Not clear to me that this is true. The expense was incurred, they just claim it over 5 years. It's not clear that the same employee is required to be there in subsequent years to claim the expense from year 1 in year 2.
It doesn't really matter how many devs you have in any given year.
What 174 does is make software a capital expense with no choice in how it gets depreciated over time. It's like having to expense the electricians wages during factory construction over 5 years.
Maybe. But I think this is a useful time to engage in the conversation about what we do as a semi-post-scarcity society and how we should treat people under that framework. If we _do_ replace all the jobs, how should we, as a society, treat each other?
Fundamentally, you either continue down the path of pure capitalism and let people starve in the streets or you adapt socially.
Ah, shame. `foo := someFallibleMethod()?` would have been nice for when you don't want to handle/wrap the error.
I'm not super strongly against the constant error checking - I actually think it's good for code health to accept it as inherent complexity - but I do think some minor ergonomics would have been nice.
There is so much anger in this thread because someone is making qualitative predictions instead of quantitative predictions (except there are some statistical predictions, albeit based around correlations to existing observational phenomenon, but that seems valid to me?).
In some ways, it is a symptom of the success of science so far that we consider that the baseline for credibility.
If the predictive observations from this theory hold true, then it's possible a mathematical framework can be developed for it.
Those are not the comments I'm talking about. There are some in this thread that are derisive due to its focus on qualitative theory and predictions instead of a mathematical foundation.
I can't quite see why complaints about the lack of quantitative support are unreasonable. They sound reasonable to me. In fact there seems to be a very broad consensus that the article lacks supporting numbers.
It strikes me similar to something that is LLM generated. It relies very much on the relationship between words, like how a non-practitioner in a field might develop a fatuous proof or theory.
I'm not saying it is wrong, either. But it's not quantitative and makes weak predictions with very little work into the roadmap to experimentally validate the ideas.
I might be more forgiving if it didn't literally start with
>For scientists interested in citation
which is so pretentious and amateurish it's laughable. If the whole thing was written in the tone of "I'm an amateur and this is my pet theory" it would be fine, not interesting to me but whatever, fanfiction is a thing. If it was curious "could this be it?", sure. But it's pretending very much to be legitimate scientific work which is just strange behavior and it's pulling people in who don't know any better who are taking it seriously.
Intentionally fooling people for your own ego is gross.
I generally agree. If I had been ask to review this, I would have pushed very, very hard on whether "cosmological natural selection assumes that universes reproduce via black holes and big bangs" and most of what follows was necessary. Even if it's true I wouldn't have mentioned that Tyler Cowen was solicited for a review. And not having any math, at all, makes me think the author is not committed enough to their own idea to put in the hard work.
It was a very interesting piece, and something to be proud of. So far nobody has figured out the TOE so they are in good company. On the other hand I see no reason for them to believe they are in a position to be as dismissive as they are of existing theory.
> it's pretending very much to be legitimate scientific work
I don't know what that means.
It's describing an idea (poorly, imo). It's not a whitepaper. The blogpost isn't pretending to be anything but a blogpost. I'm not inclined to believe this has any more weight than any other random blogpost. It is a fun thought experiment.
> it's pulling people in who don't know any better who are taking it seriously.
This is one of the least important things to be concerned about.
Is there anything inherently requiring the three stage cosmological theory to bring about the Blowtorch theory?
I find the Blowtorch theory very compelling - but the cosmological/evolution argument seems qualitatively... less scientific, or at least less physics-related. It is very interesting! But, I think its association would damage the pair.
Anything stopping Blowtorch theory from standing on it's own?
I believe Gough has expressed properly that you're welcome to consider Blowtorch Theory and ignore CNS entirely and it still works as an astrophysical model. Honestly, the longer process of reading the series of articles on the substack where Gough explains how we got the model of the cosmos we currently have helps to explain some of the strange mismatches we've had to deal with throughout history, and CNS (developed originally by the brilliant physicist Lee Smolin) offers explanatory power using no new physics, no exotic matter, and applies the process of natural selection (which is the only observed way we've identified increasingly complixifying self-organizing systems) to the cosmos, and it works shockingly well.
I felt the same way when I first read the theory, and the idea of being inside a black hole sounded silly. But the more I read, the less crazy it sounded, and I'm at the point now where it feels crazier to ignore all this evidence.
I don't believe you're engaging in good faith either.
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