Geez, I'm reminded of a business student's idea of "Uber for photoshoppers" (this is ~20 years ago): you upload your picture, you say what you want changed, and I guess you pick which photoshopper's work looks convincing from a marketplace of them...
He had a website, and the sample pic is a girl lying on her back, and in the "after" picture she's wearing a bigger cup-size..
This is intentionally much narrower: no custom requests, no creative edits.
It only does technical corrections that photographers already apply (lighting, white balance, perspective, sharpness).
Think more automated Lightroom than crowdsourced Photoshop.
I don’t see it as lying any more than adjusting exposure or white balance on a camera does.
It doesn’t add or remove anything from the scene, it just fixes bad lighting, color cast, perspective, and sharpness, basically what any decent photographer already does in post.
If anything, it helps photos reflect how the place actually looks in real life instead of dark, crooked, yellowish snapshots.
I love the idea that we believe that we can replicate all of the natural processes involved in getting a tan, and to such a precision that we can then speed up the process 10 fold, and that we can fit it all into a single unit that can be wheeled in and out of the room.
Unless of course our calculations are a bit off, then we accidentally created a bed version of the wrong chalice from raiders of the lost ark, but I think it's fine.
Some cell and animal studies show that there is a slight possible effect. It hasn't been shown in humans, and even in extrapolation from animals, the protective benefit does not seem particularly significant.
Strong reaction? I don’t know anyone who would believe that.
I don’t think we need to replicate everything about nature to incorporate what we know about nature, ourselves, and the practical details of our lives.
I have bright LEDs around my ceilings, hidden by cove molding, turning the whole ceiling into soft but bright reflected daylight.
It doesn’t need to replicate a real summer day outside to improve my mood and avoid depression in winter. Much better than ordinary indoor lighting.
Most people take some kind of supplement or medication that doesn’t replicate pre-technological natural conditions but provide benefits.
Improving our respective conditions, in the artificial world we live in, can involve quirky adaptations for each of us.
..and most people problems are communication problems.
Calling them 'people problem' is a convenient catch-all that lacks enough nuance to be a useful statement. What constitutes good communication? Are there cross purposes?
> Non-technical people do not intuitively understand the level of effort required or the need for tech debt cleanup; it must be communicated effectively by engineering - in both initial estimates & project updates. Unless leadership has an engineering background, the value of the technical debt work likely needs to be quantified and shown as business value.
The engineer will typically say that the communication needed is technical, but in fact the language that leadership works with is usually non-technical, so the translation into this field is essential. We do not need more engineers, we need engineer who know how to translate the details.
I realise that, here on HN, most will probably take the side of the rational technologist, but this is a self-validating cycle that can identify the issue, but cannot solve it.
IMO, we need more generalists that can speak both languages. I have worked hard to try and be that person, but it turns out that almost no-one wants to hire this cross-discipline communicator, so there's a good chance that I'm wrong about all of this.
This piece feels like an AI-generated effort because it’s not so much an exploration of leadership challenges, but rather a series of surface-level observations that lack depth. It's not just a general overview, but a collection of familiar tropes without any original or nuanced analysis, and the sentences aren't just simple, but lack the complexity and emotional depth that would make the piece feel truly human.
My idealistic part says that a combination of AI-driven technical orchestration (much more than just coding) and orbital/langrange manufacturing facilities could, perhaps, get somewhere in the not ridiculously distant future (centuries rather than millenia)
A more pragmatic me would point out that the required energy and materials needed would mean we would need breakthroughs in space-based solar capture and mining, but this is still not New Physics.
I think the solution will come from exponentially advancing self-assembling machines in space. These can start small and, given the diminishing cost of getting things to space, some early iterations of the first generation could be mere decades away. There are several interesting avenues for self-assembling machines that are way past napkin-sketch phase. Solar arrays are getting bigger and we have already retrieved the first material from an asteroid.
The quality and reliability of AI agents for processes orchestration and technical reflection is now at a stage where it can begin to self-optimise, so even without (EDIT) a "take-off" scenario, these machines can massively outperform people in manufacturing orchestration, and I would say we are only some years from having tools that are good enough for much larger scale (i.e. planetary) operations.
Putting humans there is a whole other story. We are so fragile and evolved to live on Earth. Unsurprisingly, this biological tether doesn't get much of a look-in here. Just being on the ISS is horrible for a person's physiology and, I am guessing there would be a whole host of space sicknesses that would set in after a few years up there or elsewhere. Unless we find a way to modify our biology enough so we can continually tolerate or cure these ailments, and develop cryo-sleep, we're probably staying local - both of these are much more speculative that everything above, as far as i can tell.
Taking it a step further, how would simple algorithms behave when viewed in this way? Rather that just the outcome, we could observe a possibility space...
Michael Levin has talked about interesting dynamics with the bubble sort algorithm, which is only a few lines of code, that have parallels in biological processes, suggesting there is a more nuanced logic to nature that we are not seeing
Isn’t that just done in a higher level language, tweaking the algorithm to allow duplicates, and then being surprised there is clustering?
I mean, I don’t see why that is special? Correct me if I’m wrong. I like his research and views on biological electric spaces, but this I did not understand.
the clustering isn't surprising? are you saying that it is an artefact of the higher level representation? special - perhaps not by itself, but when the same strategy is also expressed by single cell organisms, at least intriguing
It randomly gives types to cells. Certain cells move left if the left value is bigger. Other cells move right if the right value is smaller. Others randomly move back and forth.
I fail to see how it’s surprising you don’t end up with a complete sort, yet still with clusters.
My first thought was "how can i do this in 3d and walk around it in VR?"
I can do the VR part - any chance you can share the algo, so I can get the machine to lift it? I can imagine a 3d graphing tool would need spatialisation in order to be properly appreciated.
It's just a matter of subtracting the two functions, taking the absolute value, and putting that number through a color ramp. If you want to see the result in 3D you can subtract the functions and throw that into a 3D graph plotter. Building a 3d surface plotter would be the hard part, but they already exist, eg plug "abs(y/(x^2+y^2) - (x+1)/(x^2+y^2))" in here:
trouble is, i'm more engineer than mathematician, so while i appreciate that this is an entirely solvable problem, assembling it from scratch would likely mean many errors, and less fun
the 3d plot is nice but not what i would call "spatialised", since it's still a flat render, and I'm exactly thinking about the meshing of the thing. i am familiar with delaunay and marching cube strategies, at least enough to get a machine to hook them up to a spatial plotter
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