> a ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in
A ray of light doesn't know or choose because it has no agency, just like an apple doesn't know or decide to fall because of gravity. It's an anthropomorphization.
> a ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in
I'm no physicists, so I guess I'll ask it: Why?
Also related, why do some ray of light then "see" a black hole yet decide to head into them anyways, if they saw it before they went in that direction? Seems like a dumb move :)
Its future isn't over there because it moves in that direction, instead it moves in that direction because its future lies over there.
Relatedly:
> [General Relativity] basically says that the reason you are sticking to the floor right now is that the shortest distance between today and tomorrow is through the center of the Earth.
I understand that motive. On the other hand, LLM smell makes the text untrustworthy. I have detected it as well, and I immediately started to wonder about whether I am reading a reasonable expert analysis or just an AI hallucination. I still don't know.
I recommend prompting the LLM to mostly fix glaring grammatical and stylistic mistakes, not to rewrite the entire thing into a LinkedIn post style text.
There are many ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine that really welcomed the Russian army. The problem is that the rest of the country is not that happy about this.
This has always been overblown and clearly that “many” was an insignificantly small portion of the population once the rubber met the road. Just because you have a favorable opinion of the Russian government doesn’t mean you’re going to suddenly start singing the anthem when their tanks cross the border as they bomb you/your friends (who according to Putin are all probably Nazis) out of nowhere.
So many left after all this so Ukraine’s sympathetic-to-Russia population will no longer be significant by any metric. Putin knows this. He’s lost Ukraine forever if he doesn’t make them surrender.
I’m working on an AI-assisted music composition and criticism tool (giant project, may or may not pan out). It covers audio (samples, levels, etc), theory (harmony, rhythm), genre (classical, Motown), song intent, etc.
Working on the melody model, I asked Claude to thread it through those dimensions, both for composition and analysis. It’s a tough problem because there are heuristics but not rules for melody, so you have to come at it in layers: pitch and dynamics for analysis, intent -> genre -> harmony for composition.
Lots of research and brainstorming, and I like that Claude will start implementing a plan we decided on, then say “hey wait this isn’t making sense” and pivot or change scope in sensible ways. For instance (btw its recent obsession with “honesty” is driving me batty, so that’s a good counter example right there):
> The honest fix: distinguishing shaped-from-aimless is genuinely profile-relative (it needs the declared intent) — so v1 should not verdict it. v1 classifies only what’s genre-safe to call without intent (static vs active), reports all the facts that feed the shaped/random judgment (step/leap, reversal, contour, alphabet), and defers the shaped-vs-random verdict to profile-relative phase 2b. This is the same honesty as performance deferring declared-profile grading to 2b — and it’s more deferred for melody because melody is more genre-relative than feel. Let me revise the lens accordingly.
Of course mediocre and bad leaders make their mark on history. But Carlyle's Great Men theory is more about paradigm shifts that Great Men can will into existence, not just random noise they bring along. The problem with GM theory is that there is only a handful of examples to support it. Napoleon is one such example, and it was undoubtedly the inspiration why the theory was proposed in the first place. People were trying to come to terms with the fact that one leader can have such a dramatic impact on the entire world.
The historical setting at the moment of time matters a lot. Had the French Revolution not happened, he would've been yet another artillery lieutenant in the French army. In 1789 Jean Lannes was a dyer, Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr was a paineter, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan worked in a clothing store, Jean-Baptiste Bessières was a barber, Guillaume Marie Anne Brune was a typesetter, Jean-Baptiste Kléber was an architect... et cetera, et cetera. But it happened, and lot of people got an impossible before chance to discover their dormant military talents.
Prior to the war, Robert Brovdi (Magyar) was a local businessman on a periphery of Ukraine. Now he is a commander of probably the strongest drone force in the world.
Yes, but the point about Napoleon is that there was so much more about him than just military talents. The environment in which he flourished wasn't of his making, but he managed to grow in it and ended up impacting the whole world. Either directly by bringing the Napoleonic legal system to them with an army, or indirectly by inspiring or enabling nationalism, democratic ideas (power coming from the people, not deity), allowing the whole of Latin America to break free from the Spanish Empire by keeping the latter busy, etc etc.
Many people became successful militarily and even seized power afterwards during tumultuous times. Very few actually ended having such an impact worldwide.
And before any Brits come in with centuries old grudges, of course he did plenty of bad, most notably how he treated Haiti (which he at least acknowledged later in life).
Ah, yeah, he almost strangled Britain with his Continental Blockade. Would probably have been his greatest gift to the world, if he actually managed to pull this off. Oh well.
What is a historical theory anyway? These things aren’t for making predictions. So it seems hard to judge them the same way we’d judge a scientific theory, based on their predictive ability (too easy to cheat, since all the experiments you can make using history are concluded already, other than current events, which are only a tiny slice of history and we don’t really know which ones will be deemed memorable by the record).
I think the wrinkle of "men (or maybe women) at a particular hingepoint had their personal foibles that shaped history" is valid. There were structural forces that led to WW2 but Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler et al being their particular personalities absolutely shaped how it unfolded.
From a UK perspective Churchill had a huge personal role in dragging the UK into the war against the initial public sentiment.
Not impossible if a few people at the top of the UK power structures had made different decisions then the UK could have stayed out of the war entirely, and the effect of that on the outcome would obviously have been drastic
I find it interesting how slow the spread really was after the initial burst. I am used to think about Christianity as a global religion. But before 16th century it was a pretty regional thing and its position seemed pretty precarious in handful of moments.
The problem is that AI is mostly yielded by the Silicon Valley caste that is as popular as bankers in 2008. People are sick of tech companies that are acting as parasitic as possible.
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