In music, a refrain is a passage that we return to rather than continuing to progress the song. When we hear refrain as a verb, the metaphor tends to focus on the "abstaining from something else" aspect, but here she's focusing on the "repeated passage" aspect. It's not a common use but it basically works.
There are at least two reasonable readings of "anger is eliminated", with one being true if anger is reduced at all, and both being true if anger is reduced to zero.
Without getting into what it means to "trust" Woit or anyone else, whether we're talking about specialists or domain outsiders like myself: if experts disagree, it's up to them to explain why. I can't guess why their superior knowledge has led them to reject the line of argument unless they tell me.
What I meant by "trust" is evidenced by this entire comment section, which is full of laypeople who appear convinced by Woit's arguments but seemingly do not wonder why the physicists in question were never swayed.
Witten has given quite a lot of interviews over the years, but his more mainstream views are unlikely to make it to the front page.
I think mainstream views would deserve attention if they're directly answering these criticisms. If such point by point responses exist, and if they're compelling, then that's what we should be talking about right now.
He's shown us his character as a leader so many times at this point. When he called Vern Unsworth "pedo guy", I didn't know how to square it with my image of him, so I mostly forgot about it. Took a while to realize it's who he is.
It's true, the article doesn't make that claim. We think of primes as being mysterious and out of reach, and we're conditioned to think "mathematical / computational breakthrough" when we read the words "prime number" in a headline, but this is only because we've found all of them that aren't huge enough to be mysterious. Computing prime numbers is trivial as long as you don't mind them being the same ones everybody else already found.
Not sure what you mean by "trivial", I mean a simple prime finding algorithm is easy to write down, but it will be very inefficient, especially for large primes (the very ones you use in cryptography).
Coming up with an efficient prime-finding algorithm like Miller-Rabin* is far from trivial.
* Technically it's just a prime-checking algorithm, but you can just generate random numbers until you've verified one of them is prime.
Penumbra | Sr. Devops Engineer, Engineering Director, Sr. Gameplay Engineer, Full-stack Engineer, Frontend Engineer, others | Alameda, CA | Remote OK for most roles | https://realsystem.com/
The REAL System is a VR augmentation for traditional physical therapy. VR immersion enhances neuroplasticity, making therapy more effective for conditions affecting the nervous system such as stroke, depression and phantom limb pain, and our body tracking allows far more precise measurements of progress.
Our studio is under Penumbra Inc, a successful medical device company manufacturing devices to treat victims of stroke.
We need software engineers from a diversity of disciplines to expand our product into a platform, respond to customer feedback, and continuously improve our technology and processes. In particular we need a Kubernetes Devops engineer to provide efficiency and redundancy as we build features, but we're also looking for Unreal gameplay engineers as well as React developers for the therapist's side of the product.
Penumbra provides competitive salary, 401K, ESPP, all the expected health benefits, and will be making reasonable accommodations for working circumstances post-pandemic, with many roles being open to full time remote (gameplay engineers will need to be at least part time on-site.)
A refinement would be that the company should focus on acquiring the developers who will provide the most marginal benefit. For an organization that values diversity but that currently has a non-diverse team, this could tip the scales toward a competent developer who exists outside that monoculture.
I could breed a human baby for meat, and it, too, would exist to fulfill its purpose by dying. There are two major differences:
1) You probably place value on the baby's life and its ability to suffer, whereas that seems not to be the case for farm animals.
2) The government also places value on the baby's life, and disagrees with my assessment that its purpose for existing is to feed me. This at least serves to prove that different observers can disagree about a being's purpose, and opens the door to the fact that the animals, at least, do not agree with you about what their purpose is. (They won't say so, but the government has nothing to declare about the baby's purpose either, only that I may not kill it.)
The argument is based on the idea that farm animals exist to be useful to us, and since that isn't objectively true, I don't see that the argument reveals any objective truth.
That's fair, but on the other hand, none of those other waves of automation have empowered machines to do knowledge work, the last refuge of human productivity. That's the barrel our generation is staring down.
