.
Just saying: the two narratives really get tangled up. I don't really know what to do about it, but I do think that some harm is done by harping on the concept of a "chemical imbalance". A lot of the issue is avoided if you just think of the drugs as helpful but don't choose any model (with its moral implications) for what exactly it is they're helping with. Just treat them as a tool for making you feel better.
Also, I suspect that people who have an intuitive aversion to mental health drugs are probably way overindexing on that intuition. I definitely did this for a long time, as did some friends I knew growing up. Turns out whatever your issues you can sometimes just deal with them sooner than later if you accept that doctors might be onto something. (Actually I think the reason people get stuck avoiding medication for so long is precisely that they feel like they're not allowed to be skeptical of them... which makes them kinda plant their feet in the ground and refuse to be open to it. That's kinda why I'm typing this long comment, to tell anyone reading that it is a reasonable thing to feel. And now that you know that maybe try them anyway..?)
if you make a thing and the thing is going to be inevitably used for a purpose and you could do something about that use and you do not --- then yes, it exists for that purpose, and you are responsible for it being used in that way. you don't get to say "ah well who could have seen this inevitable thing happening? it's a shame nobody could do anything about it" when it was you that could have done something about it.
Yeah. Example: stripper poles. Or hitachi magic wands.
Those poles WERE NOT invented for strippers/pole dancers. Ditto for the hitachis. Even now, I'm pretty sure more firemen use the poles than strippers. But that doesn't stop the association from forming. That doesn't make me not feel a certain way if I see a stripper pole or a hitachi magic wand in your living room.
In this case we're debating whether one of the purposes of AI is to scan the elderly. Probably 'purpose' is not quite the right word, but the point would be: it is not the purpose of AI to not scam the elderly (or it would explicitly prevent that).
(note: I do not actually know if it explicitly prevents that. But because I am very cynical about corporations, I'd tend to assume it doesn't.)
this doesn't really matter, but, normal english would be either "Why are people all (of) the sudden writing browsers with AI?" or (slightly less normal) "Why all (of) the sudden are people writing browsers with AI?", with the (of) being more 'correct' but often omitted. Regardless, it should be "are people" instead of "people are" in a question.
This is pretty much entirely false. Maybe you don't actually know or talk to any progressives? Or the ones you're around are very bizarre. Or maybe you're extrapolating from impressions you've gotten on Twitter?
I do talk to progressive people. They are not informed about anything. They just look at everything as the struggle of the "wronged" against those that have historically committed wrongs (in their eyes) and this mystical alignment of all "wronged" to bring about change.
I'm sure there are many "progressives" who do think for themselves and have some rational agenda but those are not the (very smart but) people I interact with.
I kinda like viewing this as similar to coordinate-invariance in physics / geometry. A programming language is effectively a function from textual programs to behaviors; this serves the same role as a coordinate system on a space, which is a function from coordinates to points. Naturally many different programs and programming languages can describe the same behavior, especially if you forget about implementation-specific details like memory layout or class structures. LLM code generation is just another piece of the same model: turns out that to some degree you can use English+LLMs as coordinate systems for the textual programs.
I expect that over time we will adopt a perspective on programming that the code doesn't matter at all; each engineer can bring whatever syntax or language they prefer, and it will be freely translated into isomorphic code in other languages as necessary to run in whatever setting necessary. Probably we will settle on an interchange format which is somehow as close as possible to the "intent" of the code, with all of the language-specific concepts stripped away, and then all a language will be is a toolbox that an engineer carries with them of their favorite ways to express concepts.
I've also found myself thinking a lot about isomorphic languages, particularly the edge cases I run into when I start attempting to run through potential mappings for various aspects of syntax or language features in my mind.
> with all of the language-specific concepts stripped away
I've arrived at a somewhat different conclusion. I think we'll arrive at a maximally cumbersome, maximally verbose interchange format that isn't intended to be parsed by a human. One capable of expressing literally every feature of every language that it officially supports. Otherwise translation will necessarily be lossy and round trips with perfect fidelity impossible.
Even then certain paradigms that are common today simply don't seem possible to translate between arbitrary language pairs. I think the client language would also need to be tailored to support the paradigm. Consider how you would go about abstracting (for example) longjump in C and how fundamentally incompatible that is with (for example) Java in its present form. Or how you would deal with differences in ordering requirements as well as any implicit synchronization points between languages.
I figure that C++ will be a viable candidate for the interchange format if we wait another 10 years or so. Just need to add a borrow checker, first class continuations, full blown AST macros, and a runtime "eval" facility. It's slightly tongue in cheek but it's wild to think that actually it could almost work (including the bit about not being intended to be parsed by a human).
but the interesting thing about coordinate systems is that they do matter, a lot! many problems are much much easier to solve in one coordinate system than another.
I think this is certainly true, except for the "each engineer [bringing] whatever syntax or language" point.
At some stage, I expect that we will know what is the set of "optimal" computer languages for the interface between the programmer and the machine code.
Natural languages can't really capture the lower-level details of a program, but there's (probably) also no need for all N different ways to write a for loop.
I would dearly love this to happen. There are some corner cases that won't fit the translation layer well, for example almost any beam languages philosophy of let it crash..
I imagine those languages will be left by the wayside.
don't worry lots of americans can't stand the american humor either
a lot of stuff here keeps existing because of the weird ouroboros of it being popular so people make more of it so it stays popular. but if other things were made and thrust on the mainstream instead they could easily be popular also.
Also lots of HN readers are actual physicists or mathematicians. It's not all techies.
Also, lots of engineers have at some point learned some computer graphics and so been exposed to quaternions in that setting. Since they're mysterious and hard to wrap your head around most people don't really 'get it', leaving a sort of standing curiosity that articles like this tap into.
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