YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Wang

lines on the record: 202
first: 2021-12-23
most recent: 2021-12-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“People working on these different projects have their own timelines and their own things they're trying to meet. So we end up trying to pull these things together. And then it's this incredibly, and I would recommend just as a business tip, don't ever go into a business where when your hard work works, you're invisible. And when it breaks because of someone else's problem, you get flagged for it. Because that's in our situation, right? When something doesn't conda install properly, usually it's some upstream issue, but it looks like Conda's broken. It looks like Anaconda screwed something up. When things do work, though, it's like, oh, yeah, cool. I just worked. Assuming naturally, of course, that's very easy to make that work, right?”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is getting to a point where we do have to think about look, can we pull some of the most popular packages together and get them to work on a coordinated release timeline, get them to build against the same test matrix, et cetera, et cetera, right? And there is a little bit of dynamic around this, but again, it is a volunteer community.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing, you now run into dependency You cannot, you know, OpenCV can have a different version of libjp over here than PyTorch over here. And they all have to use it if you want to use GPU acceleration. They have to always use the same underlying drivers and same GPU CUDA things. So it gets to be very gnarly and it's a level of technology that both the makers and the users don't really want to think too much about.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, stuff they could then install different packages, and what ended up happening in the Python ecosystem was that a lot of the core Python and Web Python developers, they never ran into any of this compilation stuff at all. So even we have on video, we have Guido van Rossum saying, you know what, the scientific community's packaging problems are just too exotic and different. I mean, you're talking about Fortran compilers, right? Like you guys just need to build your own solution, perhaps, right? So the Python core Python community went and built its own sort of packaging technologies, not really contemplating the complexity of the stuff over here. And so now we have the challenge where you can pip install some things. Some libraries, if you just want to get started with them, you can pip install TensorFlow and that works great. The instant you want to also install some other packages that use different versions of NumPy or some graphics library or some OpenCV thing or some other thing.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it is hard because it's well, you're installing this on a version of Windows, right? And half of these libraries are not built for Windows. Or the latest version isn't available, but the old version was. If you go to the old version of this library, that means you need to go to a different version of that library. And so the Python ecosystem, by virtue of being crowdsourced, we were able to fill 100,000 different niches. Then we also suffer this problem that because it's crowdsourced and no one's like a tragedy of the commons, right? No one really wants to support their thousands of other dependencies. So we end up sort of having to do a lot of this. And of course, the Konda Forge community also steps up as an open source community that maintains some of these recipes. That's what Conda does. Now, PIP is a tool that came along after conda to some extent. It came along as an easier way for the Python developers writing Python code that didn't have as much compile.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have literally thousands of people writing code in the ecosystem, building all sorts of stuff, and each person writing code, they may take a dependence on something else. And so all this web, incredibly complex web of dependencies. So installing the correct package for any given set of packages you want, getting that right subgraph is an incredibly hard problem. And again, most data scientists don't want to think about this. They're like, I want to install NumPy and Pandas. I want this version of some geospatial library. I want this other thing. Like, why is this hard? These exist, right?”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To put it simply, it's able to build these packages correctly on each of these different kinds of platforms and operating systems and make as though when people want to install something, they can. It's just one command. They don't have to set up a big compiler system and do all these things. So when it works well, it works great. Now the difficulty is”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're a package developer, you're like, I code on Linux, this works for me. I'm good. It is not my problem to figure out how to build this on an ancient version of Windows, right? That's just simply not my problem. So what we end up with is we have a creator, a very creative crowdsourced environment where people want to use this stuff, but they can't. And so we ended up creating a new set of technologies like a build recipe system, a build system, and an installer system that is able to, well,”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The package problem is this which is that in order to do Numerical computing efficiently with Python. There are a lot of low-level libraries that need to be compiled, compiled with a C compiler or C++ compiler or Fortran compiler. They need to not just be compiled, but they need to be compiled with all of the right settings. And oftentimes those settings are tuned for a specific chip architectures. And when you add GPUs to the mix, when you look at different operating systems, you may be on the same chip, but if you're running Mac versus Linux versus Windows on the same X86 chip, you compile Link differently. All of this complexity is beyond the capability of most data scientists to reason about. And it's also beyond what most of the package developers want to deal with too.