This is true for a direct democracy, but for a representative democracy like the US (and many other countries) there's more nuance. Combined with first past the post voting, there's a lot of room for suppression of voices that are not aligned with those already in power.
For say something like the state legislature race in a state, they count up all the seats they have won in each district, and whichever party has won the most seats wins the race. Voters are therefore put in buckets (districts) and their votes are counted in aggregate.
This allows a process called "gerrymandering" to redraw district boundaries arbitrarily. So if there is say a democratic-party majority voting bloc in a particular area, I can redraw the surrounding districts to split that geographic area into many parts, so their votes get split across multiple districts and hence "diluted".
The voting rights act asserted this is a form of voter suppression. Specifically related to black voter suppression, if a state is say 40% black by population and they have no black representatives, it warrants a closer look as to why.
I hope that wasn't too confusing of an explanation. I'm not from the US but I'm quite interested in these things.
You explained it well. Representative democracy complicates systems of fairness since it adds another layer that itself also needs to be fair. And each is an opportunity to be corrupted into unfairness.
Our education curriculum is also a big problem here. If I stopped random people on the street in the U.S. and asked them what first-past-the-post is, I suspect only a small number would be able to answer.
Yet people are baffled as to why we have the two party system, gerrymandering, and all of the other problems. You can’t fix what you don’t understand. We have to start there.
Ranked choice is starting to gain some traction in the U.S. But there are many different ranking methods and the one we are using is instant-runoff, which has many of the same problems as first-past-the-post, including polarizing candidates and winners. I think if these systems were more broadly understood, many people would prefer Schulze for its fairness properties and to reduce polarization.
"Parasitic compute" is strange way to describe "a user running dev workflows on their own GitHub Actions allocation"
when you run ghost, it creates a "ghostbox" - an ephemeral machine on your GitHub account, on your GitHub actions minutes, accessible only by your SSH identity. It's orchestration around GitHub's infra.
Proprietary software built on GitHub is not exactly an unusual category.
I don't believe in releasing source anymore after years of doing it. It's closed source, Rust binary, proprietary but free software offered as a utility. It's the same patterns as used by coding agents and many other CLI tools.
So, your threat model is that I’m really building my business and reputation by creating illegal, criminal malware? Ponder that, is that really a plausible thing to you? You think that about me?
No, I only use open source agents, weird of you to assume that I would make an exception just for agents. My threat model is that trust is earned, not given away to complete strangers who act hostile to simple inquiries.
I was sincerely interested in why you were choosing closed source, you decided to take it as an attack.
lol No, I didn’t take it as an attack (tho that's what it was) i just didn’t answer your question. If you’re not okay with that i guess you’ll need to figure that out yourself.
That’s where i was going with my reply - i wanted you to think more about it. You perceived it as hostile but really I was just asking you some questions, simple ones. It does seem like you’re projecting here, maybe consider that more.
Because even tho I didn't take it as an 'attack' it was an attack, really. Think: What are you saying: you don't trust some software that I wrote. What does that mean? That means you think it's going to do something bad. That means you think I'm going to try to do something bad to you, by this beautiful creative effort that I'm putting out. Like wut? You really are not a builder if you don't understand how that feels, for me, but also -if you don't see the problem with just thinking that's what I'm going to do, like that's crazy. Like you think it's okay to just accuse me of that, just casually, like what? And then you don't think I can saying anything about that - because otherwise I'm taking it as an attack. Which is what it was. So of course I'm going to say something, and I can. And if you don't like that - maybe think more before you accuse people of what you're just projecting.
So, I took it as ignorance, which is what it is, I assume, which is why I asked you questions. Because if I was going to give you my real answer, I don't think you would understand it. That's why I didn't answer your question, because I didn't feel you'd understand (why might that be? Because you just fake accused me of trying to do something I'm not doing?). Is that not obvious to you?
Anyway, what else were you saying? Not weird about agents, it’s so common. I guess you’re a little unusual in your fastidiousness about that. But that’s not a problem.
What about apps on your phone, are you okay with that? Or you have, like, a dumb phone?
If you do want to know my views on open source, maybe you can try your empathy and tell me why you think?
