ISO-8601 Date Format
This site and some other places I manage have been changed to ISO-8601 date format (from US English long date like “December 1, 2023”). It is straightforward, unostentatious, engineering justice.
Sometimes I also manually type / instead of -.
“Tech”
The way Americans use the word “tech” is extremely superficial. Much of the “tech” industry is not about tech, but using it at a high level to effectively manipulate its businesses. The groups that develop real technologies are less visible.
Most of the labor required to make a digital product is not technical. Those include investigations of requirements, intentions, desires; formalization of procedures; design; selection and verification of data. The technology always allows parameterization by them, and software is adaptive enough for these goals.
Tech only has to be good enough for the product. The corporations are looking for an economic optimization of pure technology and other resources. There is not much “pinnacle of technology” in these usual digital products as they can often be filled by human labor. “What is, is right” could be said of the study of economy, and its narrow sense capitalism.
Reflexes
I was hurt twice this week by my own reflexes. Apparently they are not as helpful in a dense modern world as in the wild.
I wonder what will happen if you place a cat near an abyss and use a cucumber on the other side.
教条
我还年轻的时候，对东西不满意的方式是直接攻击它。然后人很快就来辩解，说那些东西有那些东西的条件，它在那些条件中是合理的。说得不错，我发现是对的。但是相对主义经常是诡辩，活该被再次攻击。
在一个逐渐演进的社区里，教条是和活动紧密联系、变化的；离开了那些条件、那个实践氛围环境，教条原本的含义就丢失了。人写下的每一句话都可能得到这个下场。譬如“人要互相帮助并感恩”这种广受承认的道德陈述。如果某人从小就根据这句话来行事，那么有人会说他受家教或左派祸害而从未作出自己的道德选择，他的帮助和感恩从未有深刻的动机。反过来，人可以尽量不受教条指导去行善，他们对善良的理解也一定是更深刻的，也能总结出以上教条，但是不一定同意其他人说这句话的意思。
然后我发现我的不满应该分为两部分。第一是教条内容的缺点。第二是我的朋友竟然在接受教条！那是对现实、对生活的背叛！（也许不是对理想的背叛，但是不切实际的理想应该如何对待。）他将不再用自己的能力去探索及理解世界。他是不是已经失去了感受能力，只会说和 ChatGPT 一样的公共语言，其中每个字的意思都是学来的、而不是创造出来的？
容易接受教条的人，应该没有意识到语言同时具有自由性和公共性，过于依赖文字直接表示的意思，没有意识到文章经常是不可以在没有了解其环境的情况下直接看懂的，并且这个环境不会自动被你原本就会的语言描述。有时必须控制自己望文生义的倾向，虽然它本身也是能力。所以接下来我会到处问“你这是从哪看的”、“原作真的是这个意思吗”，希望人能发现点问题。
Dogma
When I was younger I would directly attack what I was not satisfied with. Some then quickly argued that those were accepted in its conditions. Good argument; I found that to be true. But relativism is often sophism and deserves more attacks.
In an evolving community, dogma is deeply connected and changing with its activities. Once it leaves the environments of its practice, its original meaning is lost. Every sentence we write may come to this end. For example, there is this widely accepted moral statement of “people shall help and thank each other”. If a person practices his life following this sentence, some might say that he is impoverished by his early education, or perhaps leftists, never making his own moral decisions and never having any deep motivation in his help and thankful acts. In the other way, one can try to do good things without being guided by dogma. They would have a deeper understanding of good, and are also able to synopsize the dogma, but might not agree with the sense others express with this sentence.
I realized that my dissatisfaction has two parts. The first one is the shortcomings of a dogma’s content. The second is that my actual friends accept them! What a betrayal of reality and life! (Perhaps not a betrayal of ideals, but we will treat unrealistic ideals another way.) They will not explore and understand the world by themselves. Did they lose a capability to feel, to the extent that they can only speak a public language such as ChatGPT, where every word has a meaning that they learned, not created?
People who easily accept dogmas potentially did not realize the simultaneous freedom and publicity of language, and depend on the direct meaning of a text. Articles often cannot be understood without knowing its environment, which will not automatically be described by a language you already understand. Sometimes I had to control my tendency to read literally, although it is also an ability. Starting now I will ask around places, “where did you find this”, “did the original author mean this” so people can start to see the problems.
Intelligence, Objective
Perhaps no intelligent being can emerge without itself having a natural motivation. Perhaps an AGI has its own motivation which must be hijacked for us to command it.
Natural Language
There was someone’s quote that is roughly “inaccuracy is why natural language works well”. I do not like this one. First, the sentence appears to state an analytic rather than synthetic fact. Second, it can be easily interpreted in a degenerate sense and a better expression must be found.
Degenerate English
Do. Not. Speak. Like. This:
- Basically
- you know
- just kinda…
- Like,
- (starter) So,
- I mean,
- just a little bit here
- yeah
- right?
- Exaaactly