In the case of Fizzy, the app that 37signals has made “source available”, the real motivation for publishing is form of advertising for Ruby on Rails.
DHH is on a mission to show that you can write great software with way less bullshit than is in vogue.
This code base is sparkling in its design. No build frontend, server side rendered templates, minimal js used primarily to drive interactivity, extremely simple models, jobs, and controllers.
It has < 3000 lines of js with incredibly rich interaction design, when was the last time you saw that?
Looking at its license[0], it more open-source that source-available. It has a non-compete restriction as a commercial hosted service, but otherwise you can do what you want with it.
Putting the motor into the wheel makes for an excellent riding experience, I have a Bionx rear wheel (out of business) that is connected to the chain ring and pedals in the traditional way. The wheel detects torque from pedaling and applies it's own torque to drive the wheel. It can be used with and without power and feels almost seamless and is silent.
Unfortunately it seems to be difficult to engineer and build these wheel motors for reliability and longevity. They significanly increase the unsprung mass of the wheel which leads to increased wear on the hub components.
What else could it be? Elected institutions are made up of people who agree to a laws, rules, and norms that everyone else agrees on. It's all a farce built up on agreements to keep things running smoothly.
There is no system you could structure rigidly enough that it would not be vulnerable to bad actors. You can insulate yourself by distributing authority as we have, but if those authorities stop playing following the laws, rules, and norms well you end up where we are at, devolving into facisim.
This is the real answer, not the pat “no one builds new used cars” nonsense. It is entirely possible to build new, no-frills apartments that are 100% habitable and to code. But because of all the regulatory boxes one needs to check — namely all the fees spent, and time spent waiting for seemingly endless approvals — it is simply not possible to rent out bottom-dollar builds at a low market rate. The same logic applies for single family homes sold for purchase. The startup costs are just too damn high.
You are right of course. I was being flip. There are multiple reasons it is no longer profitable for car companies to make small trucks. CAFE regs are part of that.
I don't really disagree. But I also can't help but imagine a hyper-advanced alien species thinking the same thing about us due to us lacking some notionally critical (to them) aspect of intelligence/consciousness and paving over the solar system to make room for a hyperspace bypass.
If we're going to agree on anything, I just wish consciousness discussions could agree on some phenomenological referent(s) for the term "consciousness". The word is used in a way that is little more than a sed-replace for elan vital, regaling all discourse to little more than a volley of solipsistic value proclamations IMHO.
So piano playing? If I bathe my rhododendron in nitrous oxide, it stops producing oxygen. Filling my plumbing with nitrous oxide causes my toilet flushes to stop working.
Bigfoot is what you see in this photo here [0]. A useful phenomenological description doesn't presume and use the thing it attempts to describe.
A good definition would look like the Mirror Self-Recognition Test (MSRT), or even simple verbal affirmations of personal consciousness, or some MRI features, etc. But these all have glaring limitations.
MRST is unusable with blind patients, it only tests a specific kind of awareness, and it turns out that toddlers fail the test.
Verbal affirmations limit coverage to socially functional, speaking humans, so severe autistics fail, and duct tape over the mouth (or aphasia etc.) presumably impairs consciousness as well.
MRI brain features seem to always disappoint with obvious flaws like above or have some crazy exceptions of some living, healthy patients who are missing parts of their brain.
Until we can talk about consciousness without saying "consciousness" or referring to it indirectly, then we're just hallucinating IMHO.
Interesting post. I'm relaying a thesis that has been the subject of ongoing discussion. I remember reading a piece by Hameroff in which he stressed that what makes anesthetics so puzzling is that, despite having wildly different mechanisms of action, they all lead to the same result: the disruption of consciousness and pain. It's a beautiful and intriguing idea that suggests consciousness can't be captured in positive terms but only defined through what causes it to cease, along with all the excessive implications this entails.
