radhardened

somewhat contrary to the previous post: another pet peeve is people (some classic libertarians, others paleoconservatives) saying that "there is no free lunch".

there are certainly zero-sum, no-win situations that occur in life sometimes. and the phrase is often also used in some fatalistic, eschatological, broad heat-death-of-the-universe sense. sure sure, second law.

but as the great MC hawking put it: the earth's not a closed system, it's powered by the sun. there's an effectively unlimited massive fusion reactor in space we literally all live off of, and for all practical purposes we always have and always will. it is very much a free lunch! concretely: every lunch you have ever eaten and will ever eat is a free lunch given to earth by the sun.

also like .. any technological improvement that increases efficiency of some work is a metaphorical free lunch. if there were no free lunches to be had from R&D we may as well be banging rocks together as using any later developments.

also any positive-sum games or interactions, social relationships, political organization, economic cooperation .. the list of free lunches goes on and on.

enjoy your free lunches!

graydon2

reading some technology reporting today and they're using the term flywheel, a pet peeve of mine. I have written about this before on some ephemeral social media, but I am moved now to repeat my objection in a place of greater posterity.

the word "flywheel" seems to have entered the business-writing lexicon with a book about amazon called "good to great". I have not read this and have no intention of reading it. perhaps the metaphor was used sensibly there. it is no longer used sensibly. here are a couple representative samples I just found via google of the way it is used nowadays (emphasis mine):

By definition, a flywheel is a heavy revolving wheel that is used in a machine to increase momentum and therefore provide greater stability to the machine. Given its weight, the flywheel is difficult to push from a standstill, but once it starts moving it gradually builds momentum, which eventually enables the wheel to turn by itself and create even more of its own momentum through a self-reinforcing loop.

or:

A flywheel is a massive metal disk, or wheel, that often weighs over 2,000 kgs. It takes a lot of effort to get it started, but once it starts to turn there are counterweights around the outside of the wheel that start to take effect and it starts to build momentum almost by itself. From that point, the same effort can be placed on the flywheel and it will start to turn faster and faster.

this is characteristic of the way people use the term now. they talk about "getting the flywheel going" on their business, because once you're over some kind of threshold the flywheel will somehow magically start spinning faster and faster on its own.

that is not what a flywheel is or what it does at all.

a flywheel is a kinetic battery. you put angular momentum into it when you have a surplus and you can take some back out when you have a deficit (assuming friction hasn't lost it all yet). other metaphors that have a similar effect are account balances, or warehouse inventory, or queues. or taking an average of something noisy over time. take your pick.

a wheel that somehow went faster of its own volition would be a perpetual motion machine. a fantastical solution to all the world's energy needs. but also fairly prohibited by .. physics. there is no such thing.

people using the metaphor this way seem to be getting it confused with positive feedback phenomena. which do exist! even in business! here is a classic one: sales volume up => unit production cost down => sale price down => customer demand up => sales volume further up. a.k.a. "economies of scale". great stuff, bravo capitalism. it has some other positive feedback loops that are not so great like "overproduction crisis" or "market panic" but we need not dwell on those.

there are also lots of other non-capitalism examples of positive feedback phenomena. population growth, cytokine storms, even the digital flip-flop circuits storing this post are positive feedback systems.

but: a flywheel is not a positive feedback system. not at all. please, I beg you: for pity sake stop using it as a muddled metaphor for one.

nanila

What was the most sick that you've ever been?

I came down with flu when Keiki was about 4 months old. That is the most ill I've been in my adult life. I could hardly get out of bed and my temperature was over 40 C for several days. Runner up would be the ear infection I had when I was 11, which was so bad my teacher found me lying on the concrete floor of the playground because my ear was too hot. It was the middle of winter.
What disease are you afraid of getting?

All of them, but mostly: Dementia.
Are you a big baby when it comes to taking medicine/shots for your illnesses?

No. I am a big fan of medical intervention for illness and pain.
Is going to the doctor really THAT bad?

Not at all, it's just time-consuming, which is why I tend to put it off.
Would you have the flu twice a month if you were paid $1,000 for having it?

Assuming “the flu” really does mean influenza and not a bad cold, absolutely not. Genuine flu is completely debilitating. It took me two weeks to recover from the bout I had in Answer 1. This scenario would mean being continuously sick. No thank you.

graydon2

I just noticed this post from around when I first learned the term "substructural type system" is (almost) 20 years old. That sure was a while ago.

(I knew the space of ideas already but was working my way through more legit treatments of it. amusingly none of the research links in that post are live anymore -- back then arxiv.org was still "xxx.lanl.gov" haha)

azurelunatic

Caught Yellface with her WHOLE HEAD inside the Fritos bag.

altamira16

This book was a very well done AI skeptic book that was rooted in deep knowledge of the history of artificial intelligence. It brought to light some interesting points that I had never thought about, and it never descended into a rant.

It gets into the history of AI, and a lot of that discussion is rooted in the type of probabilistic models that I learned about in grad school. It is discussing n-grams, Markov, and so on.

There is a discussion about how AI is an attempt to break labor and gets into a more detailed history of the Luddites. The Luddites were craftsmen, and machines were replacing their hard won skills with an inferior product. The machines that were doing this were also dangerous to their operators.

