You say that the times are bad. Be better yourselves, and the times will be better: You are the times. Technology must multiply human agency. DMs closed.
New York, USA
Joined October 2018
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Delicatus ille est adhuc cui patria dulcis est; fortis autem iam, cui omne solum patria est; perfectus vero, cui mundus totus exilium est.
Turns out philosophy was the right move. I now have an opening on a problem more important than any other I know of in science.
Painful confusion between two kinds of theories (experience vs. explanation), the different kinds of knowledge each makes accessible, where they overlap or not, and the reflexive relationship between them.
It's very easy to forget that objectivity is constructed.
Oh no. Mathematical continuity and continuity in Hegel and elsewhere are very different.
It's good to go on HN for the same reason it's good to go to the zoo. You must know how the animals live.
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Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness – amazing.
Released in 1996 as the second single from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, “1979” became the Smashing Pumpkins' biggest American hit, reaching No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on both the Modern Rock Tracks and Mainstream Rock Tracks charts. The album was eventually certified 10× Platinum in the United States. “1979” was almost left off the album: producer Flood gave Corgan a final deadline to complete the unfinished song or remove it from the record. Corgan went home, finished the lyrics that night, and returned the next day with a new demo that convinced Flood to keep it.
Billy Corgan wrote the track as a nostalgic reflection on adolescence and the transition into adulthood. Although the title refers specifically to the year Corgan was 12, the song is less a literal autobiography than an idealised reflection on what it felt like to be young.
The crux is the limits of modeling open-ended systems and whether we can transcend them.
Scientists running isolated experiments and LLM science automation bros talking about scale + experimental data being enough are making the same mistake. You're stuck in a sandbox.
Endless back and forth about whether bottom-up simulation of biology is technically feasible. In almost every other physical domain we are focused on putting sensors everywhere to collect time series data and then using that to model systems. There is a continuous flow of electricity running from your head to your fingertips and toes instructing downstream biological processes and receiving signals back in a loop and we are hardly recording it. Instead, we are obsessing over building virtual cells in abstracted environments that repeatedly achieve little predictive value.
Where do you think the bigger marginal return to time and money is likely to be?
This is how technology feels to me, but there are miles to go before technology feels like music to everyone.
