That's only true if the engineers are not allowed to copy/steal from existing designs. There are plenty that are better than GIMP (e.g. Photoshop, Krita, ...). If nothing else, make it easy to build a layer on top so that Photoshop can be replicated nearly exactly.
They didn't say "reality must be wrong". They said that their initial hypothesis (that significant changes would be observed after 21 days) is probably wrong, so they implicitly proposed a second hypothesis (that significant changes occur after e.g. a few months).
None of this is remotely contemptible.
Pretend you're an immortal alien conducting a study with the hypothesis, "humans are mortal". You observe that your subjects do not die after 21 days. Do you conclude that humans are immortal? (I hope not. It's much better to conclude that humans don't usually die after 21 days in this particular instance of extraterrestrial captivity.)
OK, fine, they didn't literally say "reality must be wrong", they just thought it, probably. The attitude stinks. And I say it is remotely contemptible. Perhaps I'd go as far as to say moderately contemptible.
It's a fair point about the aliens. They are presumably mortal themselves, they have expectations about lifespan. Something about the mind not being a blank slate, it's hypotheses all the way down, can't escape preconceived ideas. Sure. Except you can try. You can be more impartial than you otherwise might be, when you're aware that there's something to be partial about.
In the case of smartphone bans, the viewpoint is almost politicized, like whether you're down with the tech bros or think they're evil. Researchers should know that, and thus should be very coldly objective. Here they expect the degradation of mental function, why? That's not something well-understood like mortality. It's probably something there's a great wobbly mass of very questionable psychological research about - low attention in school and degraded working memory due to what they may well call "screentime" - and they've just gone along with it like it's established. Why is known evil thing not acting sufficiently evil to meet our narrative? Must do more research until true.
Another sketchy part of doing this research is the subtext that smartphones lower the mood entails therefore ban smartphones in schools. That isn't a science-based decision, it's a decision to trample on the kids' rights for their own good: science can't guide moral choices. But the only reason to scientifically establish the first part, the fact, is for the purpose of advocating a ban.
If you think children have a right to smartphones in school, then your priors are just really out of line with anyone who is actually concerned with the well being of children.
Bad analogy. In the company name case, there’s a registry (list) with a gatekeeper (filter) in front of it rejecting very simple inputs (small strings) that don’t conform to their standards. You literally can’t get your company name on this list if you don’t pass muster. One might even say the list is “sanitized”.
A few years ago, the main advantage was merely that "Sidebery is far less buggy and much more performant than Tree Style Tab".
Nowadays, the gap has... widened. The little details matter, but there's big feature differences too: panels, saving/restore to JSON, better appearance, tons of options for tweaking (but with sane defaults), ...
Personally, I would prefer the conventional Latin Modern math font instead of Palatino math.
Latin Modern is used by:
- Wikipedia.
- Math.StackExchange.
- Nearly all papers, including the ones hosted on arxiv in PDF format.
- Nearly any math videos, slides/presentations, notes.
- Almost everything, really.
Palatino just looks weird.
Also, I imagine that authors might do math formatting hacks that were only tested on Latin Modern, and might end up breaking on Palatino.
It's also quite silly that society often credits one guy at the top who supposedly has "incredible vision" and yet would likely fail at explaining even the most basic technical details. And if such a person must be credited, why not the CTO, chief engineers, or principal scientists, who are at least closer to what actually drive the technical innovations than the CEO?
In reality, it's actually the 1000s of actual engineers that deserve most of the credit, and yet are never mentioned. Society never learns about the one engineer (or team) that solves a problem that others have been stuck on for some time. The aggregate contributions of such innovators are a far more significant driving force behind progress.
Why do we never hear of the many? It's probably because it's just easier to focus on a single personality who can be marketed as an "unconventional genius" or some such nonsense.
Our stupid monkey brains are evolved to work in a primitive, human centric way, we always need a "figure", a "leader" to look up to, we can't comprehend that many people can be involved in something, that doesn't satisfy our primate brains need to follow or worship someone.
Human motivations and effort are like Brownian motion completely stochastic and hard to direct in any one direction to make any significant impact .
A effective leader whether it is Musk, Jobs, Altman, Gandhi, Mandela (or Hitler for that matter) has the unique to skill to be able to direct everyone in a common direction efficiently like a superconducting material.
They are not individually contributing like say a Nobel laureate doing theoretical research. They get accolades they get is because they were able to direct many other people to achieve a very hard objective and keep them motivated and focused on the common vision, That is rare and difficult to do.
In the case of Altman, yes there were 1000s researchers, programmers who did the all the actual heavy lifting of getting OpenAI where it is today.
However without his ability and vision to get funding none of them would be doing what they are doing today at OpenAI.
All those people would not work a day more if there is no pay, would not be able train any model without resources. A CEO's first priotity is to make that happen by selling that vision to investors, Secondly he has to sell the vision to all these researchers to leave their cushy academic and large company jobs to work in small unproven startup and create an environment they can thrive in their roles. He has done both very well.