Various people involved in AI feel like there should not be any AI policy until it is thoroughly discussed, but the authors propose that existing laws should be used to limit the use of AI in areas where it can do harm. They quote Michael Atleson, an attorney within the FTC Division of Advertising Practices:

Your therapy bots aren't licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods.

The book was extremely critical about the use of AI in making medical decisions and in law. Law has to do with the nuance of language, and generated language that no human really thinks through does not have the same nuance.

There were also good arguments for limiting the use of AI in education.

In August 2020, thousands of British students, unable to take their A-level exams due to the COVID-19 pandemic, received grades calculated based on an algorithm that took as input, among other things, the grades that other students at their schools received in previous years. After massive public outcry, in which hundreds of students gathered outside the prime minister's residence at 10 Downing Street in London, chanting "Fuck the algorithm!" the grades were retracted and replaced with grades based on teachers' assessments of the student work.

While some technology in education is important, a lot of technology in education is designed to give an inferior education to poor kids and union-bust.

One thing that I did not know was that the little Gemini summary on a Google search uses 10-30 times more energy than search before this feature was added.

The authors see both AI doomers and AI boosters as two sides of the same coin. Both of these groups believe that the AI will become smarter than humans. The outcome is the only thing that they differ on.

The group that wants to consider the data used to train the models and the impacts that AI has on the present really does not want to get lumped in with AI doomers that think that the AI is going to eventually get so smart that it will destroy humanity. They are rooted in reality while the doomers are not. There was some criticism of how Vice President Harris was trying to get the people concerned with the present impact of AI to work with the doomers.

There were a lot of references Karen Hao's work. How has recently released the book "Empire of AI." Hao is an AI journalist specifically focused on OpenAI.

terriko

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

I decided to be a bit lazy with July’s stationary choices, so we’re continuing 2 pens from last month and just adding in the pen that I had been using for todo lists, and repeating the bunny sticker sheet that I hadn’t finished. I did get some new puppy stickers for my calendar (I’m currently tracking which days I spend some time writing). It’s a bit of chaos here this month as I finish my job, work on writing for a little fanfic event I decided to join, and then do some travel to visit family, so I don’t think I’ll be doing much actual journal writing.

Pens, Ink and stickers for July 2025. They're described in more detail in the post.

Inks & Fountain Pens:

Pilot Metropolitan <CM> with KWZ Gummiberry

Pilot E95S <M> with Pilot Iroshizuku kon-peki

Ooly duo with original pink cartridge and orange highlighter

Stickers:

Meowashi bubble tea dogs

Stickii books and bunnies

Mind Wave puppies

The Latest Kate elephants

No changes to paper this month either!

Notes from last month:

I picked up an Endless Phantom retractable fountain pen during their kickstarter and it arrived. Unfortunately it seems to dry out constantly, so I’m going to try reseating the gasket (they have a video on how to do this) and we’ll see if I have better luck after that. I spent a bit extra to get a fude nib and it writes beautifully when it writes, but it’s been pretty frustrating!

azurelunatic

Susan visited!

Thorn didn't get carjacked by a Bigfoot.

drwho

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

nanila

I have been struggling to concentrate today. It was hard not to spiral back to that day. I had been living in London (and therefore the UK) for less than a year. I spent much of the day unable to contact family and friends to reassure them I was OK because the mobile networks were overwhelmed. I remember walking the crowded streets to meet friends and my then-partner. The faces of the shuffling Londoners. The relentless wail of sirens.

I'm coping by watching the BBC documentary series on the bombings. For some reason I need some kind of external validation for feeling the way I do today and this is providing it.

(Access locked) Posts from that date: DW, LJ

Here is what I wrote on the 8th of July, 2005. I don't think I agree with myself here, not entirely. I was rationalising my own fear. The body count is also the point.

Terrorism isn't about the reality of statistics. Of the several million people living in or visiting the greater London area, a tiny percentage were physically hurt or killed by the bombings. A slightly larger percentage witnessed them firsthand, and a huge number of them were temporarily inconvenienced by the shutdown of the London Transport system. The chances that the next bus or tube journey that the average Londoner makes will have a bomb on it are not much greater than they were yesterday or will be tomorrow. But, as I said, this is not about statistics. It's about the perception of statistics. However miniscule your chances were and are of being blown to bits by a terrorist attack, they are now at the forefront of your mind, whether you want them to be or not.

Terrorism isn't about the frequency of occurrence of terrorist acts, or of similar kinds of attacks made during open war. Londoners of different generations experienced the Blitz and the IRA bombings of the 1980s. Many of them have been through this before. However, it is the very unpredictability of terrorism that makes it so frightening, that makes a return to normalcy as difficult as it was the last time, because the ordinary citizen has no way of knowing when, where or if another attack will happen.

People deal with this in a myriad of ways. Some become defiant, others resigned. Some find themselves swallowing down fear for weeks, months or years after the events, every time they board a bus or enter an Underground station. This is the real point of terrorist attacks, not the body count. All emotional responses are fully permissible, but it is the way that we act upon them that will determine whether or not we build a world in which the slight probability of terrorist attack on the average citizen will continue to be a weapon that can wield so much power.

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Page generated Jul. 16th, 2025 04:24 am

Reading

there absolutely are free lunches, among them "all life on earth"

flywheels, again

The Friday Five on a Sunday

twenty years

Oh, cat

The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna

July 2025 Ink & Pens (+tiny Endless Phantom Review)

July has already been busy

It continues.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings.