Mechanising the production of code is good thing. And crafting code as art is a good thing. It is sign of a wider trend that we need to look at these things like adversaries.

I look forward to the code-as-art countermovement. It's gonna be quite something.

Unless of course our calculations are a bit off, then we accidentally created a bed version of the wrong chalice from raiders of the lost ark, but I think it's fine.

processing the whole number is absurd

Calling them 'people problem' is a convenient catch-all that lacks enough nuance to be a useful statement. What constitutes good communication? Are there cross purposes?

> Non-technical people do not intuitively understand the level of effort required or the need for tech debt cleanup; it must be communicated effectively by engineering - in both initial estimates & project updates. Unless leadership has an engineering background, the value of the technical debt work likely needs to be quantified and shown as business value.

The engineer will typically say that the communication needed is technical, but in fact the language that leadership works with is usually non-technical, so the translation into this field is essential. We do not need more engineers, we need engineer who know how to translate the details.

I realise that, here on HN, most will probably take the side of the rational technologist, but this is a self-validating cycle that can identify the issue, but cannot solve it.

IMO, we need more generalists that can speak both languages. I have worked hard to try and be that person, but it turns out that almost no-one wants to hire this cross-discipline communicator, so there's a good chance that I'm wrong about all of this.

A more pragmatic me would point out that the required energy and materials needed would mean we would need breakthroughs in space-based solar capture and mining, but this is still not New Physics.

I think the solution will come from exponentially advancing self-assembling machines in space. These can start small and, given the diminishing cost of getting things to space, some early iterations of the first generation could be mere decades away. There are several interesting avenues for self-assembling machines that are way past napkin-sketch phase. Solar arrays are getting bigger and we have already retrieved the first material from an asteroid.

The quality and reliability of AI agents for processes orchestration and technical reflection is now at a stage where it can begin to self-optimise, so even without (EDIT) a "take-off" scenario, these machines can massively outperform people in manufacturing orchestration, and I would say we are only some years from having tools that are good enough for much larger scale (i.e. planetary) operations.

Putting humans there is a whole other story. We are so fragile and evolved to live on Earth. Unsurprisingly, this biological tether doesn't get much of a look-in here. Just being on the ISS is horrible for a person's physiology and, I am guessing there would be a whole host of space sicknesses that would set in after a few years up there or elsewhere. Unless we find a way to modify our biology enough so we can continually tolerate or cure these ailments, and develop cryo-sleep, we're probably staying local - both of these are much more speculative that everything above, as far as i can tell.

the 3d plot is nice but not what i would call "spatialised", since it's still a flat render, and I'm exactly thinking about the meshing of the thing. i am familiar with delaunay and marching cube strategies, at least enough to get a machine to hook them up to a spatial plotter

Michael Levin has talked about interesting dynamics with the bubble sort algorithm, which is only a few lines of code, that have parallels in biological processes, suggesting there is a more nuanced logic to nature that we are not seeing

I can do the VR part - any chance you can share the algo, so I can get the machine to lift it? I can imagine a 3d graphing tool would need spatialisation in order to be properly appreciated.

but really, every person i've seen who "activates" a lifestyle like this one only ever seems to wear black. i suppose it's the choice of any committed rationalist, but i think it's dull

also, fine so long as you don't need to go any where that requires a different type of shoe

then i got the machine to write a front-end that visualises them and builds a search query for you: https://pastebin.com/HNwytYr9

enjoy

"The model is a work of fiction based on the tacit and false assumption of frictionless barter. Attempting to apply such microeconomic foundations to understand a monetary economy means that mistakes in reasoning are inevitable." (p.239)

https://academic.oup.com/cje/article/48/2/235/7492210

Your comment about the generation of emotions does strike me a quite mechanistic and brain-centric. My understanding, and lived experience, has led me to an appreciation that emotion is a kind of psycho-somatic intelligence that steers both our body and cognition according to a broad set of circumstances. This is rooted in a pluralistic conception of self that is aligned with the idea of embodied cognition. Work by Michael Levin, an experimental biologist, indicates we are made of "agential material" - at all scales, from the cell to the person, we are capable of goal-oriented cognition (used in a very broad sense).

As for whether machines can feel, I don't really know. They seem to represent an expression of our cognitivist norm in the way they are made and, given the human tendency to anthropormorphise communicative systems, we easily project our own feelings onto it. My gut feeling is that, once we can give the models an embodied sense of the world, including the ability to physically explore and make spatially-motivated decisions, we might get closer to understanding this. However, once this happens, I suspect that our conceptions of embodied cognition will be challenged by the behaviour of the non-human intellect.

As Levin says, we are notoriously bad at recognising other forms of intelligence, despite the fact that global ecology abounds with examples. Fungal networks are a good example.

I absolutely think that their approach is disingenuous, though the line between this and dishonesty is not something I would claim to understand well. You may say that taking a position that is fundamentally self-interested is valid, but I would point out that, given the scale of the impact that arises from the attachment to this stance, good-faith negotiation must include some form of integration of information regarding the consequences of holding this position.

At this point, where the negative impacts of plastic over-production, micro-scale pollution of biological systems and climate impacts of manufacture are so well documented, clinging to a "what about me" argument is tantamount to a child repeating the same question over and over in order to avoid listening to the response. So, yes, maybe not classically "bad-faith" but certainly a calculated strategy that prevents progress.