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's hard, but we're trying to do that in our own way at Anaconda because we know that business users, as they use more of the stuff, they have needs that like business specific needs around security, provenance, they really can't tell their VPs and their investors, hey, we're having our data scientists are installing random packages from who knows where and running a customer data. So they have to have someone to talk to. And that's what Anaconda does. So we are a governed source of packages for them. And that's great. That makes them money. We take some of that and we just take that as a dividend. We take a percentage of our revenues and write that as a dividend for the open source community. But beyond that, I really see the development of a marketplace for people to create notebooks, models, data sets, curation of these different kinds of things, and to really have a long tail marketplace dynamic with.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seize this moment to do that because, like, a lot of the other open source movements, it's all nerds nerding out on code for nerds. And this because it's scientists, because it's people working on data, that all of it faces real human problems. I think we have an opportunity to actually make a bigger impact.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I hope he feels the same way. I mean, I hope he knows that over the years now. We both care a lot about the community. For someone who cares so deeply, I would say this about Travis. That's interesting. For someone who cares so deeply about the nerd details of like type system design and vector computing and efficiency of expressing this and that and the other, memory layouts and all that stuff, he cares even more about the people in the ecosystem, the community. And I have a similar kind of alignment. I care a lot about the tech. I really do. But for me, the beauty of what this human ecology has produced is, I think, a touchstone. It's an early version. We should look at it and say, how do we replicate this for humanity at scale? What this open source collaboration was able to produce? How can we be generative in human collaboration moving forward and create that as a civilizational kind of dynamic?”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's a really good dude. And he and I, you know, it's so interesting. We come from very different backgrounds. We're quite different as people, but I think we can not talk for a long time and then be on a conversation and be eye to eye on 90% of things. And so he's someone who I believe, no matter how much fog settles into the ocean, his ship, my ship are pointed sort of in the same direction at the same star.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then Travis, you laugh about that. I took over the CTO role. Travis then left after a year to do his own thing, to do QuanSite, which was more oriented around some of the bootstrap years that we did a continuum where it was open source, some consulting. It wasn't sort of like gung-ho product development. And it wasn't focused on, we accidentally stumbled into the package management problem at Anaconda, but we had a lot of other visions of other technology that we built in the open source. And Travis was really trying to push, again, the frontiers of numerical computing, vector computing, handling things like auto differentiation and stuff intrinsically in the open ecosystem. So I think that's kind of the direction he's working on and some of his work. We remain great friends and colleagues and collaborators, even though he's no longer day-to-day working at Anaconda. But he gives me.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Etc. And that was that, yeah. So he was CEO, and I was president for the first five years. And then we raised some money and then the board sort of put in a new CEO. They hired a kind of a professional CEO.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, it was all Python NumPy, Sophy Consulting kind of stuff. Towards the end of that time, we started getting called into more and more finance shops. They were adopting Python pretty heavily. I did some work on a high frequency trading shop, working on some stuff. And then we worked together on a couple of investment banks in Manhattan. And so we started seeing that there was a potential to take Python in the direction of business computing, more than just being this niche like MATLAB replacement for big vector computing. What we were seeing was, oh yeah, you could actually use Python as a Swiss Army knife to do a lot of shadow data transformation kind of stuff. So that's when we realized the potential is much greater. And so we started Anaconda. I mean, it was called continuum analytics at the time, but we started in January of 2012 with a vision of shoring up the parts of Python that needed to get expanded to handle data at scale, to do web visualization application development.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2005, I was working at Nthought, you know, working on scientific computing consulting. And a couple of years later, he joined us at NTOT, I think it's 2007. And he came in as the president, one of the founders of NTOT was the CEO, Eric Jones. And we're all very excited that Travels was joining us, and that was great fun. And so I worked with Travis on a number of consulting projects, and we worked on some open source stuff. I mean, it was just a really, it was a good time there. And then...”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can do these things. We can actually do this kind of collaboration because code, software information organization, that's cheap. Those bits are very cheap to fleeing across the oceans”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do we create the infrastructure for collectives of people to live on the basis of providing what we need, meeting people's needs with a little bit of excess to handle emergencies and things like that, pulling our resources together to handle the really, really big emergencies, somebody with a really rare care form of cancer or some massive fire sweeps through half the village or whatever. But can we actually unscale things and solve for people's needs? and then give them the capacity to explore how to be the best versions themselves. And for Travis, that was throwing away his shot at tenure in order to write numpy. For others, there is a saying in the sci-fi community that sci-fi advances one failed postdoc at a time.