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

“Well, we're looking for a particular kind of thing. When I was at Cornell, I had a lovely professor of Asian religions, Jamie Law, and she would tell this story about a musical musician, a Western musician, who went to Japan and he taught, you know, classical music and could play all sorts of instruments. He went to Japan and he would ask people, he would basically be looking for things in the style of Western chromatic scale and these kinds of things. And then finding none of it, he would say, well, there's really no music in Japan. But they're using a different scale. They're playing different kinds of instruments, 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
“We did. We created mathematical operations so that we can have iterated steps to approach bigger problems, right? I mean, the entire point of the Arabic numeral system, and it's a rubric for mapping a certain set of operations, of folding them into a simple little expression. But that's just the operations that we can fit in our heads. There are many other operations besides, 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
“Yeah, the mathematics we use as the mathematics that can fit in our head. Did God really create the integers or did God create all of it? And we just happen at this point in time to be able to perceive integers.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are some of the things that we think are random are actually not that random? We're simply not integrating at a final F level across a broad enough time horizon. And this is again why I said we go down the rabbit hole of some of the Penrose stuff or like Wolfram's explorations on these things. There is something deep and beautiful in the mathematics of all this that is hopefully one day I'll have enough money to work and retire and just ponder those questions. But there's something there.”
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 like to turn that around as head and look at it as what if every single one of the patterns created life or created, you know, not life, but created interesting patterns because, you know, some of them don't. And sometimes you make cool gliders. And other times, you know, you start with certain things and you make gliders and other things that then construct like, you know, AND gates and not gates, right? And you build computers on them. All of these rules that create these patterns that we can see, those are just the patterns we can see. What if our subjectivity is actually limiting our ability to perceive the order and all of it?”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have excess energy, what happens then? Life doesn't just make a hotter soup. It starts making structure. There's something there.”
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 is excess energy, things will structure and pattern themselves. And they will then actually furthermore try to create an environment that furthers their continued stability. It's the concept of externalized extended phenotype or niche construction. So this is ultimately what leads to certain kinds of amino acids forming certain kinds of structures and so on and so forth until you get the ladder of life. So what we experience as consciousness, no, I don't think cells are conscious of that level. But is there something beyond mere equilibrium state biology and chemistry and biochemistry that drives what makes things work? I think there is. So Adrian Bajan has this constructal law. There's other things you can look at when you look at the life sciences and you look at any kind of statistical physics and statistical mechanics. When you look at things far out of equilibrium.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe what humans experience as consciousness is something that sits on a gradient scale of a general principle in the universe that seems to look for order and reach for order when there's an excess of energy. It would be odd to say a proton is alive, right? It would be odd to say this particular atom or molecule of hydrogen gas is alive. But there's certainly something we can make assemblages of these things that have autopoetic aspects to them that will create structures, that will crystalline solids will form very interesting and beautiful structures. This gets kind of into weird mathematical territories. You start thinking about Penrose and Game of Life stuff about the generativity of math itself, like the hyperreal numbers, things like that. But without going down that rabbit hole, I would say that there seems to be a tendency in the world that when there”
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, each layer is a part of what you are. You are a layer cake, right? Of all these things. And if we try to deny, right, so many philosophies do try to deny the reality of some of these things, right? Some people will say, well, we're only atoms. Well, we're not only atoms because there's a lot of other things that are only atoms. I can reduce a human being to a bunch of soup and they're not the same thing, even though it's the same atoms. So I think the order and the patterns that emerge within humans to understand, to really think about what a next generation philosophy would look like that would allow us to reason about extending humans into the digital realm or to interact with autonomous intelligences that are not biological in nature, we really need to appreciate that human, what human beings actually are, is the supervision of these different layers.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing to do with your biological need to get on the ground or physics of gravity, it is an intellectual drive that you have, it's a cultural phenomenon and an intellectual belief that you carry. So that's what the four-layered stack is all about. It's that a person is not only one of these things. They're all of these things at the same time. It's a superposition of dynamics that run through us that make us who we are.”
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 was no exchange of physical anything. They didn't give us like five atoms of happiness, right? But there's an induction in our own sense of self that is at that social level. And then beyond that Persik puts the intellectual level kind of one level higher than social. I think they're actually more intertwined than that. But the intellectual level is the level of pure ideas that you are a vessel for memes. You're a vessel for philosophies. You will conduct yourself in a particular way. I mean, I think part of this is if we think about it from a physics perspective, you're not, you know, there's the joke that physicists like to approximate things. And we'll say, well, approximate a spherical cow, right? You're not a spherical cow. You're not a spherical human. You're a messy human and we can't even say what the dynamics of your emotion will be unless we analyze all four of these layers, right? If you're Muslim at a certain time of day, guess what? You're going to be on the ground kneeling and praying, 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're still of the underlying pieces. So your body is this way. I mean, we just know physically you consist of atoms and whatnot. And then the atoms are arranged into molecules, which then arrange into certain kinds of structures that seem to have a homeostasis to them, we call them cells. And those cells form sort of biological structures. Those biological structures give your body its physical ability and biological ability to consume energy and to maintain homeostasis. But humans are social animals. I mean, human by themselves is not very long for the world. So we also, part of our biology is wire to connect to other people from the mirror neurons to our language centers and all these other things. So we are intrinsically, there's a layer, there's a part of us that wants to be part of a thing. If we're around other people, not saying a word, but they're just up and down, jumping and dancing, laughing. We're going to feel better, right? And they didn't.”
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, I'm just stealing wholesale here from Robert Persig, who is the author of Zen and the Auto Motorcycle Maintenance. And in his follow-on book, his sequel to it called Lila. He goes into this in a little bit more detail. But it's a crude approach to thinking about people, but I think it's still an advancement over traditional subject-object metaphysics, where we look at people as a dualist would say, well, is your mind, you know, your consciousness, is that just merely the matter that's in your brain or is there something kind of more beyond that? And they would say, yes, there's a soul, sort of ineffable soul beyond just merely the physical body, right? And then, and I'm not one of those people, right? I think that we don't have to draw a line between our things only this or only that collectives of things can emerge structures and patterns that are just as real as the underlying pieces. But they're transcendent.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's something like when a social media app causes a family to break apart, it's done harm to more than just individuals, right? So that concept is not something we really talk about or think about very much, but that's actually the problem is that we're vaporizing molecules into atomic units and then we're hitting all the atoms with certain things that's like, yeah, well, that person chose to look at my app.”
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's far from the last. And it gets to the heart of some of the philosophical Achilles heel of the Western philosophical system, which is each person gets to make their own determination. Each person is an individual that's sacrosanct in their agency and their sovereignty and all these things. The problem with these systems is they come down and they are able to manage everyone en masse. And so every person is making their own decision, but together the bigger system is causing them to act with a group dynamic that's very profitable for people. So this is the issue that we have is that our philosophies are actually not geared to understand what is it for a person to have a high trust connection as part of a collective. And for that collective to have its right to coherency and agency.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to nope out of that, right? That's going to be a hard pass. That's great, but that's again, to your point, that's the first generation of front facing cameras, of social pressures, and you as a self-starter, self-aware adult have the capacity to say, yeah, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go and spend time on long-form reads. I'm going to spend time managing my attention. I'm going to do some yoga. If you're a 15-year-old in high school and your entire social environment is everyone doing these things, guess what you're going to do? You're going to kind of have to do that because your limbic system says, hey, I need to get the guy or the girl or whatever. And that's what I'm going to do. And so one of the things that we have to reason about here is the social media systems or, you know, social media, I think, is a first encounter with a technological system that runs a bit of a loop around our own cognition and attention. It's not the last.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we're more than just that, but we're at least that, and we're very, very seldom not that. So I don't actually disagree with you that we could be better and that better platforms exist and people are voluntarily noping out of things like Facebook and noping out.”
