Afaik, there's a difference between classical philosophy (which opines on the divide between an objective world and the perceived word) and more modern philosophy (which generally does away with that distinction while expanding on the idea that human perception can be fallible).
The idea that there's an objective but imperceivable world (except by philosophers) is... a slippery slope to philosophical excess.
It's easy to spin whatever fancy you want when nobody can falsify it.
In my amateur opinion, it's almost the opposite. For Plato, the material world, while "real" enough, is less important and in some sense less True than the higher immaterial world of Forms or Ideas. The highest, truest, realest world is "above" this one, related to cognition, and (more or less) accessible by reason. We may be in a cave, but all we have to do is walk up into the sunlight — which, by the way, is nothing but a higher and truer form of light than our current firelight. (This idea that material objects partake of their corresponding higher-level Ideas leads to the Third Man paradox: if it is the Form of Man that compasses similar material instances such as Socrates and Achilles, is there then a third... thing... that compasses Socrates, Achilles, and Man itself?)
For Kant, and therefore for Schopenhauer, the visible world is composed merely of objects, which are by definition only mental representations: a world of objects "exists" only in the mind of a subject. If there is a Thing-in-Itself (which even Kant does not doubt, if I recall correctly), it certainly cannot be a mental representation: the nature of the Thing-in-Itself is unknowable (says Kant) but certainly in no way at all like the mere object that appears to our mental processes. (Schopenhauer says the Thing-in-Itself is composed of pure Will, whatever that means.) The realest world is "behind" or "below" the visible one, completely divorced from human reason, and by definition completely inaccessible to any form of cognition (which includes the sensory perception we share with the animals, as well as the reason that belongs to humans alone). The Third Man paradox makes no sense at all for Kant, first because whatever the ineffable Thing-in-Itself is, it certainly won't literally "partake" of any mental concept we might come up with, and secondly because it would be a category error to suppose that any property could be true of both a mental object and a thing-in-itself, which are nothing alike. (The Thing-in-Itself doesn't even exist in time or space, nor does it have a cause. Time, space, and causality are all purely human frameworks imposed by our cognitive processes: to suppose that space has any real existence simply because you perceive it is, again, a category error, akin to supposing that the world is really yellow-tinged just because you happen to be wearing yellow goggles.)
"Subtle energy" and "vibrational frequency" are dead giveaways of metaphysics instead of science.
I'm not adverse to that, as I do believe that much of metaphysics does have real physical backing that we haven't uncovered yet.
But I also asked a strong scientific question. First, with the human electric field, how far does it extend outside the body and at what strength? Secondly, can drugs or practices modify this, and how so?
Yes, it listed a few of my past questions as reference points. I had asked some questions about Nintendo 64/Dreamcast and Gamecube games. It also used information I had asked it about programming languages and some work-related questions to guess my age.
I don't know how OpenAI plans to do this going forward, just quickly read the article and figured that might be a good question to ask ChatGPT.
Edit: I just followed that up with, "Based on everything I've asked, what gender am I?" It refused to answer, stating it wouldn't assume my gender and treats me as gender neutral.
So I guess it's ok for an AI agent to assume your age, but not your gender... ?
I don't really feel like diving into the ethics of OpenAI at the moment lol.
I would assume that it would be able to make those assumptions based on the questions you ask it, but OpenAI would never allow an LLM to answer those types of inquiries. That would obviously cross some boundaries.
I find it strange that having it assume your age isn't off limits - according to the article, it's about to become a major feature.
If they are shielding you giving back answers, doesn’t mean there is a lot of profiling going on behind the screens of all big tech. How close are they to behavioral monitoring?
It’s also to check if something works. I recently added something new and while I cannot and will not track any personally identifying information, I still need some data if people go through the whole process alright. That covers legitimate interest. It’s the minimum data I collect and its get wiped after some time.
Just to engage with your “12 year old to produce by yourself” , here are some examples of art made by Picasso in his early teens to mid teens.
It’s absolutely possible to be that good. Especially in the middle ages / early renaissance with the work you did for guilds and working for masters as an apprentice.
