I'll go a step further and say there is no self made anything. Just by being born in America you have a huge advantage over someone born in say, Ethiopia. When I hear someone call themselves "self-made", I immediately assume that person does not value the support and love given by those close to them. It also means they very likely don't value how much society in general contributes to the life they live. In other words, if someone tells me they are "self-made" - I'd say there's a very strong chance they are either out of touch, ungrateful, or even narcissistic.
This seems like an unnecessarily uncharitable view. Plenty of people are given support and love by those close to them. The overwhelming majority of such people do not become billionaires, or even millionaires. And at least in America, people who became wealthy generally did so by providing goods or services to others who voluntarily purchased those goods and services.
I think "self-made" is a shorthand for: the person didn't inherit the money, and engaged in entrepreneurial activity from which the majority of their wealth is derived. Of course there is an element of luck and being in the right place at the right time, and we certainly don't need to deify those people, but to say that "there is no self made anything" seems, I dunno, fatalistic.
I’d argue wealth is often created by accident. How much wealth did the creation of penicillin create?
If anything, we aren’t being cynical enough towards the concept of “self-made”. Every single genius recognizes that they are standing on the shoulder of giants; would Einstein be possible if he had to invent Newton or the concept of 0 from scratch?
It also helps to remember that many people are working towards the same main ideas at any one time. If the Wright brothers didn’t invent the first plane, many other groups were right behind. Facebook could have failed and a dozen social networks taken its place. There were dozens of competitors to the Apple I and Apple II. We’d still have Windows-like operating systems if Microsoft failed. There were many scrapped covid vaccines that could have stepped up if Pzfier and Moderna failed.
For the person who captures the market and the wealth generated, it doesn’t mean they didn’t put in any work- but they certainly owe their success more to luck and their environment than their own effort. Again, none of the above could have happened in Ethiopia.
While I don't have a strong preference for electron, I do have some thoughts and answers to your questions I'd like to share.
> Electron no longer allows Node.js to be called from renderer processes, all communication with Node.js is done via IPC.
I don't think calling Node.js from the renderer was a huge selling point for Electron - as it is not recommended due to security concerns. However, I still believe you can achieve this if you want - by using contextIsolation: false and nodeIntegration: true. But, even if this is not possible, it looks to me that using IPC with contextBridge still allows for pretty flexible Node.js use.
> Why does it have to be tied to V8/Node.js?
Some people prefer to have a Node.js backend (backend here being Electron's main Node.js process). There are multiple advantages to this:
- If using typescript: shared types between the frontend and backend
- Shared utilities, functions and constants
- If utilities and functions are shared, that means we can write some tests once, and the tests will work for both the backend and frontend
- Less context switching
These are just a few, I'm sure there are more.
> In this case, why do we still need Electron?
Besides the reasons I listed above, the alternative you listed (Tauri) seems to be relatively newer, have a smaller community, and with less online resources available (tutorials, stack overflow questions, etc).
You may not (...) (vii) buy, sell, or transfer API keys without our prior consent.
Apologies for sounding like an absolute nerd, but you can go with options 1 and 3 - as long as you ask OpenAI first and get their consent. Also the meaning of "transfer" is a bit murky in my opinion. If I take my API key and write it down in a napkin, technically I've just transferred my API key to a napkin - sorry Mr. Altman!
There have been many proposed solutions to the so called "hard problem" of consciousness. We can easily find some with a quick google search. Even its' existence has been debated by multiple scholars / philosophers - wikipedia has a list with some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
> There's no way to know if/what an AI experiences
Getting the state of neural net, at a given point in time, is easy. There are many ways to see exactly which neurons activate, why they activate, how much they activate, etc. For smaller neural nets, this is actually easy to do - here's a blog post about it:
It seems you don’t fully understand parent comment and the problem itself. Capturing signals from you eye nerve doesn’t tell anything about your subjective experience of seeing an apple. The only way to understand that you’re seeing an apple from this signal is to train a model on your responses. This is how AI works. It’s a statistical imitation.
The only way for your statement to be true is if you’d be an imitation yourself, not capable of experiencing directly. Which is actually possible, see “pholosophical zombie” concept.
I’m joking of course about you being an imitation. Or do I? :)
> Capturing signals from you eye nerve doesn’t tell anything about your subjective experience of seeing an apple.
I strongly disagree. It actually does tell you quite a lot. For example, if there aren't any signals, you're very likely not seeing anything.
> The only way to understand that you’re seeing an apple from this signal is to train a model on your responses
It seems to me this contradicts your first argument. If such models exist (they very likely do, I'm not familiar with this area of research), they can tell us a lot about a person's experience.
> see “pholosophical zombie” concept.
Searched for “pholosophical zombie” but couldn't find anything, sorry. Just kidding :)
I'd argue there's some selection bias going on. You're more likely to participate in a technical discussion if you're familiar with the topic. Or else you risk getting downvoted.
That is quite an absolute statement. Some people just have a personal preference for having git trees arranged in a certain way. If squashing can help with that, then it serves a purpose.
Squashing is an essential tool for everyday git use. Squashing pull requests wholesale at merge time as the default merging strategy? It only hurts. It's a clear case of using the wrong tool only because you haven't learned a better one yet. Maybe it is "quite an absolute statement" - but I have never seen a valid justification for its use.
Have you ever worked at a company where every engineer has in depth knowledge of git?
In my experience 90% of software engineers get as far as pull, push, commit, maybe merge. Rebase and amend if you're very lucky
Squash merges make git easier to use for 90% of engineers and therefore unless you have significantly above average git knowledge in your company it makes sense as a default strategy
Coming from a completely different culture where the word 'engineer' still means something, I find this quite funny. If your 'engineers' just smash keys together until it seems to work somehow (which includes never bothering to learn the full potential of DVCS — one of our most important tools), they're not really engineers IMHO. Real ones know their tools (I don't pretend to be one and never call myself that).
That's not in-depth knowledge, that's basic usage. I don't have in-depth knowledge of git myself, most of its plumbing is an opaque black box for me. Less obvious but useful things like `--first-parent` are just one manpage reading session away. If your colleagues are unable to perform some basic rebases to squash away their WIP commits, you may want to help them learn how to use one of the most essential tools in their work. Everyone in your team will benefit.
> let’s assume that the utility gain for the gifted son from living in the suburbs would be larger than the utility gain for the disabled son from living in the city. A pure utilitarian, then, must choose the suburbs.
Everything's okay so far. But then he says this:
> Nagel’s view is this: if you say that you would live in the city for the sake of your disabled son, despite it being the case that moving to the city creates more utility in total, you are not a utilitarian
Didn't the author just say moving to the suburbs creates more utility in total?? And now he's saying moving to the city is what creates more utility?