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. Well, there's a lot to unpack there. I think some people certainly have the capacity for that. And I certainly think, I mean, it's very interesting even the way you said it, you woke up one day and you thought, well, this doesn't feel very good. Still, your limbic system saying this doesn't feel very good. You have a cat brain's worth of neurons around your gut, right? And so maybe that saturated and that was telling you, hey, this isn't good. Humans are more than just mice looking for cheese or monkeys looking for sex and power, 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
“Of the television, and that was before TikTok and before front facing cameras. So I think for me, the concern is that it's not like we can never switch to doing something better, but more of the humans and technology, they're not independent of each other. The technology that we use kind of molds what we need for the next generation of technology.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what's My intuition is that a lot of our digital technologies give us the ability to have synthetic connections or to experience virtuality. They have co-evolved with sort of the human expectations. It's sort of like sugary drinks as people have more sugary drinks. They need more sugary drinks to get that same hit, right? So with these virtual things and with TV and fast cuts and tick tocks and all these different kinds of things, we're co-creating essentially humanity that sort of asks and needs those things. And now it becomes very difficult to get people to slow down. It gets difficult for people to hold their attention on slow things and actually feel that embodied experience, right? So mindfulness now more than ever is so important in schools and as a therapy technique for people because our environment has been accelerated. And McLuhan actually talks about this in the electric environment.”
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. I mean, it's possible to have that in the current world, but when Literally trillions of dollars of capital are tied to using those things to groom the worst of our inclinations and to attack our weaknesses in the limbic system to create these things into id machines versus connection machines, then those good things don't stand a chance.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A level of embodiment. There's a level of embodied experience and participatory interaction that is lost. And it's very hard to put your finger on exactly what it is. It's hard to say, oh, we're going to spend $100 million building a new system that captures this 5% better higher fidelity human expression. No one's going to pay for that, right? So when we rush madly into a world of simulacrum and virtuality, the things that are lost are it's difficult once everyone moves there, it can be hard to look back and see what we've lost.”
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, right. For me, it's not about any hard line about physical reality as much as a simple question of does the particular technology help people connect in a more integral way with other people, with their environment, with all of the full spectrum of things around them. So it's less about, oh, this is a virtual thing and this is a hard real thing, more about when we create virtual representations of the real things always some things are lost in translation. Usually many, many dimensions are lost in translation, right? We're now coming to almost two years of COVID. People on Zoom all the time, you know it's different when you meet somebody in person than when you see them on, I've seen you on YouTube lots, right? But then seeing a person is very different. And so I think when we engage in virtual experiences all the time and we only do that, there is absolutely”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But right, but then when you have social media, when you have all these different things that conspire to create a layer of virtual experience for people that alienates them from reality and from each other, that's very pernicious. That's impossible to see, right? And it kind of slowly gets in there.”
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'm not as concerned about the visible stuff. And the reason is because the big visible explosions, I mean, this is something I said about social media is that, you know, at least with nuclear weapons, when a newt goes off, you can see it and they're like, well, that's really, wow, that's kind of bad, right? I mean, Oppenheimer was reciting the Baha'i Gita, right, when he saw one of those things go off. So we can see nukes are really bad.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it will be a different experience for different people. I do share a common point of view with some of the climate people who are concerned about climate change and just the big existential risks that we have. But unlike a lot of people who share my level of concern, I think the collapse will not be quite so dramatic as some of them think. And what I mean is that I think that for certain tiers of, let's say, economic class or certain locations in the world, people will experience dramatic collapse scenarios. But for a lot of people, especially in the developed world, the realities of collapse will be managed. There will be narrative management around it so that they essentially insulate the middle class will be used to insulate the upper class from the pitchforks and the flaming torches and everything.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. There are some software systems that run without humans in the loop that are quite complex. And that's like the electronic markets. And we get flash crashes all the time. We get, you know, in the heyday of high frequency trading, there's a lot of market microstructure people doing all sorts of weird stuff that the market designers had never really thought about contemplated or intended. So when we run these full-on systems with these automated trading bots, now they become automated, you know, killer drones and then all sorts of other stuff. That's what I mean by we're at the dawn of the cybernetic era and the end of the era of just pure software.”