Some people are just prodigies - very, very few, but it's a real phenomenon. Even with early craft training, which people don't get today, exceptional talent still cuts through.
This is why the common "There's no such thing as talent, it's just hard work" line can't possibly be true. It's soothing to believe that you too could be a genius if only you put the hours in, but it just doesn't work like that.
Ability is set by a talent ceiling, which is on a bell curve. "Most people don't reach their ceiling" and "There are extreme outliers of native ability" can both be true at the same time.
- Some use extreme outliers to justify their own failure to get close to their ceiling. "I can't be Einstein, why should I try?"
- Some (parents, coaches, motivational speakers) also use extreme outliers to claim there are no limits/ceilings for others. "If you can dream it you can do it!" (but somehow it doesn't seem to apply to them)
The best essay I read last year described how there are two types of artists: those born with great talent, that usually create their masterpieces in their early 20s and coast for the rest of their life, and those that take most of their adulthood before finding their voice, peaking late in their 40s and 50s. The author used Picasso as an example of the former, and Kurt Vonnegut for the latter.
Gave me the greatest impulse to explore my creative drive like nothing else before, after spending my 20s lost in a daze. I know you’re joking, but if you aren’t, do not lose hope yet.
More broadly, we're doing people a disservice today by treating them as juveniles until they graduate college. When someone's that good, we shouldn't waste four years of his life in school he doesn't need, but instead let him be productive immediately out of college.
Christ a-fucking mighty, in some states, the law says that Michelangelo, had he been alive today,would have had to sit on a booster seat at the age at which he made this painting. Absurd.
One of my more heretical beliefs is that tech companies should do more hiring of high brilliant people right out of high school.
> When someone's that good, we shouldn't waste four years of his life in school he doesn't need, but instead let him be productive
Or perhaps we need more challenging schools. I'd hate to harvest before cultivation has a chance to grow without the constraints of organizational biases
- Marquis de Lafayette was only 19 when he helped the US win independence.
- Alexander began conquering when he was 20, smashed Persia at 25, and "wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer" at 30.
- Pascal and Galois did revolutionary math before 20.
- Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein at 18!
We need more rigorous secondary education and a pathway that lets people with rocket-ship trajectories skip useless tertiary education. I am sick and tired coddling mediocre people by pretending geniuses don't exist. If I ran things, I'd set up magnet schools nation-wide.
Mozart wrote his first symphony at eight, his first opera at 14. There are some people who have something extra that most people can barely comprehend.
It's controversial in education schools to "track" students, i.e. sort them into ability-categories and tailor each category's experience to its needs. For example, activist groups in New York City have been trying to kill gifted-and-talented schools and programs (e.g. Bronx Science high school) for years. It's painful to watch.
People can and do create rigorous private schools, but they're not accessible to the masses and often embody the same anti-talent mentality public ones do.
Nothing, based on the existence of thousands of exactly such schools within the US alone.
On the other hand: a disagreement about the actual definition of gifted, based on the existence of thousands of such schools in the US alone. "Gifted" in some jurisdictions simply means something anodyne like "top 10%" which obviously doesn't get close to creating an actually targeted school environment for your Mozarts.
>One of my more heretical beliefs is that tech companies should do more hiring of high brilliant people right out of high school.
I have more. Most average people need less education. No point in putting them through 15+ years of 'education'. They can start working at least part time by the time they are 12 or so. This way they also grow up psychologically very soon.
But he had not been an apprentice before making this, he started the apprenticeship that year, and this is supposed to be the first thing he ever painted.
> Michelangelo's biographers—Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) and Ascanio Condivi (1525–1574)—tell us that, aside from some drawings, his first work was a painted copy after a well-known engraving by Martin Schongauer (1448–1491) showing Saint Anthony tormented by demons. Made about 1487–88 under the guidance of his friend and fellow pupil Francesco Granacci, Michelangelo's painting was much admired; it was even said to have incited Ghirlandaio's envy.
[https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2009/michelan...]
I can’t respond much too this being Michelangelo’ painting, but if he was an apprentice under his fellow pupil it’s possible that he just did minor things or filled in. It was how you learned. You did final retouching and such.
