If you find yourself explaining the intricacies of CNN algorithms in your suicide note, consider that you are too "dug into" a bespoke topic. In 2 years, none of these math problems would be his mind at all.
Choosing to do a PHD means you are willing to dig into a bespoke topic.
They had no way out of their predicaments - it seems their mentor had forced them into a corner, where either they had to produce fraudulent work, or abandon their entire career.
I think there is also a lot of cultural pressure at play also. Being caught after producing fraudulent work is also an easy way to have the same effect of abandoning your whole career.
And without a fruitful result of your life's work, it would feel that you have wasted your whole life.
And in some cultures, that would mean being terribly judged by your family and friends, and worse.
So they did really think that they had no other options out and everything else was "worse than death".
When you are young, and you are researching something as a PhD student, it really can seem like the most important thing in your life. All of your waking thoughts (and late night thoughts) can be shaped by it. When you walk outside you're not even noticing things around you but you're lost in thought about the current problem.
This is why it's so important to have some "spiritual" life of some sort as you cultivate an academic career, where you can practice appreciating the truly valuable aspects of life, and be grateful and peaceful when you need to be. For many people on this path you don't learn these things until much later in life. This is reinforced by your entire life being dictated by grades and exam scores until the moment you start your research.
The audience for this note is his colleagues and this quandary is the central tenant leading to his decision.
While killing oneself over an academic pursuit seems extreme, getting a PhD is a pretty extreme thing to do and one of those things where it seems like one's life to that point has been entirely dedicated to the pursuit.
Reading Philip Guo's "The PhD Grind" several years back ended up giving me one of those multi-year Kafkaesque nightmares that caused me to wake up in a cold sweat. I get it.
I wonder, are there an infinite number of proofs of the theorem, each more complex than the last? Can I rephrase what they did, make it more convoluted, and call it a new proof?
If they are irrelevant details then that should not count as a new proof, in my opinion.
I guess it might be possible to have a "canonic form" of a proof so that if two proofs can be reduced to the same canonic proof then they are in fact the same proof.
Whoever wrote this piece is a bad communicator who thinks he's a good communicator, and then goes through life getting confused about why no one understands him.
For example, in the story about the Japanese, he assumes some context from the reader: "What are they building? What is Fujitsu and what is Habitat and why does Japan need their own special version of it?" It's not even clear they're building anything technical, so I wondered, "Why do they need a client and server? And also, didn't you ever think to check their internal technical details before? What did you think would be the result?"
> “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?”
These are good questions and you better have a well-worded answer! In fact, it is easy to answer these if you have prepared for them. Did you just assume that the potential customer would already have familiar with the technicals of your product? If that was the case, they would have bought it from someone else already. Your target demo is the uninformed.
> Whoever wrote this piece is a bad communicator who thinks he's a good communicator, and then goes through life getting confused about why no one understands him.
As much as I appreciate the author writing this piece, I have to agree with your comment. I was half wondering if the entire article was an exercise in “this is how you don’t communicate, here’s the final para which explains everything I wrote!”. Reading the comments on the article and here on HN helped.
Habitat [1] was a massively multi-player online role-playing game, or perhaps one of the first ones, by LucasArts.
It was first released in 1986, and awarded at Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001. So, pretty old-school stuff. The site is about that game, and stories around it, so perhaps one can assume that readers know at least that much context.
> For example, in the story about the Japanese, he assumes some context from the reader: "What are they building? What is Fujitsu and what is Habitat and why does Japan need their own special version of it?" It's not even clear they're building anything technical, so I wondered, "Why do they need a client and server? And also, didn't you ever think to check their internal technical details before? What did you think would be the result?"
None of those details are important to the story. Leaving out extraneous detail is good communication.
Yeah it was a very confusing read, and when I finally understood the point of the writer I wondered if he wrote a confusing article on purpose to create a "Aha!" moment when you finally understand what he's saying, to illustrate his point through this article.
This post claims that the answer to "why white" is because of the beneficial effects it has on the disposition of the writer. But that's hardly a reason to write, that's just a helpful side effect. The reason to write is that you have something to say, and you want others to hear it.
The claim is that writing causes you not to be disposed more positively - it doesn't really do that now does it? Writing is miserable work. No. The claim is that writing causes you to think more clearly and powerfully than not writing.
The issue with this argument is that co-writing with an AI might have that same benefit. If writers have some sort of elitism going on about the process of bashing their own heads against a text editor until gold issues forth, that's fine.
