I don't know if this was in your lifetime, but Bill Clinton reduced government spending through the National Performance Review. Not only did he do it, but he did it in a planned and strategic way, that included an initial phase of research, followed by education and recommendations, which were send to congress for approval.
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
The Republican party is literally in control of Congress and the presidency. Copying Clinton is something they could do. The fact that they don't appear to have made a serious effort to increase revenues and reduce spending in a sane and organized way raises questions.
The Republicans have this idea that cutting taxes and increasing spending will reduce the ratio of debt/gdp by increasing the denominator. It does increase GDP but I think it increases the debt faster, so it can't work. Happy to be proven wrong.
They do not actually believe that. What they believe is that cutting taxes will give them the short-term means to acquire assets that will become much more valuable after the nation has been destroyed, to which the escalating debt contributes. The crisis is a feature for them.
It doesn't "raises questions" it "answers questions". Anybody who believes the republicans in America are "the party of fiscal responsibility" is a joke.
That's not what I was saying. And "winning" elections implies legitimacy but when that comes via gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and possible vote tampering that claim rings hollow.
If you actually believe in democracy and what it stands for you might have some concern, rather than just cheering on the team whose jersey you wear.
The Senate still requires 60 votes to close debate and pass legislation, with rare weird exceptions like reconciliation. The 1990s had more bipartisanship, so Clinton skillfully got enough Republicans to support some of his moves.
Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
> Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
Biden passed the bipartisan infrastructure act as well as USICA subsidies. The first step act was bipartisan. The deficit reduction in Obama's time was bipartisan. The american rescue plan wasn't bipartisan, but republicans claim credit for its effects. You don't really have much evidence here.
I've read quite a bit of classical Chinese philosophy, and in my opinion that major piece that is directly translatable to Western concerns is the discussion of management principles. Confucian and legalist scholars recognized that statecraft was fundamentally a management problem, and they included a lot of wisdom about that sort of thing in their writings. This includes:
- One of the most important jobs of a leader is to find the talented people and give them work worthy of their talents
- Large projects start by laying a foundation which will facilitate later work
- Resource and disaster management are central problems of government
- If someone makes a bad decision, it is probably because they didn't see the value of the better decision. Instead of criticizing the path they chose, show them the superior value of the one they overlooked.
We brazillians have a popular saying: "muito cacique pra pouco índio" (a rough translation would be "too many shamans for too few tribesmen"). It's used as a criticism when too many people want to be at the helm.
I can related to that wisdom much more than I can relate to some old chinese (or old anything) text. I lived it, many times.
Maybe there are some important leadership advice in the text. But should you really apply it in the 21st century?
> We brazillians have a popular saying: "muito cacique pra pouco índio" (a rough translation would be "too many shamans for too few tribesmen"). It's used as a criticism when too many people want to be at the helm.
We have that in English too, but considering that the first to misidentify native people as Indians spoke Portuguese and Spanish primarily(?), the original version of this phrase may indeed be something like the one you’re familiar with. I’m not sure myself, but the history of America is much older than the history of the United States, and that is probably still something that I need to brush up on myself.
Nice, then I don't need the mysterious aesthetics of some old thinker to project wisdom. I can live by what relates to me in a more experience-oriented sense.
Thinking in humans is prior to language. The language apparatus is embedded in a living organism which has a biological state that produces thoughts and feelings, goals and desires. Language is then used to communicate these underlying things, which themselves are not linguistic in nature (though of course the causality is so complex that the may be _influenced_ by language among other things).
This is really over indexing on language for LLMs. It’s about taking input and generating output. Humans use different types of senses as their input, LLMs use text.
What makes thinking an interesting form of output is that it processes the input in some non-trivial way to be able to do an assortment of different tasks. But that’s it. There may be other forms of intelligence that have other “senses” who deem our ability to only use physical senses as somehow making us incomplete beings.
Sure, but my whole point is that humans are _not_ passive input/output systems, we have an active biological system that uses an input/output system as a tool for coordinating with the environment. Thinking is part of the active system, and serves as an input to the language apparatus, and my point is that there is no corollary for that when talking about LLMs.
