Today https://news.ycombinator.com/ is glowing bright with AI memes and buzzwords like a Christmas tree. Everyone is there, including billion dollar corporations announcing a “CodeLama-34b” which is “designed for general code synthesis and understanding.” First of all, I personaly do not want to rely in any part of my life on any “synthesized” (and “understood” software, and demand an explicit opt-out. Yes, yes, I know. If I have any understanding of these subjects at all, this is a bubble and irrational exuberance....

What people call a burnout is a result of what we call psychological stress or a burden out of constant frustration about the particulars of the task at hand. We have never been evolved to live immersed in a constantly changing environment, where almost nothing that worked well yesterday will work day after tomorrow. The environment we have evolved in is stable, even in the social aspects (of traditionalist societies)....

Overview A valid (less wrong) intuitive metaphor is that we “learn” a “surface” which will match (will cover, up to the last wrinkle) the whole actual Himalaya. This notion “generalizes to any number of dimensions” meme (differences, distances and derivatives do not care about Mind’s abstract bullshit) The Himalayas (Truth) has to be “out there”. A good generalization is a bucket-sort, which can be thought off as a specific example of a classification problem....

Less wrong Ultimately, we are victims of over-simplified abstract theories based on fundamentally wrong premises and “theoretical” naive assumptions. Just like Freudian “psychology”, being a canonical system based on abstract bullshit, gave way to modern neuroscience and endocrinology, abstract economic theories have to be dropped in favor of “actual”, recurring behavioral patterns. Evolutionary psychology and behavioral endocrinology are out there to explain the markets. The smartest guys already exploited these biological and social principles to create and maintain clever meme-based pump-and-dump themes, and to manipulate a niche meme-coins (shitcoins) by pushing misleading, sophisticated false narratives which look “very smart” and “logical”....

DESCRIPTION: Oops, I did it again. The hack The word “implies” and corresponding arrows are grossly overloaded and have more than one subtle but distinct meanings. We will read and interpret the “arrows” (and the word “implies”) from different formalisms differently (as an implication in terms of necessity and sufficiency and as a single discrete step of causality). We will put the universal notion of an environment (and the corresponding Γ abstraction) from obscurity to the center....

AUTHOR: <lngnmn2@yahoo.com> First of all, abstraction barriers are very real (not merely abstract notions) and they are liteterally everywhere (at all levels, from molecular to social). The “most real” abstraction barrier is how what we call “atoms” are “used” by molecular (cell) biology. For cells atoms are is how ancient people used to conceptualize them - an atom is indivisible, indestructive, eternal, “just is”. More precisely, cell biology “is not concerned” with what atoms “really are” and use them as an abstraction, provided that there is no one to “see this”, aside from an “higher level” intelligent observer....

Emacs is a monument (just like Potala palace in Lhasa) of an old-school software engineering and classic languages – it is, indeed, a world heritage site of the golden age of programming. It also could be compared with the ghat complex of Varanasi, which began no one knows when and is constantly changing since then, being reshaped by the “waves” and “tides” of social dynamics. Visiting Emacs is like visiting one of such historic sites, and just like them, it has been re-shaped by the successions of mass-hysteria and zealous over-excitement about bullshit....

Using the standard formalisms only within appropriate contexts Fitting (using an optimization method) a weighted sum, a line or a curve or a whole “plane” to match the data. Statistics This is, by definition, observing, categorizing and counting observations (which also means “measuring”) that already happened. There is no notion of any potential or possible outcomes. We just observe and count (measure). My favorite example is from archery, when one just measures the distances between hits (arrows), sum them and divide by the number of shots fired (which is averaging of the distances)....

AUTHOR: <lngnmn2@yahoo.com> Writing a semi-automated trading system is easy - just ask John Carmack to write it down for you. Before that Eric Evans has to extract the domain knowledge using his DDD approach, and then some top mathematician, or maybe Bartosz Milewski, would build a consistent model from it. Maybe it is even better to rather ask Simon Peyton Jones to write a matching engine, so you will have it pure-functional, with the most important parts formally proven in Coq (and then translated into Haskell code)....

#+HUGO_TAGS esoteric “life itself” There are some principles which are useful for a programmer to realize. There are deep connections between these and functional programming, math and logic. First, biological life “assumes” permanent (immutable) molecular structures and atoms as being “eternal”, well, atomic “black box abstraction”. Of course, neither Life nor evolution (being mere processes) assumes nothing, but these are properties of a stable-enough environment which makes Life (and evolution) possible....