It’s okay if you don’t want to. I’m finding the interaction with you a little boring… lol
Ah, so very considerate of you, well someone's read it, but the short version is: you have 0 right to attack or accuse me in any way. The fact that you want to, just shows you're a bad perosn. You're wrong. You assumed I'm doing something bad, but you don't know me, you tried to blame me for your prejudice, but that's just you, projecting, crazy.
"Why do you want to protect your IP/time/effort rather than giving away your source code? I don't run binaries as a general rule, nothing to do with ghost, which looks cool, btw." is totally fair.
Assuming bad intent, malware, or hidden wrongdoing is not neutral criticism - it is warrantless attack.
No-one knows who you are, and you’re clearly not against using something like GH Actions in a way other than its intended purpose. What’s to say you won’t pivot to running a tiny VM on my machine and making it available to others?
Is that right? Well, some people know. I’m Cris, and you are?
But wait I’ve been building so much, for all this time, but you think what I’ve really being doing is building malware, and there’ve been no consequences, somehow nobody’s noticed and I’ve just “gotten away with it”?
I don’t think anything, and I’m not accusing you of anything, I’m just saying, a lot of folks started with pure motives and got poisoned along the way.
For what it’s worth, it’s not very reassuring that you have a bunch of open source projects but you’ve decided this one is not going to be. Rather than showing I can trust you, it rather makes me wonder what you’re hiding.
The answer may well be nothing, but it’s still strange.
I get you might feel that way about it, but that’s not how it is.
The strange thing is your reaction, don’t you think: If you see a proprietary source product and you think “what’s it hiding?” and if you can’t respect a boundary of not revealing source without projecting an imagined bad onto that, that’s just you, my dude, and I’m not responsible how you react at all.
So you might wanna try to put your mistaken attitude on me, but really you need to own that. And your attitude seems mistakenly entitled.
Also the trust issues are warrantless. And, in reality, if you look at my projects, the most important ones are not “open source”.
You judged too quickly, without context, like many here and arrived at conclusions that are just not warranted.
You shouldn’t be arguing with anyone about that because why you came to those doubts or conclusions is something you have to figure out yourself, it’s not something anyone else can help you with.
> I’m just saying, a lot of folks started with pure motives and got poisoned along the way.
That’s not how I see things. That’s not been my experience of the world. I understand if it’s been yours though. Poor you. I guess in that case my advice is just try to keep in mind that not everyone is gonna have the same kind of negative outlook as you and try to be understanding towards them. There’s a lot of good in the world if you open your eyes to it, I hope you find some.
> if you can’t respect a boundary of not revealing source without projecting an imagined bad onto that, that’s just you, my dude, and I’m not responsible how you react at all
I’m responding to the change, as something worth scrutiny. You used to publish open source projects, now this is closed source. Why?
> So you might wanna try to put your mistaken attitude on me, but really you need to own that. And your attitude seems mistakenly entitled
What mistaken attitude, what am I putting on you, and what is my “entitlement”?
> You judged too quickly
> You shouldn’t be arguing
> my advice is
Please stop dressing up your arguments as some kind of metaphysical commentary on my character. I don’t need advice, I didn’t judge you, and I didn’t plan on arguing.
You built something, some people think it’s cool, a lot of people think it’s problematic. You want to keep it closed source, some people find that worrying.
Keep your faux pity for yourself, engage with me in good faith on the merits of the points I’m making, otherwise we’re done here.
You think I owe you source code, is entitled. You project strange onto change, is low empathy. There's no metaphysics, your unwarranted criticism is a reflection of your character. Don't pretend your weird subjective reaction is anything I need to respond to, nor any reflection of me - it's just you.
You have 0 right to attack or accuse me in any way. That you think you do makes you even more entitled and low empahty. Geez....
Their pattern here of immediately going on the offensive to even the smallest amount of inquiry or criticism is totally normal and not at all suspicious.
Maybe they're just having a bad day. Friendly reminder that you don't have to respond to something as soon as you read it, or even at all.
Yeah, I think that's what the program creates in your github account. I see the source to those files embedded in the executable. (I'm not running the executable, but I downloaded the linux one to my mac to take a look inside.)
And abracadabra - it will return. That's just the crowd madness leading folks from this very thread to abuse the flag/report button on GitHub repo to get it auto-disabled.
I trust it will resurrect once GitHub gets around to inspecting.
I've recently started using blip, which works very similarly to airdrop after the initial pairing has happened. The devices do not need to be on the same network etc.
No issues per se, but academic publishing has deep roots in the latex ecosystem. So templates from publishers are often not available in typst, or the publisher insists on a latex formatted file.
Often supervisors/professors etc will also resist using typst because of the cognitive overhead on their already oversubscribed time. Typst has about 40 years of history to overcome and that will take a long time to do.
This isn't strictly true. Multiple studies have shown that coffee reliably acts to increase alertness and can often boost mood.
Alertness isn't the same thing as energy, which is why people who drink a lot of coffee often feel tired but "wired". The brain is alert but energy is low. Abstaining from coffee can "reset" the nervous system to an extent, but alertness and energy is largely determined by insulin levs in the body. So figuring out what works for you with diet is a much better way of getting more stable energy through the day, regardless of caffeine intake.
In quantum mechanics, the "ball" (or in this case an ideal particle) has a "wave function" associated with it. This wave function effectively describes the probability that the particle can be at a certain location.
It so happens that when you solve for this problem, a ball bouncing against a wall, in this wave function paradigm then you end up with a non-zero probability that the ball appears on the other side of the wall.
I'm not sure if there is a deeper explanation at play here but that's how I understand it.
Honestly I found the base iPad excellent for this. The writing experience isn't a lot like paper, but is still quite good. You can get a little closer by applying a matte screen guard.
As another dude with a doctorate in Physics, I have to disagree with you (at least somewhat).
> From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
I disagree with this entirely. The existence of QFT, and our knowledge of the inconsistency between say GR and the quantum realm does not negate the idea of photons and electrons as real, measurable quantities. The fact that we have GR does not negate the fact that we still use Newtonian gravity in regimes where it is sufficiently accurate.
All the new knowledge we have learned still is (and absolutely must be) consistent with our old knowledge that has been proven correct in the regimes that they were proven correct.
This is effectively what Asimov is saying (as I understand anyway) - the knowledge that the Earth is a sphere does not invalidate the assumption that the Earth is flat approximately and locally.
I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
String theory can tell me that we have several dimensions etc but until we have a way to measure and check it remains a conceptual framework to make predictions, rather than a description of how things really are.
GR is much closer to a description. It told us about the precession of mercury, it told us to account for time dilation so we can use GPS satellites. It also predicted black holes, which were conceptually consistent but it's only been in the last ~ 5 years that we have the closest thing yet to experimental verification with the Event Horizon Telescope and gravitational wave measurements. If another theory comes along and explains all of GR with a different explanation for black holes, we will need still more accurate measurements to discriminate between the two theories. Knowledge is only as accurate as we can measure.
The way I've heard it best described is these notions of electrons and photons etc will still be retained as a special case of whatever theory supersedes them, which is critical, because that's at the heart of the "relativity of wrong" argument.
Some take the prospect of a future revision of theories to mean our present state of knowledge is no different than any prior failed theory, which I think is an urgently, catastrophically wrong, catastrophically confused way to regard the history of scientific knowledge.
QM is so platonic though. Reality consists, ultimately, of forms that can only be described mathematically. It just happens that the math returns (what we see) as a probability distribution/wave function.
I’ve never quite understood what a quantum theory of gravity would be though. QM involves the observer but gravity engages spacetime - the place where you are observing things. A quantum field theory of gravity seems like a contradiction in terms to me. Unless quantum gravity is really about the Big Bang?
The observer/observed thing is present in every part of physics and isn't really about observers but about where we choose to draw the line between one physical system and another (with the other usually containing ourselves).
Think of it this way: classically or quantum mechanically, when we pick out a physical system to talk about we are isolating the terms for that system in the universal lagrangian and assuming that in the time of interest that the terms for our physical system couple weakly to the rest of the universe (which happens to contain us).
In principal nothing really weird is going on here and in classical mechanics the idea is totally trivial as far as it goes. On short time scales with appropriately sized actions the deviation from the isolated system and the real system (which is weakly coupled to the world) can be demonstrated to be small as long as the coupling is small.
In quantum mechanics two things complicate this situation. The first is that quantum mechanical systems sort of defy separation into distinct subsets except in special situations. Classically there is a strong sense in which we can point to two different parts of a system and call them separate, but quantum mechanically we really only know how to time evolve _the whole system_ and from a mathematical point of view its the actual object of interest. This is what we are getting at when we talk about entanglement: the two spin 1/2 particles flying away from one another in Bell style experiments are not separate things in the QM description: there is just one wave function.
But in practice I don't think there is any real reason we can't quantize gravity. I'm not an expert but loop quantum gravity seems like a reasonable approach and its very straightforward and its base: just find an acceptable description of geometry and then apply the ordinary quantum mechanical tricks we use to quantize it.
Also, you don't observe things in spacetime. Observations are always purely local. You just infer the existence of spacetime from local observations which are conveniently organized by putting them on a curved 4d Lorentzian signature manifold.
I don't think you get my point because I don't think of anything you are saying as having anything to do with what I was saying.
If you have a purely instrumentalist view of reality, where, as I said, your so-called knowledge is actually just a model of an unknown thing which you employ to predict the measurements you read out against a ruler or on a meter or something, then yes, we've made progress exactly of the kind you describe.
But I was trying to make a point about epistemology and ontology. Physics has actually been pretty catastrophic for ontology. I don't think its wrong to say that from the point of view of physics we simply do not know what anything actually is.
> I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
Yes. But this is a fairly radical position historically and philosophically. Most people would say that there is more to existence than measurement and I while I share your instrumentalist sympathies, like most physicists, I don't see the philosophical case that we can have a consistent worldview if we denounce all knowledge not related to measurement as a total non-starter.
Think about what instrumentalism really means. When you utter the sentence the earth is an oblate spheroid, you are actually making an incredibly complicated set of statements about the outcomes of experiments. If we take the instrumentalist view the measurement doesn't actually tell us the earth is an oblate spheroid - it just tells us that if we make a series of measurements then they come out in such a way as to be concordant with a model of the earth as an oblate spheroid. Are you really prepared to give up the idea that the earth is a thing you can know about?
I actually rather think physics strongly encourages us to adopt the instrumentalist view, primarily because it seems so clear that physics has a local character. In GR there simply is no state of affairs whatever about what is happening "right now" except at the point in spacetime where you make a measurement. Really think about what that means. If we are standing at the north pole and make a measurement of some kind, how can it pertain to the earth as a distributed object in space when we know GR says there is no state of affairs pertaining to that object at the moment of the measurement?
GR tells us all about what the outcome of various measurements will be, but it also calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean. The instrumentalist is committed to the idea that the only thing we can talk about is the results of measurements. What the measurements operate on is just not something we can know. I think that's weird. Physicists often conflate their mathematical models with reality and that lets them think an instrumentalist view is sufficient: the measurements coming out such and such a way is taken as evidence that the universe is filled with objects consistent with the model. But that association is non-trivial in modern physics.
It must be the case that our measurements are interfacing with something ontologically real, so I can't agree with the minimizing tone that treats respect for them them as implicitly necessitating a total exclusion of ontology. Far from breaking the link between measurement and reality, examples like GR’s localism or QM’s treatment of particles show that measurement is what pushes us into new and unfamiliar ontological commitments.
To then suggest that Asimov's essay depends on such a radical version of instrumentalism feels unnecessary, given that his argument attaches just as well, I would say better, to a view that makes space for ontology but still underwrites the history of progress he was describing. His essay seems less a failure to follow deeper philosophical detours than a decision to keep his argument tied to that central point.
You also seem to be implying a kind of ontological "regression" in the history of knowledge which I think comes from projecting specific ontological attitudes retroactively onto the past when those distinctions weren’t even part of the vocabulary.
A big problem with Steven Jay Gould’s self-posturing as a savior of Darwinian theory was that he manufactured a crisis of his own invention about "gradualism" and then claimed to resolve it. Darwin never assumed a fixed speed of evolution, so the supposed crisis dissolves once you stop reading one into the history. A similar attitude helps in reading the history of science: early measurements and models need not be seen as knowledge of ontology that we somehow "lost" but as data accompanied by overconfident declarations that can be separated out.
