nico λ

We have a problem here, folks. The word “intelligence” is a semantic catastrophe. Whenever doomers use this word, I have no idea what they’re talking about. I often don’t know if they’re talking about a real thing at all. And when they say things like, “AIs are approaching human-level intelligence,” I start to bang my head against the table. What... See more

Immanuel Kant, in the eighteenth century, said that the universe as it truly is must be unknowable, and all we ever know is the world through our senses: he made a clear distinction between phenomena , our perceptions of objects, and noumena , the things in themselves.5 More than that, he foreshadowed the Bayesian model of the brain: he argued that

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, “Almost the only position of spiritual dignity left to men, therefore, is a kind of stoic silence, made bearable by the amusement of seeing, hearing, and knowing the full historical irony that its victims are blind and deaf to, and disciplined by the act of withholding comment on what we know.”

One of the most intelligent case studies in design is the Chinese tea cup. They’re made without handles simply because if it’s too hot to touch, it’s too hot to drink.

Humans naturally want to add more. Add a cardboard sleeve, add a warning on the outside of the cup, add a handle. The result of all these things never cools down the actual contents.

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1. Clearly describe the problem and symptoms. Begin your prompt by describing what is going wrong and what the code is supposed to do. Always include the exact error message or incorrect behavior. For example, instead of just saying “My code doesn’t work,” you might prompt: “I have a function in JavaScript that should calculate the sum of an array... See more

Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible. In general, important civilizations start

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When I talk about taste in business, I mean the ability to consistently make decisions that demonstrate respect for your audience, show deep empathy for their needs, and deliver aesthetically-pleasing experiences that drive positive business outcomes.

nowhere.” It is the conviction that in order to describe the world accurately and empirically, we must put aside res cogitans—the subjective, immediate way in which we experience the world in our minds—and limit ourselves to res extensa, the objective, mathematical language of physical facts. Without these distinctions, it’s difficult to imagine

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Søren Kierkegaard: “To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”