The part with being an apprentice in a masters workshop is of great importance in regard to that time imho. Neuroplasticity at that age is insane and if you spent all your time on just that, especially if predisposed to a certain way of processing visuals and image, that is a totally different circumstance then a 12 to 13 year old that is also capable of writing, maths, history, different languages, and all the other things we do in the way generalised education at that age is laid out in our modern world.
Then that's very believable (well, depending on what age he started).
As a comparison, Mozart's compositions when he was 15 years old was unbelievable, unless you put in context he was already composing music at 5 years old
This one is a copy (Bargue plate − a famous set of plates designed to train students efficiently). And to be fair, it's not _that_ great of a copy.
The paintings really aren't impressive either: compare them to student works from e.g. the Angel Academy[0] (yes, they are older than 15). Incidentally, they also use Bargue plates a little to train students, and are far, far more demanding with themselves than Picasso in terms of accuracy and cleanliness.
Picasso wasn't terrible − he's definitely better than a non-painter − but he's genuinely far from having ever reached the level of his peers.
It's like comparing a food truck with historical French cooks.
They are 18+ at Angel Academy, right? I would say they are a lot older than 11, 14, and 15. One year I think is a lot of development in the teens. Doesn't seem a fair comparison
Reminds of “We belief something first, and then we pick our reasons for it.”
People aren’t really engaging with their philosophy (“love of wisdom”) but pick and choose so it reinforces what they already believe. They don’t exactly think about it they stay mildly glossing some concepts in the popular amateur/ social media sphere.
In some ways I always wonder if this Build-A-Bear thingy we've developed in the last 100 or so years regarding spirituality, morals, principles and all that as an alternative to traditional religious practices isn't just as lame as what it's meant to replace but in its own kind.
I'm not advocating for religious institutions or theocracy, mind you, I'm trying to formulate an argument how someone talking about how living life in accordance to Stoics on YouTube or Christ in a church is more of an aesthetics issue than a virtue one.
Though I feel by the time I successfully formulate that argument I'll have multiple groups clamoring for my head.
In my experience every other python tool has a variety of slightly to extremely painful behaviours that you have to work around or at least be aware of.
Sometimes it's things like updating to Fedora 43 and every tool you installed with `pipx` breaking because it was doing things that got wiped out by the system upgrade, sometimes it's `poetry update --only dep1` silently updating dep2 in the background without telling you because there was an update available and even though you specified `--only` you were wrong to do that and Poetry knows best.
Did you know that when you call `python -m venv` you should always pass `--upgrade-deps` because otherwise it intentionally installs an out of date version of pip and setuptools as a joke? Maybe you're not using `python -m venv` because you ran the pyenv installer and it automatically installed `pyenv-virtualenv` without asking which overrides a bunch of virtualenv features because the pyenv team think you should develop things in the same way they do regardless of how you want to delevop things. I hate pyenv.
So far the only problem I've had with uv is that if you run `uv venv` it doesn't install pip in the created virtualenv because you're supposed to run `uv pip install` instead of `pip install`. That's annoying but it's not a dealbreaker.
Outside of that, I feel very confident that I could give a link to the uv docs to a junior developer and tell them to run `uv python install 3.13` and `uv tool install ruff` and then run `uv sync` in a project and everything will work out and I'm not going to have to help them recover their hard drive because they made the foolish mistake of assuming that `brew install python` wouldn't wreck their macbook when the next version of Python gets released.
uv not only completely replaces all of pip, pyenv & venv, but it also does a much better job than any of them at their intended function, as well as a bunch of other convenient, simple developer-friendly features.
1. pip isn't entirely to blame for all of Python's bad package management - distutils & setuptools gave us setup.py shenanigans - but either way, UV does away with that in favour of a modern, consistent, declarative, parseable PEP 508 manifest spec, along with their own well-designed lockfile (there was no accepted lockfile PEP at the time UV was created - since PEP 715 has become accepted UV has added support, though that PEP is still limited so there's more work to do here).
