Can you recreate all phenomena computationally? Could you replace the antenna of your radio or mobile phone with a special CPU? Could you bomb a country with CPUs? I don't think so.
We DO have PB-grade storage facilities and they lack full AI. Moving the memory inside a single box instead of having interconnected devices is not going to bring AI just like that.
I wonder if there isn't some fundamental misunderstanding here. What if it's not "just the neurons". If you found a Regency TR-1 radio you could wonder "how can this 4-transistor device produce a continuous stream of music, much like Spotify, which requires billions of transistor to run?". Of course, the radio also has an antenna, which is a completely different device than a transistor.
The device running Spotify may also have an antenna, but I hope you get the analogy. My analogy is not meant to be taken faithfully, so that we need to start looking for antennas now instead of neurons. I am just saying that maybe the neuron-counting game is not the only thing. Maybe there is something else -- not magical, not divine, but physical and as-of-yet unknown. Humanity didn't always know everything, and maybe still doesn't.
Exactly my point. If all you want to do is replicate the TR-1 with four transistors, that's easy, just like making a human mind by creating a baby is easy. But making AGI with silicon, while demanding functionality completely alien to a human brain, is like making a TR-1 that can save your playlists and pause/resume the audio while still only using four transistors.
In this case the game is not building 'electric airplanes' but 'better batteries'. If you have the power plant at a reasonable power output / weight building the airplane is not such a challenge.
Additionally, I can find 6am flights, which means that I can be at 8am at the destination and have a full day ahead of me. By train the whole day will be dedicated to travel. Same on the return. Losing 2/3 days on a business trip is a big cost to pay.
Sometimes. But if I'm flying out to somewhere at 6am, the alternative is often that I'd just be spending the night in my own bed. Now, to be honest, I'm sometimes fine with heading down somewhere the day before and having a relaxing evening at my destination. But that may not be ideal for people with families and isn't really justified from a business standpoint.
There is one aspect where flying beats trains: checking luggage. If you have big suitcases it's a PITA to get them on and off the train. And changing trains means taking the bags with you, unlike flights where bags are (usually) transferred.
I disagree; taking whatever bags you like and having access to them through the whole journey is much, much nicer than having to hand them over and hope they arrive in the right place, and potentially paying extra or even having to book ahead if you've got anything other than a standard suitcase.
Not typically for international flights, and even for some US domestic carriers. Same goes for most of the rest of the world (e.g. Asia) which is what I was actually thinking about. Brazil has free luggage mandated in law.
Even when you do have to pay in the US it is typically very generous. Larger size and weight allowance, and you won’t get dinged for being even a few kilos over. And the bottom tier of frequent flyer programs (which is usually trivial to get and keep) waives all these fees anyway. I can’t remember the last time I paid for luggage allowance outside of a trip to or through Europe.
I wish that service was more widespread. The Swiss SBB will pick up your luggage at your door before your trip and deliver it at your destinations door afterwards. For a few of course, but still.
I had that issue last time and I used a service to send my luggage to the destination. They came to pick it up at my place and delivered it to my other place.
If only. There's a nice flat-earth documentary on Netflix. Some scientifically-minded flat-earthers designed and carried out not one but two experiments to "prove" the earth is flat. Both of them came conclusively on the side that the earth is not flat, but is quasi-spherical with a radius and rotation rate consistent with the scientific consensus. Remember, these experiments were on their own terms. They repeated them several times and they declared them "inconclusive". This is not someone you can convince by any means.
To be extremely reductive, allowing false beliefs into one's web of beliefs corrupts it. This typically gives rise to a multitude of other false beliefs. Flat earthers almost never only believe one obviously false conspiracy theory. They become epistemically susceptible, and worse still, they tend to spread these awful ways of thinking with great zeal.
In the more general case, I recommend you learn about the ethics of belief. The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on the topic is a good starting point: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-belief/
Maybe someone can come along and answer your question in a more succinct yet equally (or ideally more) convincing way. This request that you commit several hours to educating yourself is the best I can do at this time.
