When I was in high school and planning to study architecture, I came across this blog. I'm glad the author is still here and putting out high-quality pieces after all this time.
The author, Kate Wagner, also writes more serious pieces on architecture and housing for The Nation. I recommend taking a look!
The parent is referring to this article [1], which features JUICE and two other satellites as characters observing humans on earth after the advent of immortality.
It's a great read. It's thoroughly and wonderfully human.
> Erdős and Turán wanted to know how many numbers smaller than some ceiling N can be put into a set without creating any three-term arithmetic progressions.
Just state the result. 15 year olds can understand big O notation and arithmetic progressions. Instead we get a long article that nobody gets what is actually going on even after reading it.
I do not really understand the unconditional love for Quanta. Sure it is better it exists than not but I find the articles vague and mostly about people/institution name dropping. "Someone someone from the prestigious MIT said <this is a tremendous result!>". Cool I guess?
Take this one:
- No clear explanation of the problem to solve. Could have given an example or something to hammer out what is an arithmetic progression of 3 numbers.
- No detail about the actual form of the previous bound and the new one.
- Not much detail about the actual technique. I get that it become very technical very quickly. But that is the actual job of a science/math journalist to distill this. "They used a well know technique of increasing density, etc.". If it is well know, why not try to describe how it works.
I wonder what someone like 3blue1brown would make of this.
> I wonder what someone like 3blue1brown would make of this.
Although I am not Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown creator), I would wager very good money that he would strongly approve.
I am a research mathematician, I do read Quanta, and I've been interviewed for them also. Overall my impression is that they do a good job of making at least something of contemporary research mathematics accessible to the general public. Most people have very little concept of what we do.
It is a notoriously hard task, it is a vitally important one, and it is one that too few people are attempting. Quanta does the best job of it of any publication I know, and for that I am very grateful.
I recommend 17776 [1] to anyone interested in the question of what a society of immortal humans would look like. It's thought-provoking and well-put-together.
Donald Shoup, who the article credits in large part for this change, has given many talks about parking. Some are available on YouTube [1]. Well worth a listen.
The section on caring about people's time [0], a.k.a. prefix-competitive docs, is great. Prefix-competitiveness is widely and easily applicable and provides a lot of juice despite how obvious it sounds. It's relevant for docs, slideshows, emails, and communication in general.
Java idioms are one contributing factor. There's some inherent wordiness too - for example, Hello World in Java is wordier than in most other programming languages.
This is a reductionist take on a complicated question. More environmental damage may mean fewer people in the future. Is more people now worth fewer people or a lower quality of life later?
Also, consider non-humans: how many additional people would make destroying the Great Barrier Reef worth it? If clearcutting the Amazon rainforest would increase the population cap by N, for what values of N would you do it?
Life may be beautiful and good, but I'm sure if we probed our respective ethical intuitions--even after subjecting them to reflection--we'd agree that an ant's life isn't as worthy of ethical consideration as a dog's, or a human's. In short, I believe life's value must be correlated with sentience or consciousness, and I also believe that everyone who is honestly venturing forth what they believe (rather than doubting someone else) also believes the same, and I'd love to see a counterexample of someone truly believing differently.
>how many additional people would make destroying the Great Barrier Reef worth it? If clearcutting the Amazon rainforest would increase the population cap by N, for what values of N would you do it?
Just want to say, I think we are all in just as much of a position to have to answer questions such as these as the parent commenter. We can't get away from tricky ethical questions simply because they're difficult.
We can even recognize that something's going wrong if we think we need to answer such stark utilitarian tradeoffs, but that's _still_ not a complete answer. Tricky questions like yours are inherent in the _world_, and it just so happens that the default "answer" to such questions is simply to cover one's eyes and pretend they don't exist.
>If this is written in the library, that is 2^n combinations of file output functions
This is a feature you want. When you code you want to build things in a style that's modular like legos such that you have the ABILITY to build 2^N or more combinations. Any style of coding that restricts this ability is a detriment. Don't get confused, we're talking about the term "modularity" here. Modularity is a feature you want. Who wants a library/framework/programming language that DOESN'T give them ability to be modular or have the capability of building 2^N combinations? It's about ability not actuality.
Not every high level function needs to be implemented. Like any framework you should be given the tools to build whatever you want. If you want somewthing simpler, that's ok too. Then you wouldn't expose all the core low level functions of the library. You would expose higher level functions in your api and make the primitives private. But to build those high level functions, the way to go is to modularly construct them as I did in the example above.
Maybe they don't need logFilterWithSuffixToFileAndSocket. Then don't create it. You just need the foundational primitives such that if I wanted to create it, I CAN. And you can also expose primitive functions through the API such that users CAN too. That is the core philosophy of programming.
The author, Kate Wagner, also writes more serious pieces on architecture and housing for The Nation. I recommend taking a look!
https://www.thenation.com/authors/kate-wagner/ (warning: paywall after a few articles)