jpowers.io
jp@jpowers.io
THINGS I CAPTURE THROUGHOUT MY DAY

NOTES_

I enjoy hearing people talk passionately about very specific work they do: the designer who drew Cursor's icons

What I'm looking for is what I think of as the attractor: the soul of the object, the shape a concept keeps pulling toward. What makes a bin a bin? At what point does a question mark stop reading as a question mark? Inside that attractor there are still plenty of ways to draw the thing, but it has to land instantly. It's communication first. When the industry hasn't settled on something, there's no attractor yet, so it comes down to exploration. You try the literal version, the abstract version, and everything in between, and you put them next to each other until a few start looking better than the rest, then a couple better than those, until you choose one.

When you break down “AGI” as a term/concept/definition — as this piece does seriously — it crumbles into nonsense.

I also like the definition it gives of functionalism and intelligence.

The first is functionalism...that a thing is defined by its function, what it does, rather than by what it is made of. His example is a future artificial kidney built from carbon nanotubes: nothing about those atoms makes them a kidney, and if you were the one waiting for the transplant you would not care in the slightest what it was made of, only whether it worked. The same reasoning extends to minds. If a function is what it does, then whether it runs on carbon or on silicon is not a difference in kind. Then he argues that intelligence is prediction, the probability of the future given the past, coupled with the agency to act on what you have predicted.

A cool shirt idea: Intelligence = Prediction

@mkbhd demos the iPhone Duo. Looks both dope and inevitable.