On GPT-3
Companies
Debuild.io - co-founder Sharif Shameem
One of Sharif's key questions:
What is the best encoding for human thought?Is it written language? Will Neuralink actually be useful ?Currently the only way to encode our thoughts is writing or speaking, however that can be incredibly lossy. Could we represent an idea as an n-dimensional vector? Or perhaps a series of electrical signals we could somehow replay in our brains?
2020-07-27 - Conversations
Alan Kay
Me: What are the key ideas in the Smalltalk programming language?
Alan Kay: The Squeak/Smalltalk programming language is based on human intellectual structure and physical structure. We figured out how to look at it from a level of ideas and from a level of how to have tools that support that and came up with the top-down, bottom-up, make-a-world, simultaenous-interactive-multiparty-conversation-model thing. We are the first language to do that. It is very good for taking humans and changing them.
Me: What's the difference between state and data in a computer program?
Alan Kay: Data is the static stuff, the "black boxes" that you can connect to with wires. State is the changing stuff like in a physics simulator where you have position, velocity, acceleration.
Me: What's a virtual machine with respect to Smalltalk?
Alan Kay: You have virtual machines like Java on the Java Virtual Machine and Parrot and Python, I think, runs on a number of different ones. You can treat a virtual machine as a piece of code running on your machine and by that, you can run other kinds of languages.
Me: What year was SmallTalk invented?
Alan Kay: 1967
Me: When did Christopher Alexander write Notes on a synthesis of form?
Alan Kay: The basis of the whole thing was there in 1960, but the book appeared in 1965 or so. The original article was published in 1964 in "Journal of Architectural Education."
Me: What's the first paragraph from Christopher Alexander's Notes on a synthesis of form?
Alan Kay: The first paragraph says: "In all fields of design there are a number of things that go under the same names, and which are usually treated as if they were the same. We shall show that, in fact, they are usually quite different, and their different character is often not recognized."
Me: what was the first reference for object oriented programming?
Alan Kay: It was Smalltalk and Squeak, the first time the whole system was there. Simula was object oriented, but not a whole system. C++ and the later one are "imperfectly" object oriented. Only a few people could think in those terms so there were too many ways of saying the same thing, even in the specifications. When the whole software architecture is written in terms of the objects being self-similar, you can do very powerful things.
Me: What does it mean that objects are self-similar?
Alan Kay: That they are generic or reusable parts, like the combinators from the whole series of essayists. See the Martin, Polanyi, Heidegger, and Alexander stuff. You can start with little hints from biology where systems can self-replicate and have a notion of a whole in a part, which is then assembled.
Me: What programming languages actually got object orientation right?
Alan Kay: Ruby is still fairly small. Smalltalk is the best and JavaScript is also getting better. Self has done a lot of interesting work. Self, Python, Smalltalk, Ruby, and JavaScript. (Java is an ugly mess and only gave rise to an ugly mess.)
Me: Are objects about state or data?
Alan Kay: It is about what is state and what is data. This is all still very hard to see because we haven't been taught to think about it that way.
Me: So objects are about state and data?
Alan Kay: Yes, and what is state and data and how can I make new ones. Objects are also objects in themselves. They are parts that come together. You make something that has properties, and some properties you would like to be inside, some outside, and some both. That is the first object oriented thing, the ability to make parts and put them together.
Me: What are the key characteristics of objects?
Alan Kay: Objects are processual. They are active, dynamic and typically have properties that can be changed. They are instantiated. They have structure, properties, and state. Objects are dynamic.
Me: How do objects relate to virtual machines?
Alan Kay: The virtual machine is like the operating system. It provides services and resources like sharing and memory and interrupt handling. It is "a world."
Doug Engelbart
First off, that's not the tyranny of the rocket equation. Rockets have a payload limit that has to be overcome by adding propellant thus increasing weight further which ... you get the point.
"Elon" answers confidently and incorrectly.
The incorrect answer "Elon" is true. We do have to design and build before we launch. It's also true that most modern rockets aren't reusable. But here's where things start to go very subtly wrong again...
"At least if X you can Y therefore reusability" is an interesting argument structure, but the argument is factually incorrect.
Launching from the ocean has no impact on reusability, nor does it imply that we'd be able to land it on a runway.
GPT-3 is fascinating! But in the interest of "learning from someone", it feels more like sophistry than rhetoric.
Plato Dialogue
Writing Fiction
How it works
Human intellect “priming” based on examples.
Magic and human art is in the training.
