That "Bam!" thing just brought Josh Starmer to mind. Anyone remember his book with the illustrated ML stuff? I used to watch his YouTube channel too. I really dig these kinds of explainers; they make learning so much more fun.
I agree to some extent, the average coders/programmers will definitely have a hard time finding jobs, but maybe they will start their own businesses instead.
We think of SQL as a high level language, an abstraction. We need to think about Code with LLMs similar to that as I still find LLMs to not be able to be completely autonomous at present.
There will be the need to debug understand the underlying execution at a low level just like in SQL or any other high level language.
There will be a requirement for humans to find better ways than LLMs and sometimes we might find frugal and ingenious ways to do stuff for which LLMs had taken the average solutions found in their datasets.
One of the 3 I's of innovation is iteration, if we call iterating innovation as building knockoffs then we might as well dismiss all other successful products that were iterations.
I completely agree, LibreOffice feels really complete these days and for the most of my needs it works well. The only concern I have is when I send it to someone who might not be using LibreOffice but say MS 365, is it still going to display what I had built and the way I had intended.
The best way to do that is via pdf, at least if the recipient doesn't need to edit it. I still have a $20 license for office 2024 for those few edge cases :)
It was inevitable, someone had to do it and I don't understand the awful fact that the West still lives in a bubble where it thinks that they are the only source of innovation in this world. There's a lot of innovation going on in the rest of the world too.
>Are they abandoning their dreams—and does that matter?
It definitely matters, ask any developing nation about the brain drain and you know the reasons why individuals do it, it's a net gain for them but a loss for their nation. Now take all those reasoning and apply to the brain drain within disciplines and domains. All disciplines and domains are important and need significant contribution to continuously innovate.
Even at an individual scale people should do what they like/or are naturally good at, only then they will be able to do great work.
I'm guessing what you hit on is exactly why UK and US hit peak (economic, but I believe also structural) complexity in the 1960s: the beginning of "tech", "VCs", &c
"Dreams"- no one who works at the Economist expects dreamers to participate in the world with the same respect and privilege level that higher levels of money brings. Why is this even a story?
Faction at James Wilson's that want to take the fight to the FT? (Imho the FT has what Americans might call a left wing slant for ages, but which appeals to maybe 50% of it's paying readers )
> "Forming groups did not expand the cognitive abilities of humans. The famous ‘wisdom of the crowd’ that’s become so popular in the age of social networks didn’t come to the fore in our experiments"
If it were true wouldn't all democratic societies be in danger. Our whole society is based off the wisdom of the crowds.
That seems to be university PR doing its "magic." The actual study is much more interesting: the humans weren't allowed to speak to each other, and pheromones wouldn't help the ants solve the problem, so both groups were communicating through haptic feedback. Ants do this naturally and demonstrated swarm intelligence behavior by "going with the flow", but the humans kept working at cross purposes by trying to implement a complete solution without coordinating the details.
I agree with the overall conclusion, even if it's phrased misleadingly: human collective intelligence is primarily about individual intelligences accessing group knowledge rather than groups working together to tackle complex problems beyond individual comprehension. Ants are not individually capable of understanding the piano-mover problem at a basic level; research administrators are generally capable of understanding the work of individual researchers, they just don't have the time to digest all the details.
> If it were true wouldn't all democratic societies be in danger.
Democracy is more or less in a permanent state of crisis. This has been discussed thoroughly since the time of Athens, and certainly Rome. The late days of the republic were characterized by squabbling over the specifics of who got to lobby voters, how they were allowed to, and where they were allowed to. For instance they have laws on the books dictating the physical structure of the buildings that people voted in to ensure that the rich couldn't basically station people in the halls leading to the ballots to purchase votes or physically intimidate voters. This is also reflected in the sudden populist turns of eg the Gracchi brothers and Caesar himself.
It's also true of the American republic. Self-conception of us as an egalitarian democracy is still around at best a century old, and more accurately around sixty years old. And we remain extremely far from being an obviously healthy democracy. Of course, the state has vacillated between actions you could argue are wise and those that are clearly not, before and after these divides.
I really would be very cautious at viewing democracies as reflecting of "wisdom". We often can (and often do) come to consensus that is extremely ill-advised from the perspective of the needs of the populace. Democracy is more or less permanently perched on the tension between the will and needs of the constituents which are often at blatant odds with each other. There's a reason why the Philosopher King has held such a cultural weight through the millennia. At best democracy is a best-faith effort to approximate wisdom through consensus—sometimes with better faith than other times.
> Democracy is more or less in a permanent state of crisis.
Maybe we should define democracy and state of crisis before reaching to any conclusion.
We can just as well consider human history as a graph of political crisis.
As for democracy, if we mean a system were everyone in the crowd is equal citizen and the people officially rules itself directly, there is probably no single State in the world that fits the definition.
Sociopaths have an edge to rule society as they are inclined to impose their agenda through relentless use of all the means they can think of while most people will refrain themselves from most crual actions for ethical concerns.
