Infinite Quack

Karl Popper made a big stink about falsifiability . If you’re making a statement about the real world, there had better be some way to disprove (falsify) your statement. Let’s say your statement is “It’s raining”. I should be able to open my window and stick my arm outside and see if it gets wet. Writing as a software developer, I might use the shorter word “testable”. If your assertion is testable, it may be right or it may be wrong. I and others are empowered to figure that out. If the assertion is that life continues after death, how does one render that assertion testable? We must say more. “Ghosts exist”, for example, is testable, as long as your definition of “ghost” includes that they have some observable impacts on the living world. It should be possible to take a picture of a ghost, record a ghost saying something or moving an object. People make ghost hunter TV shows, of course, but the wider scientific community remains unconvinced because this “evidence” doesn’t meet the hi...

I’m writing this in 2023. I figure, if you’re too young to be President of the United States (less than 35 years old), you probably can’t imagine what it was like before the Internet. I’m a 1974 model. When I was six, my grandparents left their TRS-80 home computer at our house, to watch it for them while they went on vacation. They also left the manual. I read it. I learned how to use BASIC to write a program. That was it. I was hooked. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. My parents bought it for me shortly after my encounter with the TRS-80, because they could see how entranced I was. Obsessed, really. For whatever reason, I got computers. The goal was always to push the machine’s boundaries, to see what I could make it do. Even on these very early machines, whose capabilities were laughable by today’s standards, their possibilities seemed endless to me. There was a universe contained inside a small box. I would invent a project for myself, then another. Most went unfinished, ...

chatGPT can never replace programmers "Never" is a long time. In a narrow sense, yes: maybe you can say that ChatGPT will never replace programmers entirely. But that's a straw man. We don't really care about the narrow statement, do we? Even if you expand it to "Large Language Models will never replace programmers entirely" (and I grok the argument that they can only ever mimic human-produced writing), that's not what we care about, either. What keeps us up at night is this: Can we never build any machine that can think well enough to replace programmers? There's no way to avoid the philosophical, with questions like this, so let's not mince words or dodge the key issue. Is there a magical component to the human brain? You, reader, can believe what you like. I can only describe my own beliefs: I'm a physicalist. I believe that matter and energy exist, the stuff that physics tries to study and understand... and that's it. If you believe t...

Bagel, please. (Pronounce that in your head not like “Coffee, please”, but like “Bitch, please.”) The Multiverse has been in the zeitgeist lately. Notably in movies, it often happens that different films touching on similar topics will emerge around the same time. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is one. Everything Everywhere All At Once is another. Spoilers ahead, particularly for those two films, some Marvel Cinematic Universe backstory, and also – for physics. We all love a good story. Stories, as Sir Terry Pratchett was fond of pointing out, are a huge part of how we think about the world. “Fisherman catches fish. Poor man begs for fish. Fisherman refuses. Poor man turns out to be King pretending to be poor man. Fisherman begs forgiveness, learns lesson about being kind to strangers.” That sort of story sticks with us and is retold over centuries, because it encodes some basic truths. Kings are useful plot devices because they’re powerful. They allow things to happen t...

I don't speak for my employer, but I'm going to speak about them I may have mentioned in passing, here and there, that I work for Amazon. In fact, I've worked there longer than most software developers; I'll pass 16 years by this June. Amazon likes to measure its employees' career development according to its Leadership Principles . Note that this link, like everything I reference in this post, is to publicly available information. I'm not spillin' any secrets here. I signed an NDA like everyone else. In my own progress assessments, I've been told I'm excellent at "Diving Deep". This, you could probably guess from my writing. I'm a details guy. I analyze the crap out of stuff. It's just how my brain works. Where are my "opportunities for growth", as they like to positively frame "the stuff you're not-so-good at yet"? The clearest of these is "Think Big". I jump so naturally to the details, the singl...