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This should be a Super Bowl ad. That's great. Maybe somebody. You really need a new iPhone? Maybe one of our listeners will fund something like this, but just actually bring it back, bring it back to actually the question of what do you need.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, the question of surplus, right? This is the question if everyone were to go and run their own farm, no one would have time to go and write NumPy SciPi, right? Maybe, but that's what I'm talking about when I say a post-scarcity point for a lot of people. The question that we're never encouraged to ask in a Super Bowl ad is how much do you need? How much is enough? Do you need to have a new car every two years, every five? If you have a reliable car, can you drive one for 10 years? Is that all right? I had a car for 10 years and was fine. You know, your iPhone, did you have to upgrade every two years? I mean, sort of, you're using the same apps you did four years ago, right?”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we charge for all the exponential dynamics out of it. That's what Facebook did. That's what modern social media did, right? Because the old internet was connecting people just fine. Facebook came along and said, well, anyone can post a picture, anyone can post some text. And we're going to amplify the crap out of it to everyone else. And it exploded this generative network of human interaction. And then it said, how do I make money off that? Oh, yeah, I'm going to be a gatekeeper on everybody's attention. And that's how I'm going to make money.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Restricting a forking reduces value. So that's different than any other physical resource that we've ever dealt with. It's different than how most corporations treat software IP, right? So if treating software in this way created this much value so efficiently, so cheaply, because feeding a dozen people for 10 years is really cheap, right? That's the reason I care about this right now is because looking forward, when we can't automate a lot of labor, where we can, in fact, the programming for your robot in your part neck of the woods and your part of the Amazon to build something sustainable for you and your tribe to deliver the right medicines, to take care of the kids, that's just software. That's just code that could be totally open sourced, right? So we can actually get to a mode where all of this additional generative things that humans are doing, they don't have to be wrapped up in a container.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From finite game scarcity mentality, medieval institutions. As we are now entering, to some extent, we are sort of in a post scarcity era, although some people are hoarding a whole lot of stuff. We are at a point where, if not now soon, we'll be in a post-scarcity era. The question of how we allocate resources has to be revisited at a fundamental level. Because the kind of software these people built, the modalities that those human ecologies that built that software. Treat softwares on property. Actually, sharing creates value.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would challenge anyone to go and try to hire the right 12 people in the world to build that entire stack the way those 12 people did that would be very very hard press to do that if a hedge fund could just hire a dozen people and create like something that is worth billions of dollars a day every single one of them we racing to do it right but finding the right people fostering the right collaborations getting it adopted by the right other people to then refine it that is a thing that was organic in nature that that took crowdsourcing that took a lot of the open source ethos and it took the right kinds of people right none of those people who started that said i need to have a part of a multibillion dollar a day sort of enterprise they're like i'm doing this cool thing to solve my problem for my friends right so the point of telling the story is to say that our way of thinking about value our way of thinking about allocation of resources our ways of thinking about property rights and all these kinds of things they come”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's the thing. What can we do to do more of that? That's open source. The way I've talked about this in other environments is when we use generative participatory crowdsourced approaches, we unlock human potential at a level that is better than what capitalism can do.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right, easily. I think. Like the things they could not do if they didn't have these tools, right? So that's billions of dollars a day. Great. I think that's about right. Now, if we take how many people did it take to make that? And there was a point in time, not anymore, but there was a point in time when they could fit in a van. I could have fit them in my Mercedes sprinter, right? And so, if you look at that, like, holy crap, literally a van of maybe a dozen people could create value to the tune of billions of dollars.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, if you look at our systems, when you do a Google search, right? Now, some of that stuff runs through TensorFlow, but when you look at Siri, when you do credit card transaction fraud, just everything, right? Every intelligence agency under the sun, they're using some aspect of these kinds of tools. So I would say that these create billions of dollars of value”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“SciPy Numpy matplotlib. There's iPython notebook. Let's throw pandas in there so I can learn. A few of these things. How much value do you think, economic value, would you say they drive in the world today?”