How do you inform a voter on the implications of say, tax policy, and expect them to make a rational decision if they can't even comprehend that the earth is proven to not be flat? Ignorance and its tolerance hurts everyone in a democracy.
It's not that curious, it's pretty clearly self describing actually.
And what's wrong with arguments against democracy? We are in a thread explicitly discussing questioning anything and everything and talking about the virtues of being averse to dogma. What if democracy is not as good as it gets? What if there's an alternative that is not authoritarianism?
I saw a keynote by Bill Dally when he was promoting the then-new CUDA framework/language. His message was that if you want a new language to be adopted it needs to do something (something reasonably important) 10x better than the competition. Even 2x better is not enough to motivate the disruption of changing languages.
The Julia programming language is an interesting example of a language addressing a niche. It originally focused on scientific computing - the ease of a scripting language (like Python) and the speed of a C or C++ program.
More recently, Julia promotes itself as a general-purpose language suitable for non-scientific domains too. However, the association with scientifc computing remains strong. It's too early to say if that perception among developers will change over time.
Julia is one of those products that is not only 10x better in one dimension, but is also at least marginally better in most other dimensions compared to Matlab. I think they have a bright future.
Julia is lucky because they are targeting not just a niche but a userbase that has been amassed already. Really what they're doing is directly taking on Matlab it seems, where Matlab users have gotten frustrated with how stale and expensive the language is. Julia has the fortunate task of convincing unsatisfied people who are paying a shit ton of money for an inferior product to try a superior product for free.
Even this doesn't really capture how much better it has to be, because there are so many dimensions to a PL. You have to not only be 10x better than the competition in some dimension, but you also have to be competitive in all other dimensions.
Let's say your language X is 10x faster than language P. Or it compiles 10x faster. Or you can write programs 10x faster. That's not enough. You also need:
- a complete compiler and debugger toolchain
- a complete language server implementation, and language modes for all popular IDEs
- a package manager with a large package ecosystem
- a community with live chat support and a Stack Overflow presence
- robust documentation with copious examples, tutorials, guides, and technical info. These days even a multi-hundred page book with professional editing available for free is expected.
- you have to be responsive to bugs and provide patches promptly
- your language is expected to have undergone a full independent security audit, and to be up-to-date on the latest security issues
- you have to manage the community and deal with petty interpersonal conflicts or else word gets out that your language has a "toxic community"
- support for all major operating systems and hardware architectures
- support for the web through wasm, so you need experts at that as well as x86 and ARM platforms now.
- And on top of all that, your project needs to be completely open source, with a free and open license that permits royalty free, patent free, commercial use. Oh, and your users both corporate and personal expect your work to be completely free as in beer. They won't pay anything for it. Not even a dollar. And if you ask them to pay something they don't weigh the value of your product versus the competition, they balk immediately and don't even consider it. It's been a non-starter to ask for money for a PL for decades.
So even if your language is 10x better in some way, it's not going to be 10x better in all ways. In fact, it needs to be at least as competitive as other languages in the above (and many other) dimensions to gain traction outside of enthusiasts. This is why it's so hard to gain traction in the PL field, and why most of the top new languages to emerge over the last decade or so (Rust, Go, Swift) came from patrons with deep pockets. The only exception I can think of is Zig, and even that's in a minor league compared to the ones listed.
And that should be a single visible something that has 10x improvement. 1.1^25 exceeds 10, but a new language (or really anything) that is 10% better in 25 different aspects probably wouldn't make the cut.
The 10X rule of thumb holds in many areas where you have to overcome existing sunk cost, large market inertia, or a network effect.
I’d say it also holds for operating systems, network protocols, core tooling, etc.
The thing improved 10X might vary though, and for any niche there may be more than one thing that can be improved. Linux for instance displaced Windows NT by being both cheaper (technically free) and radically more flexible.