And of course sociopaths are going to pretend they became and remain king thanks to the will of some mighty divinity, their demiurgic actions, and their exceptional wisdom.
The appealing point for democracy is that those who have to follow the law are those who makes the law, do a feedback loop can tweak the way the society organize along the way without possibility to ignore the actual consequences of these decisions.
Given the coordination/cooperation aspect of the problem, this isn’t really the “wisdom of the crowd” as I’ve always understood it.
Something like estimating the number of beans in a jar is a good fit, since there is only one layer of perception to agree on and no coordination required.
This experiment as described seems closer to “design by committee” with (predictably) similar results.
> If it were true wouldn't all democratic societies be in danger.
All democratic societies are in danger -- because the wisdom of the crowd does not have the capability to handle scenarios where the crowd has sufficiently great power.
All political systems are in danger because the wisdom of whoever influence decisions imposed on the collectivity does not encompasses such a capability of handling actual reality in its whole complexity.
Nevertheless at the end of the day we will have political systems anyway.
An entirely meaningless response. They key is not to point out similarities, but to talk about the differences. Democracy does have its unique weaknesses, which is the drift towards efficiency over all else through capitalism, which tends to favour very dangerous and powerful technologies over time. Such a drift is simply not the case with a dictatorship or group run by elders, for example.
The lake of meaning is in our mind when we can't find any meaning to attach to what is exposed.
In that case, the text was specifically pointing to how so general statements can hardly lead to any robust conclusion.
All systems have their unique weaknesses, which can lead to dangerous situations.
On a pure retorical level, we can pick any system that can be conceptually exposed and discuss its theoretical virtues all day through. Or expose all the danger we can envision from mechanisms it implies on conceptual level.
In theory, an enlightened dictator is the best system, just as well as democracy with enlightened crowd, or gerontocracy with enlightened elders that don't fall in illusion that everything was better before and new generations are a bunch of lazy arrogant ignorants that will doom the civilization, or whatever gouvernement form we can theorize about.
It's easy to blame the ruler when you are not put with the duty to actively participate in the policy creation that should content all stake holders, and it's easy to blame the ruled ones when you don't have to obey the same rules as everyone because of course your exceptional contributions to society necessarily implies exceptional privilegies and you are the one that makes the laws anyway.
Except of course in a system where everyone is imposed the duty and means to contribute to maintain and evolve the laws that everyone have to follow, self included.
This video if it was a scientific paper I would have visualised absolutely nothing. I don't know that if we can submit/embed animations instead of PDFs for university classroom work/ scientific papers, because that's really much better than having to read papers/PDFs that is so incomplete without the right imagination/visualization of the problem. The last time I was giving a mock seminar in my university using a GIF to explain the RRT algorithm I was warned to not use animations in presentations . . . I mean either it was really not that helpful to visualise the solution or it has to do something with age old standards that needs to be revised. I mean figures can only do 3 or 4 frames isn't more frames better.
If you need to visualize an algorithm in a talk, the usual approach is having a few slides representing the key steps instead of an actual animation. That way you can adapt the pace to the audience, stop to answer questions about any individual frame, and jump back to previous frames when necessary. People often find animations on slides distracting, and the forced pace is almost certainly wrong. And if the animation is longer than a few seconds, the talk stops being a talk and becomes an awkward video presentation instead.
In 2002, when I was doing my second year at college, my professor was cool enough to let me submit an animation of the self-balancing insertion algorithm for AVL trees. Those were the years of Macromedia Flash and Director. It was a cool project, and I wish I had kept the files. Overall, it was a highly technical thing.
Twenty and so years later, I still do animations, even if only as a hobby. These days I use Blender, Houdini, and my own Python scripts and node systems, and my purpose is purely artistic. Something that is as true today as it was twenty years ago is that computer animation remains highly technical. If an artist wants to animate some dude moving around, they will need to understand coordinate systems, rotations, directed acyclic graphs and things like that. Plus a big bunch of specific DCC concepts and idiosyncrasies. The trade is such that one may end up having to implement their own computational geometry algorithms. Those in turn require a good understanding of general data structures and algorithms, and of floating point math and when to upgrade it or ditch it and switch to exact fractions. Topology too becomes a tool for certain needs; for example, one may want to animate the surface of a lake and find out that a mapping from 3D to 2D and back is a very handy tool[^1].
I daresay that creating a Word or even a Latex document with some (or a lot of) formulas remains easier. But if I were the director of a school and a student expressed that videos are easier to understand, I would use it as an excuse to force everybody to learn the computer animation craft.
[^1]: Of course it's also possible to do animations by simply drawing everything by hand in two dimensions, but that requires its own set of skills and talent, and it is extremely labor-intensive. It's also possible to use AI, but getting AI to create a good, coherent and consistent animation is still an open problem.
That word "support" does a lot of heavy lifting there. A bit like in "Email supports end to end encryption".
You are not wrong, but if you had to bet your life on somebody being able to get the information and you don't know how they are going to view that PDF would you do it?
