They are referring to how there’s a belief in some parts of Massachusetts that the police are trying to frame Karen Reid for the death of John O Keefe (0). At its climax it was all over the news, it was discussed at a lot of water coolers, and there were even billboards bought by the highway to show support and draw attention to the court case.
The amount of evidence described in the Wikipedia entry that relies on mobile data is both fascinating and jarring; step counts, battery temperature, automobile software, Ring cameras...wow.
I use YouTube in 3 contexts, mobile, laptop and TV. Since the remote slows down my inputs the most I watch longer content (e.g 20 minute or longer videos) on TV. I do notice that YouTube plays longer ads, somewhere around a minute’s worth, on TV. They likely realized that consumers are used to putting up with long commercial breaks in this medium.
I believe knowing a proof exists will bring us closer to elegant human proofs.
I wanted to justify this with the “Roger Bannister Effect”. The thought is that we’re held back psychologically by the idea of the impossible. It takes one person to do it. And now everyone can do it, freed from the mind trap. But further reading shows we were incrementally approaching what Roger Bannister did first: the 4 minute mile. And the pause before that record was likely not psychological but physical with World War Two. [0] And this jives with the TFA when Mr. Wolfram writes about a quarter of a century not yielding a human interpretation of his computer’s output.
All I’m left with is my anecdotes. I had a math professor in college who assigned homework every class. Since it was his first time teaching, he came up with the questions live. I’d come to class red in the face after struggling with questions all night. Then the professor would sheepishly reveal some of his statements were false. That unknown sapped a lot of motivation. Dead ends felt more conclusive. Falsehood was an easy scapegoat.
I think there is something to this idea. There have been cases where person A was working on proving a result but struggled, then person B announced a proof of the result, and then person A was inspired to finish their proof. (Sadly, I don't remember the specifics.)
The Minecraft comparison is really good. Roblox is for kids. That audience of children attracts seedy actors who want to make money.
I’d like to draw an analogy from redstone (Minecraft’s imitation of circuitry) to the ability to create games in Roblox. Both are incredibly accessible to beginners. Both can be a learning rabbit hole. And I think both have flowering communities of creators pushing each other forward.
I think today Roblox doesn’t need kids to make games the same way Minecraft is fine if no one uses redstone. That being said it’s clear the team puts an incredible amount of effort in maintaining the developer experience. For example, here’s documentation for sending a message from a server to a game client.
- and look at the switch at the top, how mature APIs change by deprecating behavior!
I played Roblox a decade ago and it was an on-ramp to a lifelong love of everything computer science. I don’t think it’s the majority’s experience with the brand. But that’s my anecdote.
Thank you for sharing. I’m glad to hear that it sparked your interest in computer science. I imagine had I been a little younger when Minecraft came out (re Redstone) or young when Roblox came out I’d have been similarly enthralled by the possibles. I was in college when Minecraft came out and had been writing code for 3-4 years at that point so I felt things like Redstone to be limiting but as a kid I would have loved it.
I would guess that this drives a non-negligible number of people to playing the game for the first time. My personal anecdote is tab completing `apt-get install` by mistake and figuring I should research this 0ad package more to make sure I didn’t screw up configurations.
Emulators don’t always challenge developer profit. Minecraft is incredibly successful because users can play on alternative server implementations (e.g hypixel).
Minecraft sells their own hosted servers called realms that bill monthly [0]. The key difference here might be that it was rolled out well after the game’s release around the 1.5 update [1].
I was surprised that the story of Gauss's schoolboy arithmetic tricks was the guy himself. Per Sartorius, Gauss "often related [the incident] in old age with amusement and relish". I suppose it makes sense. I cannot imagine biographers hunting down old schoolmates for stories without modern tools.
A lot of celebrity myths can be verified in 2022. Michael Jordan often recounted [0] that he was cut from his high school basketball team. Reporters found his high school coach who clarified that Michael was placed on junior varsity just like everyone else in his year[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_John_O%27Keefe