The open (about the bet) is actually pretty reasonable, but some of the predictions listed include: passenger vehicles on American roads will drop from 247 million in 2020 to 44 million in 2030. People really did believe that self-driving was "basically solved" and "about to be ubiquitous." The predictions were specific and falsifiable and in retrospect absurd.
I meant serious predictions. A surprisingly large percentage of people claim the Earth is flat, of course there's going to be baseless claims that the very nature of transportation is about to completely change overnight. But the people actually familiar with the subject were making dramatically more conservative and I would say reasonable predictions.
Do you know of any short examples of this? Yesterday I was trying to prove some "easy" theorems that involved machine number representations, and I couldn't find anything in Lean.
Just about everything that a non-specialist in combinatorics needs to know about counting can be found in Rota's twelvefold way, which lists the 12 counting problems that you can define for finite sets and shows how to solve them:
They're claiming some revolutionary "synthetic muscle," but is there video of one of these things walking? If it's just pneumatics then this is a repeat of the early androids out of Japan, which looked cool but never got up and moved - they were basically just impressive animatronic dolls. My guess is that this ends up being something similar.
Check the arm/hand videos; it shows what they are testing ; unless they completely changed everything since that video, it's just a bucketload of rubber (pneumatic) tubes.
Yup! Lean is based on a variant of the Calculus of Constructions, which is in turn based on strong connections between (intuitionistic) natural deduction and type theory. The connection is incredibly beautiful:
It's interesting that, at least through ollama, it appears impossible to get DeepSeek-R1 to give concise answers to questions that don't require any reasoning.
That’s the nature of LLMs. They can’t really think ahead to „know“ whether reasoning is required. So if it’s tuned to spit out reasoning first then that’s what it’ll do
Before you read this, it's worth your time to check out Haraway's Wikipedia page. The criticism section sums things up nicely:
Haraway's work has been criticized for being "methodologically vague" and using noticeably opaque language that is "sometimes concealing in an apparently deliberate way". Several reviewers have argued that her understanding of the scientific method is questionable, and that her explorations of epistemology at times leave her texts virtually meaning-free.
This manifesto is exactly the kind of nonsense that led Alan Sokal to send his fake paper to Social Text. Essays like this should come with a Surgeon General's warning: this writing may be amusing, but if you take it seriously it will rot your brain.
> at times leave her texts virtually meaning-free.
This statement makes no sense. What is the methodology these reviewers used such that they can determine how much meaning is in a text? And what is the difference between a text that is "virtually" meaning-free and 100% meaning-free with no modifier? What is the threshold for a text to have an epsilon of meaning? I'm sure those reviews came with p-values.
I might say that those reviewers' understanding of continental philosophy is questionable and at times leave their texts virtually meaning-free.
This criticism shows the ignorance of those who made it. This isn't a scientific empirical study, it is humanistic philosophy in the continental tradition. Nietzsche and Camus didn't have a methodology either.
Out of curiosity: what kind of philosophy do you like? Are you open to any psychoanalytic or marxist methods, if executed with enough scientific rigor? Honest question. I'm guessing basically all of HN agrees with you, so no offense intended!
TBF, AFAIR Sokal was criticizing Literary Criticism, not philosophy. I guess she does invoke a few science fiction stories here so the line is blurred, but its clearly instrumental. Namely for this purpose:
Haraway uses the cyborg metaphor to explain how fundamental contradictions in feminist theory and identity should be conjoined, rather than resolved, similar to the fusion of machine and organism in cyborgs. The manifesto is also an important feminist critique of capitalism by revealing how men have exploited women's reproduction labor, providing a barrier for women to reach full equality in the labor market.
Which IMO is far from meaning-free! Also in her defense, literally all of the linked criticisms are about one book, Primate Visions. The first one isn't a criticism at all if you actually click the link, other than in the Kantian (non-pejorative) sense. The second one is by a primatologist who's offended and seems... well, I guess I'd have to read the book, but I'm dubious of the claims that Harroway endorses "relativism" or that "Marxism and feminism are never in doubt". The third one appears to be inaccessible / in Japanese (??) so no comments there.
Sorry, I've been a die hard fan of her for the past 30 minutes, as you can probably tell! So I'm more than a bit biased.
The other reply linked to a good explanation. I would only add that I also wrote a paper on Dendron, and Figure 17 shows how to transform a decision tree node into a behavior tree, so that you can implement any decision tree as a behavior tree:
BTs were developed in the computer game industry, as a tool to increase modularity in the control structures of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) . In this billion-dollar industry, modularity is a key property that enables reuse of code, incremental design of functionality, and efficient testing.
In games, the control structures of NPCs were often formulated in terms of Finite State Machines (FSMs). However, just as Petri Nets provide an alternative to FSMs that supports design of concurrent systems, BTs provide an alternative view of FSMs that supports design of modular systems.
Following the development in the industry, BTs have now also started to receive attention in academia.
At Carnegie Mellon University, BTs have been used extensively to do robotic manipulation. The fact that modularity is the key reason for using BTs is clear from the following quote from [2]: “The main advantage is that individual behaviors can easily be reused in the context of another higher-level behavior, without needing to specify how they relate to subsequent behaviors”.
BTs have also been used to enable non-experts to do robot programming of pick and place operations, due to their “modular, adaptable representation of a robotic task” and allowed “end-users to visually create programs with the same amount of complexity and power as traditionally-written programs” [56]. Furthermore, BTs have been proposed as a key component in brain surgery robotics due to their “flex- ibility, reusability, and simple syntax”.
Hi Richard I just reached out to you on LI. I'd love to get a chance to chat with you about your experience with this. Thank you for sharing this is fascinating.
I own a copy of that book, and I also highly recommend it! (The full title is "Physics for Mathematicians: Mechanics I", but sadly we're now never going to get a "Mechanics II".) It has a different goal than my notes --- he's more interested in building up classical mechanics very, very carefully from first principles --- but it's a fun journey if you have the time to spend on it.
As a former physicist, I never understood the full math behind Schrodinger's equation. Since then I ventured into CS, so I wonder if this book will be a good refreshment.
The Schrodinger equation is just restating something you may already know if you studied physics. The Hamiltonian is the generator of time translations.
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/in-two-years-there-could-be...
The open (about the bet) is actually pretty reasonable, but some of the predictions listed include: passenger vehicles on American roads will drop from 247 million in 2020 to 44 million in 2030. People really did believe that self-driving was "basically solved" and "about to be ubiquitous." The predictions were specific and falsifiable and in retrospect absurd.
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