More like architects, in the civil engineering sense. Even if you don't pour concrete or drive nails yourself, you have to have a lot of technical understanding, including the low level, to be able to design a building competently. And, very certainly, you have to be able to inspect how the nails are driven and how the bricks are laid, whether your contractors are humans or robots.
> And, very certainly, you have to be able to inspect how the nails are driven and how the bricks are laid, whether your contractors are humans or robots.
As someone coming from non-software engineering (mechanical), I always believed that good engineer is capable, and sometimes does these things himself. This guarantees he actually understands his domain in all aspects.
Or it could be an awful lot of productivity. We have to think bigger. What would the world look like if every programmer were a 10x (or whatever) programmer?
uh...okay. The legend of Faust is the classic work where a person sells his soul to the devil for power/knowledge/pleasure. Goethe has Faust make a wager with the Mephistopheles: show me the good life (pleasure, power, knowledge, whatever) it will never be enough to make me stop striving, to make me want to linger. If you can do that my soul is yours. To me it reads a _lot_ like our contract with AI.
> But that's not to say that they wouldn't be capable of adding safeguards on their end, not even on their MCP layer. Adding policies and narrowing access to whatever comes through MCP to the server and so on would be more assuring measures than what their comment here suggest around more prompting.
This is certainly prudent advice, and why I found the GA example support application to be a bit simplistic. I think a more realistic database application in Supabase or on any other platform would take advantage of multiple roles, privileges, Row Level Security, and other affordances within the database to provide invariants and security guarantees.
"problematic" is a matter of degree, and is relative. Inflation is less problematic than some theories (e.g. "magic"). Are there any alternative theories that are less problematic than inflation, and yet also solve the same problems that inflation solves?
Cosmic inflation is the observation, not the explanation. The expectation is that cosmic inflation should be much, much larger based on what we understand about quantum mechanics: that vacuum is practically boiling with energy, and should be forcing stars away from each other. Instead we observe that it is very small.
I was being somewhat tongue in cheek responding to OP, who was not specific about what they find problematic. The vacuum catastrophe is the area in physics where our explanations explain the smallest amount of our observations. We're very confident in our measurements and understanding at both the large and small scale, and there is essentially no explanation that anyone has any confidence in.
By comparison, observations of dark energy/matter are practically perfectly accurate. It's a single order of magnitude difference from expected observations. We have some half-decent candidates to explain them. Unlike magic, inflation is not a theory in search of an observation. The fact that we don't see inflation is what is so desperately confusing.
People and scientific instruments are made of "normal" (non-Dark) matter, which makes it easy to detect other "normal" matter (electrons, protons, quarks, photons, neutrinos, what-have-you). It's hard for us and our instruments to detect or even be aware of Dark matter at laboratory scales, which operate over the electromagnetic and nuclear forces which Dark Matter feels little or not at all.
At astronomical scales, however, things are different. At those scales, gravity wins out, and is one of the dominant things we observe in astronomy. Dark Matter may not feel the electromagnetic and nuclear forces the way normal matter does, but it feels gravity the same as every other particle does. Nobody gets a pass from gravity, not even Dark Matter.
Consequently, it's relatively easy to observe the gravitational effects of Dark Matter at the astronomical scales of the rotation of galaxies and the dynamics of galaxy clusters, even while it's difficult or impossible to observe the non-gravitational effects of Dark Matter at laboratory scales.
"the only reason it’s believed to exist at all is because a lot of otherwise well-understood equations and observations require it to exist."
I mean...those are pretty good reasons. If a particular theory successfully predicts more out of "a lot" of observations than any other competing theory does, and is a smaller departure from "a lot" of existing theory than any other competing theory is, would you choose to spend your career researching those competing theories?
"If people understood that the last 200 years of science has shown that we are still utterly ignorant about the underpinnings of the universe"
That's a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think?
"But we are not very well educated so yeah, they will doubt it for no good reason other than "it doesn't feel right"
That's also an exaggeration. Laypersons are under no more obligation to understand the details of the scientific professions than scientists are to understand the details of, say, the legal profession. A healthy skepticism within the general public is harmless and even helpful if it maintains an interest in science. I would just gently urge people not to veer from skepticism into dogmatism.
"We have concrete evidence that either a) a new type of matter and energy exists, or b) our theories need to be modified in some way."
a new type of matter is a modification to our theories
"Until we either detect dark matter/energy, or develop a theory that accurately predicts the behaviour we're attributing to dark matter we cannot say one way or the other which is the correct approach."
"We" the general public isn't in the business of saying one way or the other is the correct approach, and scientists aren't, either. Scientists conduct experiments and propose theories in whatever lines of inquiry interest them, subject to the constraints of getting somebody to pay for it. Many scientists have been interested in refining the theory of Dark Matter and subjecting those refinements to experimental tests, partly because the theory has withstood and only grown stronger by those refinements and tests. That's a success by any measure, and that success is partly why public funding agencies have been willing to pay for it. Like anybody else, they try to pick winners.
It could also be that we are not accurately modelling EM/SR/GR effects at a large scale, such as how they are warped by the different stars orbiting the arms of the galaxies. Or that when we extend QED/QCD to accelerating reference frames (general relativity) that dark matter won't be needed, just like how QED was formulated by extending electromagnetism/QM to special relativity (non-accelerating reference frames).
You're not "wrong" per se as you're entitled to your views, but a fairly common alternative view goes something like this.
Yes, while we sometimes do pursue scientific inquiry for its practical application to the betterment of humanity, we also recognize the value of scientific inquiry simply for expanding the endowment of human knowledge about the world. That is an "innate good". Moreover, if history is any guide, it's sometimes or even often difficult to predict what practical applications will or won't emerge from any given scientific endeavor. In the case of Dark Matter, it may not be exactly the case that we will ever directly manipulate it in any scientific application. However, it may be the case that by grappling with Dark Matter we will refine and deepen our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, and that will unlock future practical applications. Then there is the topic of "human capital": training people to be scientists trains cadres of people with strong skills in science, math, engineering, and computer science, which is an investment in that human capital. Often, they're well-equipped to go on to fruitful careers outside of their initial field of inquiry, producing innovations that benefit humanity. Finally, if it's a matter of cost, many people feel that the societal cost (e.g. federal expenditures on science) are puny compared to other things which I need not name here. Consequently, "basic science" which includes fundamental physics and the study of Dark Matter, is always a great investment for society.
Or something like that...that's my understanding of how that argument goes. Make of it what you will.
I agree with you. "Dark Matter" (and "Dark Energy") are colorful (colorless?) names that I think helped these theories diffuse into the popular consciousness at a time when popular interest in science was at a high-water mark (remember when "chaos theory" was fashionable?). As I mentioned in another comment recently (it feels like a "Dark Matter" or "Dark Energy" headline trends on HN almost every day), this coded these theories as "exotic" or "weird" as you say, and invited speculation about Dark Matter and even an urge to overturn it among laypeople who equated "exotic" with "tendentious." But, as you suggest, personally I don't regard Dark Matter as all that exotic. We already know about some species of "dark matter": the neutrino is one, and before that there was the neutron. Oh, well. I suppose there will be another episode on HN in a day or so.
Yeah, but it might've tamped down any perceived controversy even among laypeople, which would've saved many priceless electrons being spent debating the issue on the internet.
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