I concede that Robin Williams was a good actor and a real professional. It takes one (of each) to deliver such a dumb monologue with grace and conviction, without stumbling over the inane blandness of the material. He carries it through like the pro he clearly was.
Whoever wrote that thing though should burn in writer's hell, boiled forever in stale ink and old IBM keyboards. Five minutes of an older man god-moding a younger man and we have to suspend disbelief for the entire thing: oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels. Every. Single. Thing. He got nothing wrong. Not one thing.
He goes on about the Capela Sistina' ssmell and then he switches to women and I'm "oh no he's gonna tell him 'you don't know what a woman tastes like'" or something weird and creepy like that. But, no, the kid's had sex! Already at his age? I read the LotR at high school! And then he's like "you don't know what it's like to wake up next to one woman being perfectly happy"... wait, what? How would you even know something like that? Have you had sex as a young man? And you weren't happy afterwards? Maybe there's something wrong with you then, not the kid?
Honestly, that's nothing but some kind of elder dude fantasy, or other. It could have been tolerable if it lasted for two minutes, maybe two and a half, but it goes on for far too long.
> oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels.
He says exactly the opposite: that he can't know about the guy just because he read Oliver Twist and would be fascinated to hear about him, about the real person the guy intimately is.
How can it be an elder dude fantasy when it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they were in college? Robin Williams' character isn't pwning anyone. He's a therapist trying to get through to a patient who's completely walled up and trying to deflect by by analyzing the therapists' painting in his office to comment on his wife's passing.
When I think about elder dude fantasizing about pwning the rascal youth, I think of those self-written scenes of a boomer/early GenX actor asking for "black coffee", then delivering a diatribe to the Gen Z minimum wage worker who's contractually obligated to try to upsell them on the higher-priced and infuriatingly named mixed coffee beverages.
I guess if I project this argument onto software engineering there is no need to write maintainable code; as long as a vibe-coded blob of horror spaghetti "does the job" demanding that the blob is "comprehensible with what a human being considers a reasonable effort" is anthropocentrism.
I swear, with AI it's got to the point that I read articles in the tech press that sound like blog posts by homeopathy enthusiasts, the way they play fast and loose with facts and fudge technical details. Take the following:
>> In February, for example, the AI company Math, Inc. used its aspirationally named reasoning agent Gauss to formalize a proof that had earned the mathematician Maryna Viazovska, of EPFL, in Switzerland, a Fields Medal in 2022. Gauss first helped human mathematicians complete the formalization of Viazovska’s solution to the 8-dimensional sphere-packing problem in a matter of days, and then autonomously formalized the more complicated 24-dimensional case in just two weeks.
Gauss "autonomously" formalized? There are no autonomous AI systems! Even the most performant agentic harnesses require extensive human guidance and cannot complete substantial problems without some user interaction. Indeed, if I read the Math, Inc. pages linked in the article I find that Gauss is a typical agentic harness that relies on human scaffolding and interaction and its vaunted autonomy is currently only speculative:
>> Gauss offers a glimpse of how formalization will scale into the future. Currently, it relies on natural language scaffolding supplied by human mathematicians, and requires high-level expert guidance and development on that scaffolding. We anticipate future iterations of Gauss to be more capable and autonomous.
Or take this bit from the Math, Inc. pages again:
>> In two weeks, Gauss then autoformalized the 24-dimensional case using only the original paper as input, performing autonomous literature searches when needed. This brought the total sphere packing formalization from 70k to ~200k lines.
Gauss took only the original paper as input? Really? No initial prompts? No scaffolding? Just the paper and off it went? But then, the future feared by the young mathematicians at the 12th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, has already come to pass:
>> Speakers described a future in which superhuman AI mathematicians transcend human knowledge and capabilities: forming conjectures, searching solution spaces, proving conjectures, and finally verifying the proofs and generalizing the results, all without human involvement.
Hold the press for that is already happening: Gauss, the autonomous agent for autoformilization, is already capable of running completely autonomously with "only a paper as input"!
This is not serious. It's some kind of over-exaggerated mumbo-jumbo that fails to impart any useful information and makes it impossible to tell what advances have really been made and where things still can go. But perhaps that's exactly the point? Unbelievable.
Game AI uses behaviour trees, usually coded by hand. Decision trees are used for classification and are normally learned from data. The latter are a traditional AI technique from the early days of the modern machine learning era, in the 1990's.
>> For me it was surprising to see that JEPA is a model predictive control algorithm it an almost literal sense; I guess I’m happy to have studied what I chose when I was 18.
It's sold as something completely different though that will revolutionize autonomous decision-making which it clearly isn't, it's just trying to re-invent the wheel but with neural nets this time around.
I'll confess I didn't understand what you meant with the part of your comment after the semi-colon.
>> They need expert reviewers in virtually every interesting topic, which fundamentally is an intractable problem, especially since things change all the time.
How odd. It's Expert Systems and the Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck all over again.
The name of Cyprus being of semitic origin is probably easy to hand-wave away as the result of trade.