If you correct for ontology in this way, treating the instruments as interfacing with whatever is ontologically real, then you see steady progress toward more accurate knowledge. Far from being subtly wrong this reinforces the core of Asimov’s point that successive models are increasingly less wrong because they are tethered to reality (e.g flat to globe to spheroid to GR’s spacetime and beyond). It's that same arc of progress carrying us through those examples into more exotic ontologies. And the sense of crisis comes not from instrumentalism's commitments but from identifying progress with 'intuitively familiar' as if outgrowing our conceptual inheritance were failure rather than discovery.
Long reply already but one more thing. I would go so far as to say that all-out instrumentalism is a way of reading what Kuhn advocated (and perhaps actually what Kuhn believed depending on who you ask), and it was key to him to get away from notions of progress that rely on ontological commitments to external reality. And so a lot of the pushback was to rescue "progress" by insisting on ontological commitments that make the notion of progress make sense. In that light I can't see a way of reading Asimov advocating progress that would commit him to that kind of instrumentalism.
To be honest, I think you're straying from science into philosophy.
"The nature of being", "ontology", "it calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean".
Science is not about the search for meaning, it's about describing and understanding the physical and natural world. Meaning is up to you, and me, and everyone else.
Asimov was not talking about meaning.
It's easy to see that he wasn't, because nobody would make the categorical statement that there's unequivocal progress in the search for meaning, because meaning is such a cultural (and personal) thing. Meaning is not scientific, and is highly subjective. I wouldn't even know how to measure meaning. Self-reporting? Chemically measured happiness? What.
Had the English professor complained "we think we know so much, yet we're so ignorant about what it all means! People are so unfulfilled, live such empty lives! Wake up, sheeple!" I bet Asimov would have... -- well, he probably would have had humorous words for that too, but his argument would have been different.
I do not think of science as distinct from philosophy. But I'm not talking about the sort of meaning you are talking about. I'm talking about the fundamental basic question of what the physical world consists of and how we relate to it.
When I say that most people think there is more to the world than measurement, I don't mean art or love or whatever. I mean that most people think that the world is made up of things that exist whether we measure them or not, things which have their own nature which we somehow can understand. The purely instrumental thinker says we can't understand those things, we only have measurements and mathematical expressions that relate measurements.
I'm not a native speaker so I had to look up what "ontology" means specifically, and what I got is : "The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. " (among other things)
I agree in that sense that physics does not do well here. I actually think physics _cannot_ do well here. Physics (and the "hard" sciences more generally) are good at describing what something is, and how it interacts with things around it. We "know" by assembling individual pieces of information that form a consistent model, then declare that model to be true. When a piece of information outside of that model arises, we then have to call that model in question.
I do not "know" the Earth is spherical from direct experience. I do "know" it from other indirect means - reading, measurements, images from space and so on. I do not also think that Asimov is saying anything about how we know what we know - he just talks about how "science is wrong" is not a true statement. Science is always approximately correct, but how approximate is the question.
So perhaps I'm missing the point entirely here, but I don't understand your distinction of "instrumentalist knowledge" vs other kinds of knowledge. If you say physics cannot explain my knowledge that I enjoy watching the sunrise - then absolutely yes. That is not it's realm. In the same way that physics cannot explain the history of medieval China to me. A common issue among physicists is to assume that this is the only way to view the world, and I disagree with that. There are many systems of knowledge, and each is good at certain things. Rejecting one as the "global" system misses the richness of other kinds of knowledge building.
Absolutely, having the AI agent write out a draft and leave it there, or better yet grant it read-only access to my email and have it draft email responses and store it somewhere else where I can retrieve it would be fantastic.
AI is still not at the point where I am comfortable letting it run free with my email, but a draft that I can read over and make changes to before sending it out is a game changer.
For say something like the state legislature race in a state, they count up all the seats they have won in each district, and whichever party has won the most seats wins the race. Voters are therefore put in buckets (districts) and their votes are counted in aggregate.
This allows a process called "gerrymandering" to redraw district boundaries arbitrarily. So if there is say a democratic-party majority voting bloc in a particular area, I can redraw the surrounding districts to split that geographic area into many parts, so their votes get split across multiple districts and hence "diluted".
The voting rights act asserted this is a form of voter suppression. Specifically related to black voter suppression, if a state is say 40% black by population and they have no black representatives, it warrants a closer look as to why.
I hope that wasn't too confusing of an explanation. I'm not from the US but I'm quite interested in these things.
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