>In their recent paper, Kingsland and Taiz argue that proponents of plant intelligence and plant neurobiology misuse historical sources to support their claims, suggesting a pattern of bias. They critique the reliance on subjective judgments and the systematic misuse of past literature by notable scientists. This response addresses their criticisms while adhering to Rapoport’s rules to foster constructive academic dialogue. We emphasize the importance of evidence-based research and highlight areas of agreement, including the fallacy of appealing to authority and the necessity for more robust empirical evidence. However, we also challenge their selective citation practices and argue that their narrative itself is subject to the same criticisms they levy. By examining recent works and pointing out overlooked rebuttals, we aim to clarify misconceptions and advocate for a more nuanced understanding of plant intelligence research. This dialogue underscores the need for rigorous, respectful scientific discourse to advance the field.
If you don't understand consciousness, how to make it from first principles and how it works, then I don't think you can confidently say "this isn't conscious" about much.
We can explain plant behavior through known physical processes though.
We don't need to lean on consciousness nor other mysteries at all. Nor we do have to when a rock changes color as it gets wet.
And without this parsimony, then we could claim that any unexplained mystery underlies any well-understood phenomenon which doesn't sound like much of an epistemic standard.
You could just as well make the same argument about human behavior in a broad perspective. Not understanding every minute interaction in our brain is a fairly secondary point when the overarching themes are all the same.
You can not make the same argument just as well about human behavior.
You can observe that a human and a record player can both say "hello", but you can not make the argument from that that there is no way to disprove that a record player might wish to express a greeting to a fellow being.
A simple process can duplicate the outward appearance and effect of a complex one (an mp3 player can talk), and a complex process can duplicate the outward appearance and effect of a simple one (a human can crank a drive shaft), and neither of these means that one might just as well be the other. They don't mean anything at all by themselves either for proving or disproving.
Humans reacting to stimuli in largely similar ways to a plant, or even plain physical process like water filling a vessel or diffusion, neither proves nor disproves, nor even merely implies or suggests, nor even merely opens any doors to any room for doubts about anything.
It could be that there is no fundamental difference between a human and a plant and a toaster, but this observation about similar behavior provides nothing towards the argument.
Perhaps it's easier to explain what I mean by turning it around. Every point you've just brought up can be made for plants in the same way. Humans are not special in the animal kingdom, we're just dominant in this era. Other species held that role in the past and other species still will do so in the future.
Yes, Chinese room is a well-known way of building up a system that's capable of understanding something from parts that individually are not (even though it was formulated in an attempt to prove the opposite).
I find some irony in the mention of elan vital upthread - on the one hand, most people here wouldn't let themselves be caught dead believing in elan vital, but then switch to any thread discussing AI, or even cognition in animals (or plants, like here), and suddenly vitalism becomes the mainstream position once again.
Even if there's no hard measurable rule on the limits of what we consider consciousness, that doesn't mean that definition includes anything that exhibits chemical reactions.
Ultimately it's a bit of an inprecise human concept. The boundaries of what fits in there might be somewhat unclear, but we definitely things that intuitively are (humans) and aren't (plants, rocks) in this set.
To your point, we have a great understanding of human/mammalian injury and injury recovery. We know what proteins and structures cause blood clots and we can even manipulate them to help peoples blood clot better. We know about nerves and reflexes and nociceptors.
But if I cut myself, no amount of science can currently assess how much pain I feel or how much it bothers me.
Brains work with chemical gradients and hormones. There's no magic involved, we just don't understand the meta, and are probably incapable of doing so.
I like to think of this in terms of the information theoretic formulation of physics and the bounds placed on that by the holographic principle. For any system to fully represent another internally, it must contain more bits of information than the system being internalized. In other words, it must contain more matter and energy, or be physically larger. The brain expends an extraordinary amount of energy looking for patterns it can distill into leaky abstractions in order to build internal representations of reality without violating this principle. However, since the abstractions are leaky, our understandings are imperfect.
You also can't confidently say "this is consciousness", as the top level comment did. Even less so when it's in an alleged form that's so different from our only confirmed case.
Wikipedia article about Consciousness opens with an interesting line: "Defining consciousness is challenging; about forty meanings are attributed to the term."
Perhaps "consciousness" is just a poor term to use in a scientific discussion.
DHH is on a mission to show that you can write great software with way less bullshit than is in vogue.
This code base is sparkling in its design. No build frontend, server side rendered templates, minimal js used primarily to drive interactivity, extremely simple models, jobs, and controllers.
It has < 3000 lines of js with incredibly rich interaction design, when was the last time you saw that?