I get regular "crashes" on the newest Fedora KDE on a new Thinkpad X1 (from this year). I say "crashes" because it’s not the window manager or Wayland session crashing but some non-essential component of the Plasma desktop (don’t remember which one right now), so it doesn’t affect my work at all. From my point of view it basically just causes a crash report popup every 1-2 hours and says whatever service crashed has been restarted.
Another common theme is to kill rare animals to stage cool photographs.
However, I don't assume AI slop will (fully) replace that cruelty, unfortunately. But maybe using AI slop will be easier than animal abuse/killing so that those business models run dry for the most part.
I suppose it gets a bit more complex again if you enable stuff like microtype, but even then you can probably measure how much inter-letter and inter-word spacing has been adjusted by just scanning other text in the same line.
I think the conclusion is honestly that PDF is an outdated format for keeping records that might have to be redacted in the future, like court documents. Something reflowable like epub could have the text replaced with constant-space black squares instead no hints leaked as someone mentioned in a parallel comment.
I’ve never heard anyone suggest PDF is a good format, and while I don’t know the spec, I imagine based on the acrobat cve list it’s an absolute clusterfuck.
My guess would be a linkage with something else as you say. Look for example at the Russian domestication of silver foxes which was done very deliberately, and bred for less aggressiveness, yet it caused physical changes in appearance like dog-like ears and tails:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
Physicist here. My PhD is in an area that was spawned into existence due to inspiration coming from string theory, not string theory proper.
I've made some comments here [1] to discuss how I see the situation. It's difficult to be thorought in the world of research, and even more so in an HN comment. I'll be writing more as the subject pops up in HN.
The legit criticism with a legit recommended change is even better.
A time and technological gap always exists between theory and a plan for experimental confirmation. Some gaps are fairly short. String theory's gap is undoubtedly long, not for lack of resources.
This gap justifies tapering the allocation of attention and research resources (funding, students, etc), which got lopsided following the strong marketing campaign driven by Greene.
I tend to agree. Science funding is unfortunately a limited resource, and I would like to see different approaches explored in more detail, which unfortunately would imply less (but not zero) funding to string theory. Not zero, because we also don’t want the competence built up in string theory groups to die out completely, in case that remains our best lead.
To borrow a compsci analogy, we tried the depth-first search going in the string theory direction, maybe it’s time to switch to breadth-first for a while, to see if there are any viable and useful theories with less distance from the ones we have today. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a "theory of everything" either, we can initially settle for a "theory of more".
I'm legit interested in hearing more about this, like YouTube series, popsci books, magazines - I've been meaning to read Zwiebach's A first course, but I keep getting distracted with background reading and then never get back to it.
Yes, although the fast workers currently intentionally make their slower coworkers starve (also while compromising on quality and innovation), so how about that. They have done this for years. Payback is a part of righteousness.
If you really only care about syntax highlighting then nearly any code editor will do. Even nano supports it, it’s just disabled by default.
If you want something powerful yet easy to pick up, you might want to look at e.g. Zed (GUI IDE), Sublime Text (GUI editor), or Micro (TUI editor). If you don’t mind a learning curve, Vim/Neovim and Emacs are excellent choices. But there’s a lot of other options out there, like Gedit, Kate, BBEdit, Notepad++, etc. depending on your platform of choice.
As someone teaching in higher education, I’d say that you can certainly incentivize the students to learn "understanding", although I agree that a lot is up to the student.
Some basic examples:
- Don’t give test and exam questions that are too similar to examples and problems in the text book and homework. Then they’ll know that learning to generalize is a better pay-off than memorizing the textbook problems, and may choose to change their strategy when studying for exams.
- Reduce the amount of curriculum. By studying in depth instead of in breadth, you have time to focus on how things really work instead of just rushing through material on a surface level, and in my experience that improves understanding more. (But I know many disagree with me on this one.)
- Focus on problem solving as part of the lectures (student-active learning). I’m not an extremist, like some advocating that we shouldn’t lecture at all, but the pedagogical literature is pretty clear that small doses of lectures interspersed with problem solving enhances understanding.
- Try to teach intuition and conceptual models, not just facts. For example, as a student, I really struggled understanding eigenvalues and eigenvectors because our linear algebra textbook defined it by Αv = λv but made no attempt at explaining what it means intuitively and geometrically. Similarly, integration by parts has a simple and beautiful geometric interpretation that makes it obvious why this is correct, but we were only taught the opaque symbolic version in my calculus classes. When I teach myself, I try to lean on such visualizations and intuitive pictures as much as possible, as I think that really enhances «understanding»; not necessarily being able to cough up a solution to a problem you’ve seen before as fast as possible, but being able to generalize that knowledge to problems you haven’t seen before.
But who knows, maybe I’m just biased by how I myself perceive the world. I know there are some people who for example eschew geometric pictures entirely and still do very well. My experience is that most students seem to appreciate the things listed above though.
Students need to take responsibility for themselves and Teachers need to point them in the right direction and help/steer as needed.
A Chinese Martial Arts saying which i keep in mind goes;
To show one the right direction and the right path, oral instructions from a Master are necessary, but mastery of the subject only comes from one's own incessant self-cultivation.
A good authoritative book can be the stand-in for a Master in which case there is more discipline and effort required of the Student.
These days different types of books/videos focusing on different aspects of the same subject are so easily available/affordable that the Teacher/Student can both work together and focus on understanding. A handful of real-world problems modeled and worked through beats pages of mere symbol manipulation. We need to start stressing quality over quantity i.e. deliberate effort via deliberate practice in the right way.
The Feynman essay here is all about the teachers NOT pointing the students toward understanding.
And it is all about the students being disciplined and putting in effort, but toward rote memorization rather then understanding, because that is what teachers told them to do.
I was agreeing/elaborating on "setopt's" comment (which lists specific approaches) on how to solve the problem detailed in the essay.
I had submitted the original article for discussion since the observations seem to apply to how Physics/Science has been taught/studied in most countries and not just Latin America.
I think you’re right and especially in regards to abstract concepts like linear algebra I don’t know anyone serious about learning who didn’t struggle with what turned out to be relatively simple things when viewed intuitively.
The problem as I see it
1. Professors themselves don’t understand it and are regurgitating pedagogy from books.
2. The material load is so high for your average bachelors degree you’d spend 8 years in school otherwise. I would hazard to say this is necessary and sufficient but schools wouldn’t get funding and our job oriented society would have it so then only the wealthiest could get education (like it was for centuries).
3. Tests are a benchmark and very expensive. You can consider a class’ total value to be loaded on the final exam. I recently wanted to go back to school casually. One of the cheapest universities available wanted 2600 dollars for a partial differential equations course. If I fail the course I lose 2600 dollars since I would need to retake it to proceed to higher mathematics. This alone does not allow a person time to explore - and that’s just one class!
4. Schools are simply a money laundering vehicle that takes money from students and moves it into administrator pockets. Education costs have skyrocketed yet education and pedagogy remains the same. This is money laundering by any other name.
- understanding leads intuition. There’s very little of either, anywhere.
