Hoftstader's video is pressumably based on his own book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies".

Very interesting book. You don't really think about how often metaphors are employed in language, and their influence on how we think. The book makes some rather strong claims regarding science and philosophy being misled by metaphorical thinking, but still a good read.

And it's relevant today given how people like to anthropomorphize LLMs, and compare biology to digital machines we make. Of course there are similarities. But the point about metaphorical thinking is we are mislead by treating metaphors as literally true.

Anyway if the stronger claims in the book are at all true, it might impact how an alien species thinks differently than us (given a lot of our metaphors are biologically based). And could present significant difficulties for decoding an alien signal.

One of the best examples of a clear issue with metaphorical thinking came from discussions about the plaque installed on Pioneer 10. Some clever people thought up the idea of using a pulsar map to define where the sun/earth were. Some other clever people noted that pointing to the location with a line that ended in an arrow was very, very deeply rooted in the history of human hunting techniques and could be very hard to understand if you have never seen or even conceived of an arrow(head).

Add a slight trailing decay and I think the basic arrow motif could be intuitive for trajectory for any observer who experienced aerodynamics?

Whether it is the evolved shape of a flying creature or an abstract depiction of a meteorite (or even a comet!), there is a kind of intuition about the sharp end and the flaring of air or fluid around it, with some sort of trailing tail from whence it came...

One can imagine many observers who could find our space probes would also have some of these experiences?

Of course, all of this assumes some kind of visual perception and cognition to even recognize the plaque as having markings made with an intent to communicate some abstract ideas...

> According to Lakoff, an individual's experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues are influenced by being framed in linguistic constructions. In Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Persian Gulf (1991), he argued that the American involvement in the Persian Gulf War was obscured or "spun" by the metaphors which were used by the first Bush administration to justify it.[3] Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunct Rockridge Institute.

I will never not find it amusing how a simple thing like money is obscured or "spun" by a thin veil of pseudointellectual bullshit.

Sure, but that's not generational wealth.

We must be operating on different definitions. Generational wealth means you have enough money to meaningfully improve the lives of your kids and give them a leg-up on life. A million dollars is enough to buy a house for each of your 2.5 kids.

If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.

> If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.

Well said.

Where I live, one million dollars would allow me to pay off my house, open healthily sized investment accounts for my kids, pad my investment account, setup a trust and, overall, set my family up for a comfortable life in the future. I don't see how that isn't generational wealth.

Generational wealth is where you can also do all of the above for your kids and potentially their grandkids as well.

Basically the bar is higher than "something you can pass down". It is enough that the next generation does not need to worry about making money either.

Generational wealth generally is used to mean something like you and at least your children can live very comfortably off of investment income for the rest of your lives, I.e. none of you have to work for a living. That’s why sibling’s def of 1.5-5m per child is much closer to the commonly understood meaning.

We can debate “live comfortably” if you want, but no 4.5 people are doing that from the investment proceeds of 1m.

What you are describing is kind of more like social mobility.

The commonly accepted definition of generational wealth ranges from around 1.5 to 5 million per child.

I can only find sources that define it the way I said, but I'm sure that folks who think a million dollars isn't enough to buy a house disagree.

> If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.

Generational wealth is definitely not "affect[ing] how much money you can leave your kids." That's an equivocation - if you're leaving your kids a dollar, another dollar will "affect how much money you can leave your kids."

edit: you need a million dollars to securely retire at all, and that's if your parents, kids, or you don't get sick. If they do, a million is not only not "generational wealth" but it may not even last you three years.

You're right of course, I should have said "meaningfully affect." Obviously every penny counts.

Generational wealth is generally used to describe not just a comfortable personal retirement but your children and their children and so on never needing to work if they are remotely responsible with the money.

First, don't park it in actual cash or you'll lose value to inflation which is currently running high. At a minimum put it in treasuries.

Second, trying to time the market is almost always a suboptimal strategy. The question is when will you likely need the money? If you won't need it for 10 years or more, keep it in index funds. Otherwise, treasuries.

Personally I tend to assume anyone talking about VTI knows about the risk-free rate.

Yeah, I would also assume that anyone talking about VTI wouldn't try to time the market, but that's what he was talking about so :shrug:

If the primary user concern is "all data is public", then the utility of ATProto is extremely narrow and will likely lose to something with a different philosophy.

That is about to change very, very soon though: https://dholms.leaflet.pub

Or you just use a different protocol for private stuff. Square peg, square hole. Round peg, round hole.

Is kimi making a profit? How subsidized is it by the Chinese government?

Is that any worse than being subsidized by VC? They're playing the same game as the western labs, just with slightly different players.

Chinese government vs American VCs doesn't equate to "slight different players."

True. The Chinese Communist Party's motto is "Serve the People". [0]

They might not always live up to that, but at least the aspiration is there.

No such pretense from American VCs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serve_the_People

This is the most naive comment I've read in a long time.

American VCs and American Government mingle at the deepest levels. Yes, slightly different is correct.

This isn't true unless you're limiting your reference point to Trump's second term.

Let's compare concrete and equivalent people or institutions. I'll nominate Elon to represent "right wing philosophy" since this is a conversation about grok. What's an equivalent, in terms of importance/stature, that you'd nominate to represent "left wing philosophy". From there we can compare the accuracy and truth seeking of both. Warning, Elon has a terrible track record on this front.

That's a 3% margin which is unsustainable. It's less return than you can get from buying treasuries, which means that if they don't improve it they will go out of business.

This is the frustrating thing reading these comments, where people seem to assume that any profit margin is good enough to sustain a business.

People see a 3% return and think, "Well, they aren't losing money so there is no reason they can't just keep doing business as usual." What this idea is missing is that the investors in a company aren't choosing between "keep my money in this company" and "sit on the cash", they are choosing between "keep my money in this company" and "invest my money somewhere else"

In other words, you aren't just looking at direct returns on an investment, you also have to think of the OPPORTUNITY COST of the investment. By keeping their money invested in a business making 3% returns, they can't invest that money somewhere else.

So basically: The stock market is cancer.

It's more like evolution through natural selection. If you can buy a treasury that returns 3.6%, you will NOT invest money in a business that has more risk, is only returning 3%, and has no believable growth story. Even worse, if you own shares in that company, you will sell them and shift the investment dollars to something with better returns or better chance for growth.

It's this competition that leads to prosperity, the alternative is central planning which leads to poverty.

Talk about frustration reading these comments. People knee-deep in Kool-aid, thinking this is the only and god-given way things should be.

We may need to create a community driven version of SO. Hard for it to be a successful business these days.

https://software.codidact.com/ was created after one of the many SO dramas. It doesn't come up in searches though and I didn't have reason to use it...

thanks, that's exactly what I was imagining.

Except for the part where he says that he found Go infuriating to use as a developer prior to LLMs.

> This is annoying but only needs to be solved once at the start, either by the LLM or the human guiding it. A single prompt of "Set up a uv project in this directory with Python 3.13" is enough that it's never an issue again for that repo.

This isn't true. I'm mostly using python and UV with claude and it periodically decides to try to run scripts directly instead of using UV.