But that may have more to do with masochism than with refining one's thoughts. One can think and write deeply with the help of AI - in many cases more deeply than one can do on their own. Furthermore, co-writing with an AI helps bad writers improve [1]. These emerging facts are surprising, valuable, and should not be dismissed.
As someone without a lot of math background, the most confusing part of this is k. Is k a number, like 7.45 or whatever? Or something else? Everything else is just normal mathy stuff.
> So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too
No. He got that number of followers because he is on Twitter. He would not get the same number of followers on some other social media platoform. Trump had 20 times as many followers on Twitter than he has on Truth Social. And those Truth Social users are less valuable.
Engineers like to think that the engineering is the important part of platforms. It's not. The engineering can be easily replicated. The valuable part of platforms is the users. You buy the platforms to buy the users.
> Some of them, like Dolphins, sure seem damned close to our own capabilities with likely fully formed languages ... Because we're definitely trying to communicate with the species we're aware of that we think have language.
This is highly doubtful. Crows don't have language anything like humans. Dolphins are a more likely candidate. I want to believe it, but I can't.
And this right here is why it's taken us so long to figure out that we even have terrestrial aliens with cultures and languages.
If you're not willing to believe it's possible, then you can't even begin to devise ways to determine if it's real.
> "We have hardly begun to decipher the language of the raven. Its dictionary so far contains but a few 'words'. Perhaps our analysis has been too coarse-grained to catch the meanings. Our research has been something like that of aliens from outer space who make sonograms of human vocalizations under different situations - eating, playing, loving, fighting, etc. Certain differences noted in frequency, intonation, and loudness are correlated with feelings and emotions. But human sounds convey much more, and perhaps ravens' do, too."
> Our challenge is to put ourselves in the place of those "aliens from outer space" and solve the immensely difficult problem of how to communicate with another intelligent species.
Consider this: Crows pass knowledge down the generations. There have been studies done on crows where researchers go out and bully them. Then they observe the crows to see if they remember who bullied them. They do remember. And so do their children, and the children of their children. They clearly have a means of pretty abstract communication, because in remembering, they differentiate different people. They have a way of telling their kids "See that human? Yeah, that one. He's an asshole."
> Recent studies have proven that the crow can remember the faces of other birds and even humans. They can differentiate between those who have been kind to them and those who have caused them stress. Crows will even pass this information on to other generations.
With Dolphins the existence of a language is even clearer.
In this Nova Science episode they show clear evidence of a language. They have taught the dolphins to create a new trick (something they haven't done before and haven't been taught to do by humans). They've also taught them to do tricks together. Then they put them together - "together", "create". And they did it, they came up with a new trick and they did the exact same trick together.
> Then they put them together - "together", "create". And they did it, they came up with a new trick and they did the exact same trick together.
> That absolutely requires language akin to humans.
I want to believe they describe the trick like skaters describe theirs: "When I give you the signal, let's do a a 360 Ollie underflip flamingo powerslide. If we do it in sync, the walkers will give us treats".
Oh just to clarify, it was not my intention to put down Jane in the slightest. It's a fascinating firm in a fascinating field that is obviously full of elite mathematicians and technologists. I'd most likely be willing to work there.
> anymore than there is a clear winner between tabs and spaces.
But there is a clear winner here. Tabs won, almost all code files use spaces. Of course everyone uses the tab key on their keyboard, and the IDE makes spaces for you; no one is going to manually press space 4 times.
There is no winner, both tabs snd spaces are widely used. However with proliferation of better tools the question thankfully became mostly irrelevant. I don't care if it is spaces or tabs, as long as it is consistent across codebase (which CI enforces with autoformatters and linters) and as long as my editor (which obeys project's editorconfig) uses the same convention.
I don't think solar energy is the only type of energy. And if you are at "we are running out of square meters of land to put solar panels on", space might actually be viable at that level of advancement.
Food is not limited by labor, or specifically scarce any more than any other good. In fact it's not obvious to me it will always require labor at all.
Strictly speaking, all goods are scarce if you don't have an infinite number of them. But I think we are lazily saying "scarce" when we mean something like "unavoidably zero sum". The only thing you list which has that is land.
It's the only type of renewable energy. All other renewable energies depend on the heat from the sun to work. The earth's core doesn't generate enough to fully satisfy our current needs, there's a finite quantity of uranium, plutonium, coal, oil, etc.
Of course, all of this is on a scale well beyond what we need to (currently) be concerned with- we don't have the technology to fully utilize what we have to fully eliminate scarcity in the first place.