2. pyenv works fine but uv is faster & adds some nice extra features with uvx
3. venv has always been a pain - ensuring you're always in the right venv, shell support, etc. uv handles this invisibly & automatically - because it's one tool you don't need to worry about running pip in the right venv or whatever.
pip and venv. The Python ecosystem has taken a huge step backwards with the preachy attitude that you have to do everything in a venv. Not when I want to have installable utility scripts usable from all my shells at any time or location.
I get that installing to the site-packages is a security vulnerability. Installing to my home directory is not, so why can't that be the happy path by default? Debian used to make this easy with the dist-packages split leaving site-packages as a safe sandbox but they caved.
They have their place. But the default shouldn't force you into a "project" when you want general purpose applicability. Python should work from the shell as readily as it did 20 years ago. Not mysteriously break what used to work with no low-friction replacement.
Python can work from the shell, if you don’t have external dependencies. But once you have external dependencies, with incompatible potential versions, I just don’t see how you could do this with “one environment”.
A python virtualenv is just a slightly more complicated node_modules. Tools like PDM, Poetry and uv handle them automatically for you to the point where it effectively is the same as npm.
The thing that makes Python different is that it was never designed with any kind of per-project isolation in mind and this is the best way anyone's come up with to hack that behaviour into the language.
That's what `uv tool install` does: it creates the wrapper and puts a symlink to it into ~/.local/bin (which you can add to PATH with `uv tool update-shell` if you don't want to do it manually). I don't recall pip doing anything helpful here; I think it still leaves it up to the end user to either add the venv's bin directory to their PATH or create the wrapper and put it somewhere already on the PATH. So it's a reasonable complaint that `pip install` has become less useful now that it resists installing tools outside of a venv but still lacks the replacement feature (which third party tools like uv and pipx do provide).
The common thinking of often a mental pattern of that intersects somewhere between laziness and comfort.
Is this the sort of thinking of “everyone needs to be able to do calculus in their heads with calculators around” or “you still need to write in the age of computers/printers” or something different?
But both of those statements are true, and for the same reason. A calculator isn't a human brain capable of doing math, and writing isn't the same thing as a computer. They're different things.
I can give a 5th grader a calculator and he's not passing college calculus. I can even give him a whole ass PC and he still isn't.
As for writing, again, it's its own thing with its own benefits.
I still write all my notes, because it helps me remember. There's something specifically about using my hands on paper that makes things stick better in my brain. It's less convenient than computer notes, and much harder to organize. But they accomplish different goals. They're not for reference, no, I usually don't ever read my notes again.
The TI-89 came out in 1998 and can do a lot of calculus work. It can go very far in entry level calculus courses and can be very useful for checking work even in the higher courses.
> Is this the sort of thinking of “everyone needs to be able to do calculus in their heads with calculators around” or “you still need to write in the age of computers/printers” or something different?
I can't tell - are you suggesting these aren't good practices/traits to be learning when people are still in the "fundamentals of education/learning" stages of their lives?
I did all my basic differential and integral calculus studying by mind only. I don't do it that way in my career day to day now - nor could I without some serious practice. But the efforts I took in learning this way in undergrad made me a much stronger student and made me much more comfortable leveraging calculus in more application driven fields of study.
Well yeah my suggestion is do you need to get the skills when the skills can be do for you? As a lot of popular thought goes as per the parent comment.
Good riddance. I once had the honor of being featured together with many other artist on an HP website. It was implemented in Flash though, meaning it existed as a smallish rectangle in the middle of a website; within that rectangle you could click through to browse the exhibition one artwork at a time. This entailed that your path through the Flash app was not connected to the browser's address bar and exhibits did not get a URL of their own. When you wanted to direct others to your piece the only way was by giving them a "Japanese visitor's address", as in "go to this well-known named point (the domain name), from there walk west and when you see a tall black building, turn right and take the third alley to your left, I'm living in the fifth house down that alley".
Although Flash really sucked as a technology, it did inspire a lot of visual artistry on the web. Half of the cool stuff you saw on StumbleUpon was made with Flash by people who weren't proficient with JS/CSS, which weren’t capable enough to achieve the same results anyway.
Flash was fun but it was never built for being responsive and handling desktop and mobile in one app. Everything was basically fixed layout. Adding in that responsiveness would have probably killed the "easy" part.
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