The environment is a place where inputs exist and where outputs go. Coordination of the environment in real time is something that LLMs don’t do much of today although I’d argue that the web search they know perform is the first step.
Agreed. Many animals without language show evidence of thinking (e.g. complex problem solving skills and tool use). Language is clearly an enabler of complex thought in humans but not the entire basis of our intelligence, as it is with LLMs.
But having language as the basis doesn't mean it isn't intelligence, right? At least I see no argument for that in what's being said. Stability can come from a basis of steel but it can also have a basis of wood.
LLMs have no intelligence or problem solving skills and don't use tools. What they do is statistically pattern match a prompt against a vast set of tokenized utterances by humans, who do have intelligence and complex problem solving skills. If the LLM's training data were the writings of a billion monkeys banging on typewriters, any appearance of intelligence and problem solving skills would disappear.
Word embeddings are "prior" to an LLMs facility with any given natural language as well. Tokens are not the most basic representational substrate in LLMs, rather it's the word embeddings that capture sub-word information. LLMs are a lot more interesting than people give them credit for.
I am sure philosophers must have debated this for millennia. But I can't seem to be able to think without an inner voice (language), which makes me think that thinking may not be prior (or without) language. Same thing also happens to me when reading: there is an inner voice going on constantly.
Thinking is subconscious when working on complex problems. Thinking is symbolic or spatial when working in relevant domains. And in my own experience, I often know what is going to come next in my internal monologues, without having to actually put words to the thoughts. That is, the thinking has already happened and the words are just narration.
I too am never surprised by my brains narration but: Maybe the brain tricks you in never being surprised and acting like your thoughts are following a perfectly sensible sequence.
It would be incredibly tedious to be surprised every 5 seconds.
> which themselves are not linguistic in nature (though of course the causality is so complex that the may be _influenced_ by language among other things).
Its possible something like this could be said of the middle transformer layers where it gets more and more abstract, and modern models are multimodal as well through various techniques.
This criticism strikes me as lazy: it zeroes in on some casual introductory remarks made by the author which are intended to serve as a general guideline or frame of reference for understanding the concepts which follow, then invents a premise which is not in the article (that engineering doesn't contain discovery) and uses that to falsely demonstrate the weakness of the rest of the article.
How can you read this article and your takeaway is that "the author is arguing that engineering does not have abstraction or discovery"? How can you read this insightful article and think "this is extremely poor understanding" because the author does not discuss how "all engineering is full of discovery" when that is not even relevant to the topic of the article? Clearly their point is that engineering does have discovery, and they give examples specifically from the domain of software engineering.
If you think that discovery in all fields of engineering is an interesting topic, go ahead and write your own article about that topic. Show examples from plumbing, electrical engineering, and material science. It would be fascinating, it really would be! But that is not this article, nor is it at odds with what the author of this article is saying.
It's difficult to write an article like this. It takes time and consideration, organization and work. Nit-picking generalization which are not core to the argument of the article, on the other hand, is easy. Anyone can do it.
I am little confused by the article because it sounds like they are describing "pulse width" which is a common parameter on analog and digital synthesizers to change the character of the square wave. A square wave with a low pulse width will sound thinner than one with a high pulse width, and layering square waves with different pulse widths gives you a pleasant phasing effect.
Based on some cursory research, however, it seems that duty cycle is different than pulse width, so now I am unsure if they are trying to use duty cycle variation to implement pulse width modulation (PWM) or if they are doing something else entirely.
More precisely "pulse width" would be a time, while "duty cycle" would be a percent.
And while when going from 0% to 50% duty cycle it could be said that "a square wave with a low pulse width will sound thinner than one with a high pulse width", however, once you go past 50% duty cycle the situation reverses. So a 25% duty cycle would sound almost identical to a 75% duty cycle...the amplitudes of their Fourier transform components would be identical.
> almost identical ... components would be identical
I'm having a tough time reconciling how the former could be almost identical while the latter is identical. I guess the former involves a human listening through a speaker which has asymmetric imperfections (maybe the speaker moves outward more easily than it moves inward, or a DC offset in the signal leads to compression in the high-excursion side that doesn't exist on the low-excursion side, etc.) whereas the FFT readout doesn't necessarily have a speaker in the system at all.
