I wouldn't be surprised if this were a general cognitive bias having to do with estimating proportions, and nothing to do specifically with minority groups.
I'm all for reading the classics, but if you take all of the fun out of reading, nobody is going to do it. If someone had forced me to read Plato instead of Harry Potter as a kid, I wouldn't have done nearly as much reading as I did, which prepared me for tackling more difficult texts as I matured.
Re: American TV, Deadwood is widely considered some of the best Shakespearean writing of the modern age.
> I'm all for reading the classics, but if you take all of the fun out of reading, nobody is going to do it. If someone had forced me to read Plato instead of Harry Potter as a kid, I wouldn't have done nearly as much reading as I did, which prepared me for tackling more difficult texts as I matured.
You don't have to jump between extremes, plenty of interesting and still brain engaging books
I would say that Nolan is no more grandiose and superficial than Kubrick. Their films aren't about characters and plot, they're about images and sound.
Not at all. Most Kubrick's movies are illustrations of specific, well defined theses (for example about human ambition and violence) and the plots are tightly fit to that purpose. Nolan makes adventure movies where the plot is a succession of action scenes- any other sequence or choice of situations would work the same.
Memento, Inception, and Tenet are just action movies? It's interesting you use the word, succession, because all three of those movies explore the thematic, cinematic, and psychological meaning of that word.
The abstract ideas he explores may seem pretentious or maybe even boring. To each their own. But he also puts alot of effort into the practical process of movie making. For example, he puts in alot of effort to avoid CGI. Anybody who creates things for a living, including code, should at least be able to appreciate Nolan on that level; that is, setting constraints for yourself and seeing how far you can take things.
I wouldn't place him in the pantheon of the greatest movie makers. He's a strongly systemizing thinker, obsessed with impersonal themes. That can make his movies feel a little hollow, like someone on the autism spectrum making a movie about trains. But he's otherwise definitely way above average. And on a technical level maybe he does belong at the top of some lists. I don't know enough about movie making to fully appreciate his work, though I can recognize the skill the same way I can recognize a really good chef or any other professional, including recognizing that beneath the surface (which may be too cloying for some) there's more there than I can fully appreciate.
I'd leave aside Memento as it's a small independent movie, very different from Nolan's movies from Inception on. I'm curious what you mean with "explores the thematic, cinematic and psychological meaning" of "succession".
Personally, I don't find he explores any abstract idea- his movies (Inception and Interstellar specifically) are pretty inconsequential action movies- basically fantasy adventures for an audience aged 12-14, but with the outward appearance of serious movies as the characters are grown ups, and there is no hint that the audience is supposed to be children (compare for example with Jurassic Park, that does include children as main characters). But they are nothing more than fantasy adventures.
>What do "real" numbers buy you? That is, what do you get for the trouble of building your formalism around numbers that are not computable?
I guess the naive answer is completeness. Every Cauchy sequence converges to a member of the space. For example, quantum mechanics relies on the formalism of Hilbert space, defined as a complete inner product space. This gives us nice things like the spectral theorem for unbounded operators, without which we wouldn't be able to define probability (the Born rule) or time evolution (the operator exponential e^-iHt).
Can you formalize quantum mechanics using computable numbers? I don't actually know, but let's say yes. I assume it's more work with more edge cases, so I would ask the same question: what do you get for the trouble of building a formalism around computable numbers?
Bad example. You can do all of this with constructivism. Any constructable Cauchy sequence converges to a constructable member of the space.
What you get for the formalism around computable numbers is this. Every mathematical object in the theory is something that can be, at least in principle, actually written down. When we say that it exists, this existence is of the most tangible form that any mathematical thing could have.
Having constructible Cauchy sequences doesn't guarantee that we can construct unbounded operators. I'm no expert, but the little searching I've done suggests this is an open research question.
I don't see the benefit of being able to write something down "in principle." A number can only ever be computed to a finite number of digits in practice. If we're talking about finite approximations, then the standard approach using numerical solutions to the Schrödinger equation handles this just fine, no alternative mathematics needed. If we're talking about theories, then we should choose whatever abstraction is most convenient for expressing the theory.
Personally, I don't believe numbers "exist." The physical universe exists, and numbers are abstractions that we invent to describe it. In that sense, uncomputable numbers are just as "real" as computable ones.
I watched Kiki's Delivery Service recently with my sisters and niece. I'm always amazed by the artistic vision when I watch a new (to me) Ghibli film. As a grown man, you'd be hard-pressed to get me to watch a cartoon about a young witch if it were made by any other studio. But Ghibli has the magic that makes it delightful for everyone.
The comparison in the article between Kiki drawn with "standard" colors and the final version is really telling. Even though the standard version is more saturated, which in my naive mind should make it more vibrant, it actually looks more bland when you put it side by side with the desaturated colors of the actual drawing. It goes to show how much these little choices influence the final product.
> As a grown man, you'd be hard-pressed to get me to watch a cartoon about a young witch if it were made by any other studio. But Ghibli has the magic that makes it delightful for everyone.
That is very true for any Ghibli film which I think is a product of taking the child characters seriously and not like they have to be silly, things around them are silly, but they are serious.
I'm sure there are unwarranted attacks on Stephen Wolfram out there in the public discourse, but what I see is people criticizing his ideas, which is always fair game.
I actually think criticism is especially important in the case of high-profile public figures like Wolfram. Far more people in the general public know about him and his highly speculative and unproven theories, while at the same time thousands of serious scientists publishing important and influential work go relatively unrecognized.
It’s not really a completely clear distinction, but if I was going to try to describe it:
Coding is writing code to solve a problem. Someone can “know how to code” in one language, and have a very hard time moving away from that language because they understand the symbols more than the ideas.
Programming is approaching a problem space as a system specification problem and solving it with an algorithmic solution, and it doesn’t matter what language you use because you are approaching it from the symantic direction rather than the syntactic one.
You are a programmer when all languages are roughly similar to you, even though you may be much more familiar with the syntax of one than you are with others.
You are a coder when you can write programs, maybe even complicated ones, but you think of the solution in terms of a computer language rather than data structures, transformations, and state machines.
Most people start as coders, unless they come from a computer science background, or start out in assembly or with a little extra push, languages like forth. If you keep going and start to branch out a bit, most people will become programmers to one degree or another within a few years of working or playing in the field.
In short and to overgeneralise to the extreme, the focus is on the code vs the data.
You can also be so far in to the theoretical side that you are a data scientist or mathematician and a coder, but not really a programmer, even though you are solving complex data and algorithmic problems by programming a computer…. So it’s kinda nuanced? I think maybe it’s a matter of how you think about practical computation? But there’s definitely a difference in the depth of knowledge that crosses some kind of inflection point that is non-linear.
In my mind, programming is the concepts, especially around problem solving with code as a tool, where coding is specific syntax/implementation, a means to an end. Related, you don't get paid to code, you get paid to program.
OpenGL is arguably still better for learning the fundamentals of computer graphics. All you really want early on is a simple vertex and fragment shader up and running so that you can learn how to move a camera around, transform objects, basic lighting and texturing, etc. Vulkan is overkill for that. If you follow the LearnOpenGL tutorials you'll get as far as HDR lighting and shadows. At that point you'll be better equipped to understand an API like Vulkan and probably a lot more successful at porting an engine over to it.
Totally agreed. I find it distracting working through a book that's been marked up by someone else. In fact, I get the same feeling even if I marked it up myself, which is why I stopped writing in books. I would prefer to keep my thoughts and the author's thoughts separate. When I want to know what the author thinks, I'll go to the book; when I want to remember what I thought, I'll go to my notes.
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