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have the mechanisms we have now explored enough technologies to where we can actually, I think, sustainably produce what most people in the world need to live. We have also created the infrastructures to allow continued research and development of additional science and medicine and various other kinds of things. The organizing principles that we use to govern all these things today have been a lot of them have been just inherited from honesty, medieval times. Some of them have refactored a little bit in the industrial era. A lot of these modes of organizing people are deeply problematic. And furthermore, they're rooted in, I think, a very industrial mode perspective on human labor. And this is one of those things I'm going to go back to the open source thing. There was a point in time when, well, let me ask you this. If you look at the core scientific collection of libraries,”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has done that to some extent. I mean, it's not all good or bad, in my perspective. You know, we can always look backwards and offer a critique of the path we've taken to get to this point in time. But that's a different, that's somewhat different and informs the discussion, but it's somewhat different than the question of where do we go in the future, right? Is this still the same rocket we need to ride to get to the next point? We'll even get us to the next point”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, creating a homogenized demand makes it really cheap to create homogenized product. And now you have economics of scale. So we make the same tickle mealmo, give it to all the kids, and all the kids are like, hey, I got a tickle meal, right? So ultimately where this ties in then to runaway hypercapitalism is that we then capitalism is always looking for growth. It's always looking for growth. And growth only happens in the margins. So you have to squeeze more and more demand out. You got to make it cheaper and cheaper to make the same thing. But tell everyone they're still getting meaning from it. You're still like, this is still your tickle meow mobile bits of this dripping critiques of this dripping in popular culture. You see it sometimes it's when Buzz Lightyear walks into the thing. He's like, oh my God at the toy store, I'm just a toy. Like there's millions of other or there's hundreds of other Buzz Lightyears just like me, right? That is.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason why everyone wants it is because we have broadcast that tells everyone this is the cool thing, so we homogenize demand, right? And we're like Baudrillard and other critiques of modernity coming from that direction, you know, the situation list as well. It's that their point is that at this point in time, consumption is the thing that drives a lot of the economic stuff, not the need, but the need to consume and build status games on top. So we have homogenized. When we discovered, I think this is really like Bernays and stuff, right? In the early 20th century, we discovered we can create demand. We can create desire in a way that was not possible before because of broadcast media. And not only do we create desire, we don't create a desire for each person to connect to some bespoke thing, to build a relationship with their neighbor or their spouse. We are telling them you need to consume this brand. You need to drive this vehicle. You got to listen to this music. Have you heard this? Have you seen this movie, right?”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't sit well in the environments. It's essentially you can think of it as the antonym of craft, whereas a craftsman will come to a problem, maybe a piece of wood, and they make it into a chair. It may be a sight to build a house or build a stable or build, you know, whatever. And they will consider how to bring various things in to build something well contextualized that's in right relationship with that environment. But the way we have driven technology over the last 100, 150 years is not that at all. It is how can we make sure the input materials are homogenized, cut to the same size, diluted and doped at exactly the right alloy concentrations? How do we create machines that then consume exactly the right kind of energy to be able to run at this high speed to stamp out the same parts, which then go out the door? Everyone gets the same tickle melo.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it can be. I certainly draw on some of Ol's ideas, and I think some of them are pretty good. But the way he defines technique is, well, also Samondun as well. I mean, he speaks to the general mentality of efficiency, homogenized processes, homogenized production, homogenized labor to produce homogenized artifacts that then are not actually”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's, I mean, to all the stuff aside and setting aside our discussion on currency, which I hope we get back, get back to, that's what I mean about the meaning crisis, part of it being created by the fact that we're not encouraged to have more and more direct relationships. We're actually alienated from relating to even our family members sometimes, right? We're encouraged to relate to brands. We're encouraged to relate to these kinds of things that then tell us to do things that are really of low consequence. And that's where the meaning crisis comes from.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are incented by the, I would say mostly I'm thinking about middle class consumers. They're incented by advertisements, they're scented by their memetic environment to treat the purchasing of certain things, the need to buy the latest model of whatever, the need to appear, however, the need to pursue status games as a driver of meaning. And my point would be that it's a very hollow driver of meaning. And that is what creates a meaning crisis. Because at the end of the day, it's like eating a lot of empty calories, right? Yeah, it tasted good going down. It's a lot of sugar, but man, it did not. It was not enough protein to help build your muscles. And you kind of feel that in your gut.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, right. They're trying to plant a million trees with Mark Robert or whatever it was. Yeah, it's not that those kinds of games can't lead to real consequences. It's that for the vast majority of people in consumer culture.