25% and 75% would sound identical alone, but in a mix there often are interplays where it can create a difference. An easy way to hear it is to run two synced oscillators, say a square and a saw, with sharp attack. The resulting sound should be sufficiently different, one side would dampen the attack compared to the other. Furthermore, I think in hardware synths and those that emulate them changing pulse width can cause the module to implicitly shift the signal up or down to ensure consistent average voltage, further complicating things. I am curious what you mean by compression.
Good point. If I have 2 oscillators, and no control over their phase as they mix, then an option to choose 25% vs 75% for one of them would at least offer some variation instead of none.
As for compression, this [0] is a good intro. Most commonly it is applied to a signal deliberately to achieve a desired outcome, but I'm referring to a (generally) undesired speaker nonlinearity [1] near its maximum power handling capacity.
Different linearity properties on the positive and negative side would be pretty bad for a speaker, but possible. In the case of a square wave, non-linearity would be identical to a fixed amplitude change though, possibly with a DC bias.
Based on the gameboy wiki I looked up, the phase of the 25% duty and 75% duty are such that they are inverse of each other, seemingly eliminating the possibility of combining the two for different waveforms.
There already is a story like that in The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. One of the robot characters in the book decides to make a poet robot. They reason that a poet is "programmed" by their culture, and a culture is programmed by the previous culture, so the robot has to simulate the evolution of the world from the beginning of time in order to produce the AI poet. It's a wonderful and hilarious story.
It could be that Lem was influenced by Borges? The original poster is referencing a specific Borges short story called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" which he published in 1939. It influenced a number of other notable authors
Could you help clarify something for me? When I looked into the federal workforce, just looking at raw numbers without much insight about the "inside", it doesn't seem particularly bloated or wasteful to me: it runs at ~5% of the federal budget and at 2mil people it is about 0.5% of the population.
It looks like you and some other commenters, however, are discussing government contracts, which are projects and programs paid for the government but implemented by third-party contractors. Is that correct?
Yes, they are correlated
; contracts are created with budget authority afforded to federal employees. Essentially the only way to get promoted is to amass reports and budget, and use it in some way.
So it’s basically like this: yes, the federal government creates jobs and the cost of those jobs directly is only 5% of the budget. However the real cost of those jobs is in spending, in terms of opportunities they champion, which essentially amounts to all discretionary spending conducted by the federal government — ~30% of the budget.
This is correct. Rhodopsin, for example, is a G-protein coupled receptor, which means that activation of the receptor triggers G-proteins inside the cell which can activate or inhibit any number of cellular processes.
> But on the other hand, something like 40-50% of my paycheck goes out in taxes and I would prefer if my government actually spent it on things to improve my life versus dumb shit domestically or abroad.
I agree here, but one thing that has come to light recently is that the federal work force is only ~6% of the federal budget. That means that most of those taxes are not going to pay the salaries of government workers.
Also, a lot of the money from our taxes goes to public health, safety, resource management, and infrastructure. I'm happy to pay for things like that. I don't doubt that there is significant waste as well, but there have been a lot of egregious lies lately about how much waste there is and _where_ that waste is located.
I agree a ton the budget is transfer payments. That said I live in the DC metro area and a ton of people are complaining to high heaven - and they aren't technically in the federal work force. They're contractors. People who's jobs depend in large part on federal grants.
FY 2022 spending was around $6.75 trillion, civilian pay was $271 billion, or around 4% of the spending for that year. You'll find the numbers have been hovering around 4-5% for quite a while.
That actually looks par for the course in "western" governments. The only items going over 20% are typically related to pensions, social security, and health services. Everything else (in isolation) is basically a pittance.
This reminds me of an ancient Chinese story from the Liezi, where a craftsman presents a robot to King Mu that can sing and dance. After the robot beckons to the kind's concubines, he orders the craftsman to be killed. The craftsman is terrified and deconstructs the robot, demonstrating to the king that it is simply a collection of inanimate items. The king is impressed and says "can it be that the skill of a man can be equal to that of the creator?" It's a great story that I discovered because it's an early instance comparing creativity and invention to divine power. Not sure if it has been translated but the text is here: https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=37480
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
Reference: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...