I'd like to offer some evidence that the people of Crete were of Greek origin and therefore Indo-European rather than semitic, unfortunately all the scholarship I can find on the subject is from Greek scholars and since it confirms that the Minoans are genetically related to modern Greeks, the more I hear of that evidence the less I am convinced by it. Because it's exactly consistent with confirmation bias. So I would not be surprised if the Minoans turned out to be one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Except of course we know those turned up in the Americas so they can't be the Minoans.
The serious bit is that as soon as you make claims about who is from where and connected to what ancient people, you lose. It's impossible to disentangle peoples' nationalism and identity politics from whatever facts. I'm speaking in this as a Greek myself. Did you know that the Greek language is not, actually, an Indo-European language, but predates it by severeral hundreds of thousands of years, and has influenced every language you can find on every continent, including but not limited to the languages of the pre-Columbian civilisations? True story. Evidence: plenty! Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xochicalco Obviously that is the temple of the Goddess Kali in the country side ("Ο ναός της Θεάς Κάλι στην Εξοχή". Εξοχή-Κάλι-κο, Ξοχικάλκο!). I have actually read that in a book someone handed to me when I was a teenager. I had to put the book down after that.
tl;dr people get really crazy when it comes to their ancient history and lose the ability to think straight and derive sound conclusions from facts.
The author and their friend are in the thread so I'll try to not be mean.
Caveat: I'm Greek so a kind of natural amateur historian. That is to say I grew up reading about the prehistory and ancient history of Greece, as one does when one is born Greek and a geek. I've seen the Phaistos disk and linear A inscriptions with mine own eyes in Greek museums and I have dreamed of the day they would be translated. I am not at all unsympathetic to the hopes of a Linear A decipherement.
However. The claimed decipherment has all the hallmarks of imaginative and fanciful attempts to draw parallels between historical events and entities, that were not really connected, many of them notably inspired by the Hebrew bible. For example, remember when the lost tribes of Israel turned out in the New World [1]? Or how Biblical Sodom was actually destroyed by a comet [2]? Or the time that Venus was ejected from Jupiter and caused the Biblical Cataclysm [3]? Or, for less biblical but no less foundational texts of the Western literary canon, remember when Heinrich Schliemann discovered the Jewels of Helen of Troy [4] and the Death Mask of King Agamemnon [5]?
Or of course we could recall any of the claims to decipher the Phaistos Disk [6] or the Dropa Disks from Bayan Kara-Ula [7], and so on I'm sure.
All of the above is not to say that a decipherement is impossible. What it is to say is that it currently isn't possible; because we have no idea what the language that Linear A transcribes even is. It's not like the Minoan language is still spoken today in some far-evolved form, as was the case for e.g. Egyptian or Mayan or indeed ancient Greek [8]. So we have an unknown script, writing an unknown language, and to make matters worse there are no parallel texts with another ancient language that might help us bridge the gap. What there is, is some rudimentary understanding of the more obvious contents of Linear A texts (mostly, lists of goods) and the fact that some Linear A symbols have been reused in Linear B.
But, how were they reused? And what good is that knowledge without knowing anything about the language transcribed by Linear A? I can read German, a language that I don't speak, because I can read Latin script, but the meaning of the script might as well be Greek to me [9].
I'm a computer scientists, I guess, these days [10]. The problem of deciphering Linear A, or the Phaistos Disk, or any other script (that may not even be a script) that transliterates a language that we don't know is a problem of reconstructing information that we don't have, from other information that we don't have. I'm not saying it's completely impossible. I mean, who knows? Maybe we're just missing the right maths. But, what we're really trying to do here is de-noise a message garbled by the passage of time without even a guess as to the language the message is written in. Claude Shannon would tell you that it's a fantasy that is not worth pursuing. You don't have to ask him, you can just read his magnum opus [11] and check out Section 3 titled "The Series of Approximations to English" for an idea of what the mechanics of deciphering a script when the language is known look like with the only technology we have that can do the job reliably.
When Turing and the other Brits at Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma code, they at least knew it was, ultimately, a coded form of German. We may have a lot more compute now, and much more advanced tech overall, but there are some barriers that you cannot physically cross, no matter what resources you have. For example, you can't go faster than light and you can't escape the event horizon of a black hole. In the same way you can't translate text written in an unknown script, encoding an unknown language, without any parallel texts with a known language. There is just not enough information to do the job. Worse, if you try, you can endlessly come up with plausible "translations" and convince yourself that you have the right one, but you have no way to know you do.
I'm sorry but this claim is just a wild guess trying to link Hebrew to Linear A, without any serious evidence that the two are linked and without any evidence that the link is real, other than "look, I can guess what all the texts say!".
[8] I can read ancient Greek. The further back in time it goes, the harder it gets to understand what it means but I can still read the script. It has changed in 5000 years but not enough that I can't read it. Nothing like that ability survived for Linear A. I blame Thera.
[9] Except of course then I would understand it. But it's just German to me.
[10] I can assure you that took me by surprised, first of all.
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Spoiler: because it hurts like hell.
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