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the YouTube influencer is status games, but at a certain level, it precipitates into real dollars and into like, well, you look at Mr. Beast, right? He's like, Sending off half a million dollars worth of fireworks or something, right? On a YouTube video”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, okay. So I see what you're saying. I think I see what you're saying there. With the idea there, I mean, we'll take the LeBron James side and put in like some YouTube influencer.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's different kinds of money. Part of the reason that some of the stuff is able to go a little unhinged is because the big sovereignties where one spends money and uses money and plays money games and inflates money, their ability to adjudicate the physical resources and hard resources and land and things like that, those have not been challenged in a very long time.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'll be captured in the physical space. It all builds. It's just like the stack of human beings, right? If you only play the game at the cultural and the intellectual level and the people with the hard resources and access to layer zero physical are going to own you.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'd have the fuel and the rare earths to make the next generation of robots. They're then going to run game, run circles around you and your children. So it's another reason not to play those virtual status games”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning crisis. Well, there's a meaning crisis in that there's two aspects of it. Number one, playing those kinds of status games, oftentimes requires destroying the planet because it ties to consumption consuming the latest and greatest version of a thing, buying the latest limited edition sneaker, and throwing out all the old ones. Maybe it keeps in the old ones, but the amount of sneakers we have to cut up and destroy every year to create artificial scarcity for the next generation, right? This is kind of stuff that's not great. It's not great at all. So conspicuous consumption, fueling status games is really bad for the planet, not sustainable. The second thing is you can play these kinds of status games, but then what it does is it renders you captured to the virtual environment. The status games are the really wealthy people are playing are all around the hard resources where they're going to build a factory.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that it's more meaningful than the other, it's that you make a decision between these two brands and you're told this brand will make me look better in front of other people. If I buy this brand of car, if I wear that brand of apparel, right, the idea, like a lot of the decisions we make are around consumption, but consumption by itself doesn't actually yield meaning. Gaining social status does provide meaning. So that's why in this era of abundant production, so many things turn into status games. The NFT kind of explosion is a similar kind of thing. Everywhere there are status games because, you know, we just have so much excess production”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, they're high end luxury purses and crap like that. But the point is that we give people the idea that consumption is meaning. Making a choice of this team versus that team spectating has meaning. So we produce all of these different things that are as if meaning, right? But really making a decision that has no consequences for us. And so that creates the meaning crisis.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Result of a person making a consequential decision, acting on it, and then seeing the consequences of it. So historically, just when humans are in survival mode, you're making consequential decisions all the time. So there's not a lack of meaning because like you either got eaten or you didn't, right? You got some food and that's great. You feel good. Like these are all consequential decisions. Only in fossil fuel and industrial revolution could we create a massive leisure class. I could sit around not being threatened by bears, not starving to death, making decisions somewhat, but a lot of times not making, not seeing the consequences of any decisions they make. The general sort of sense of anomie, I think the French term for it, in the wake of the consumer society, in the wake of mass media telling everyone, hey, choosing between Hermes and”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of human history, there wasn't so much a meaning crisis, there was just a food and not getting eaten by bears crisis, right? Once you get to a point where you can make food, there was the not getting killed by other humans crisis. So sitting around wondering what is it all about is actually a relatively recent luxury. And to some extent, the meaning crisis coming out of that is precisely because, well, not precisely because I believe that meaning is the consequence of When we make consequential decisions. It's tied to agency, right? When we make consequential decisions, that generates meaning. So if we make a lot of decisions, but we don't see the consequences of them, then it feels like, well, the point happening, but we're just long for the ride, then it also does not feel very meaningful. Meaning, as far as I can tell, this is my working definition of circa 2021, is generally the”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cartesian, like, what is the vector? Where is the position? Where is it going? It's completely deterministic. And kind of this idea that things emerge. Everything we see is the emergent patterns of other things. And there is agency when there's extra energy”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think systems to your point. I mean, look at how much how uncomfortable you are with this concept, right? Think systems that feel like overbearing control will not evolutionarily win out. Think systems that give their individual elements the feeling of serendipity and the feeling of agency that that will those systems will win. But that's not to say that there will not be emergent higher level order on top of it. And that's the thing, that's the philosophical breakdown that we're staring right at, which is in the Western mind, I think there's a very sharp delineation between explicit control.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source