I attend “The Party” in Aars, Denmark for a few years around 2000. It was at the crossroads of broadband, but got to taste the demoscene vs gamer experience. It was magnificent.
There were a real festival atmosphere, and afterwards you’d declare never to attend again - that was, until the tickets were released and you somehow couldn’t help yourself.
We did https://markant.md with TextKit 1, flies through multi-megabytes markdown files with latex rendering etc. took some scaffolding (like only rendering attachments when they are close to the viewport) to make it smooth, but it wasn’t really a big problem.
Thank you, great spotted. I did make a CLI tool for it, but it was a bit too cumbersome to distributed it via the App Store for the first release, so I dropped it from the release but forgot to update the help.
I have a feeling this goes waaaay back, but was covered by claims of authority, in a time where merit and authority were intertwined.
My pet peeve is that management is a transferable skill that supersedes industry expertise. It is such a convenient lie that offers MBAs, management consultants, burned out business executives and “retired” generals alike a new career without actually knowing anything about what they are doing.
Bullshittery of the finest quality.
If we see our contributions as brownian motion rather than preconceived trajectories, then, rather than focusing on the Gausses, Einsteins, Patons as providing singular progress, they become the the dominant least energy paths to what we recognize as truth. Without negating the individual’s contribution, the ones we see as truly important are the ones that supported by every other’s attempt, finds the path forward.
This should provide hope, if we can leave aside our egos and focus on humanity, we can, and do, all contribute even though a few seems to get all the credit.
This also goes for AI, it may be an accelerant in research, but the probability distribution of reality is large, large enough for humans to wonder, ask questions and stumble upon a new path forward, that computers alone don’t find.
I built a Markdown viewer https://markant.md to go with the flow rather than against it. I also cooked up a mew format, which basically bundles markdown and images into “Markbooks” https://markbooks.org. LLMs don’t even need an Agent Skill to understand the format, as it is just a zip with and index.md plus assets.
I’d love for people here to consider the idea.
The concept of “absorptive capacity” our ability to gain from the information presented to us, is a key factor in education. If we humans remain agents of our own lives (which I find axiomatic) we still need education to interact with AI, to ask the right questions and to make sense of the results.
Yes, you definitely need to absorb some information, but you also need to understand an process it.
There is a bias in education to memorising facts over teaching concepts and skills. It has certainly got worse in the UK over the last few decades as a result of pressure on schools to get high grades, which has lead to teaching the exam rather than the subject.
I might be biased by the small sample closest to me: my kids doing some of the same A level subjects, and the GCSE teaching my kids friends got compared with their learning (they were out of school from late primary until after GCSEs) .There is a lot of "you do not need to know it for the exam". Memorising standard answers and definitions. Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it. Discouraging extra reading as a distraction from the exams.
I am not claiming its a new problem, but its an ever-present one that is getting worse at the moment. its the exact opposite of what you need in a world where facts are accessible and explanations are often misleading.
It’s not a bias on the educational side, it’s the inherent requirement for knowledge before you can learn skills. Memorization creates a Rosetta Stone the enables people to start reading. You need to know what happened historically before you can have meaningful opinions about it. You need to memorize mathematical symbols meaning before you can use them etc etc.
The only bias here is people disliking memorization. It takes effort and has concrete right and wrong answers so you can fail in a way that doesn’t happen with skills. But disliking something doesn’t mean it’s actually wrong.
I agree that memorization is a very useful skill, but I believe it’s over-used in some education systems.
There have been classes I’ve taken where ~half of the evaluation is brute memorizing dates/event names. Ive also taken classes (machine design) where the majority of the evaluation is open book and about solving problems. Most classes land somewhere in the middle.
I think there is a bias towards memorization-based testing because it’s easy. Coming up with trivia questions is easy. Grading those answers is easy. A students can’t complain about marks when they get a date wrong.
Coming up with problem solving questions is hard. Grading them is ambiguous. Students will complain that their mark should be higher. Everything is harder.
If the testing is memorization based, students will get good at memorizing facts and spitting them out on the test. If the test is problems solving, students will optimize for that.
The vast majority of people currently do not “ask the right questions and to make sense of the results” now because they are conditioned from early life on to only ask the approved “right questions”, which will always frame the sense they can make of any results; why would that change with AI that has clearly already been manipulated with the very same kind of dogmatic guardrails deliberately there to prevent “asking the right questions and make sense of the results”?
And if anything, it’s inversely correlated with at least the “education” in the West today, which is primarily an incentive ladder where the more “education”, i.e., system approved indoctrination you have, the less incentive or motivation you have to question it at all.
In many ways, we are witness to that behavior pattern in the Department of War and our whole government right now, where yet another generation of people in the military are supporting and perpetrating war crimes, while the incentive structure shields and protects them.
We can even see today that those the system fears the most, those people who start asking questions and are financially outside of that incentive ladder, the system attacks most aggressively. That has also never changed. If the system does not attack you, you know you are not actually over the target in any way.
It’s not really a new phenomenon or really fundamentally any different than aristocratic incentives to remain loyal to the king to curry favor, but the AI component introduces a whole different dynamic and in my view will even start aggressively going after any kind of knowledge or information that the system does not control, very much like how Orwell envisioned in 1984 or somewhat as envisioned by Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. The question I cannot find an answer to is; why wouldn’t it do that, especially since we are already seeing the groups and interests that have long undermined free speech even in the USA, only get more aggressive in their attack on free speech from all angles?
So if you have books and information of fact the system will definitely come to not like at one point or another, you may want to keep quiet about that future contraband.
There is nothing in the trajectory and the system that would give me the impression that it wants anyone to “ask the right questions” especially not the “educated ones”. Their job within the system is to ask the acceptable questions within the guardrails, and they are conditioned/trained to do that and self-police in that way.
Good times.