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 human may have set some criteria, but the human wasn't precise. So, for instance, I just read the other day that Earlier this year, or maybe it was last year at some point, the Libyan army, I think, sent out some automated killer drones with explosives. And there was no human in the loop at that point. They basically put him in a geofenced area, said find any moving target like a truck or vehicle. It looks like this. And boom, that's not a human in the loop, 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
“When humans are out of the loop, when the machine is actually sort of deciding on its own what it should do next to get more information, that makes it a cybernetic system. So we're just at the dawn of this, right? I think everyone talking about MLAI, it's great. But really the thing we should be talking about is when we really enter the cybernetic era and all of the questions of ethics and governance and correctness and all these things, they really are the most important questions.”
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, when I say cybernetic, I really do mean that the software itself is closing the observe orient decide act loop by itself. So humans being out of the loop is the fact what, for me, makes it a cybernetic system.”
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've thought about software as just this thing that you can do in isolation with some test trial inputs and in a very sort of sandboxed environment. And we can quantify how does it scale, how does it perform, how many nodes do we need to allocate if we want to scale this many inputs. When we start turning this stuff into prediction systems, real cybernetic systems, you're going to find scenarios where you get inputs that you're going to want to spend a little more time thinking about. You're going to find inputs that it's not clear what you should do, right? So then the software has a varying amount of runtime and correctness with regard to input. And that is a different kind of system altogether. Now it's a full-on cybernetic system. It's a next generation information system that is not like traditional software systems.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, service level agreement. So it has to return within some time. You have a 10 millisecond time budget to return a prediction of this level of accuracy, right? So these are things that were not traditionally in most business computing systems for the last 20 years at all. People didn't think about it. But now we have value dependence on functional correctness. So that question of correctness is becoming a bigger and bigger question.”
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 a lot of dimensions to correctness. Historically, and this is For the last 40 years or so, software correctness was really defined about functional correctness. I write a function, it's got some inputs, does it produce the right outputs? If so, then I could turn it on, hook it up to the live database, and it goes. And more and more now, I mean, in fact, I think the bright line in the sand between machine learning systems or modern data-driven systems versus classical software systems is that the values of the input actually have to be considered with the function together to say this whole thing is correct or not. And usually there's a performance SLA as well. Like, did it actually finish making this?”
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 boundaries that we hit with these information systems is when the representation of the data hits the real world is where there's a lot of slop and a lot of interpretation. And that's where actually I think a lot of the work will go in the future is actually understanding kind of how to better in the view of these live data systems how to better encode the semantics of the world for those things. There'll be less about the details of how we write a particular SQL query.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I'm just thinking about computing systems here. Okay. And the reason I bring this up is because I believe there's no free lunch around this stuff. So if we build machine learning systems to sort of write the correct code that is at a certain level of performance, so it'll sort of select, right? With a hyperparameters, we can tune kind of how we want the performance boundary in SLA to look like for transforming some set of inputs into certain kinds of outputs. That training process itself is intrinsically sensitive to the kinds of imposts we put into it. It's quite sensitive to the boundary conditions we put around the performance. So I think even as we move to using automated systems to build this transformation as opposed to humans explicitly from a top-down perspective, figuring out, well, this schema and this database and these columns get selected for this algorithm. And here we put a Fibonacci heap for some other thing, human design or computer design. Ultimately, what we hit”
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 every programming system, every information system, ultimately finds some spot in the middle of this little triangle. Sometimes some systems collapse them into just one edge.”
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 does, but my background is a physics. I took like two CS courses in college. So I don't have, now I did cram a bunch of CS in prep when I applied for grad school, but still I don't have a formal background in computer science. But what I have observed in studying programming languages and programming systems and things like that is that there seems to be this triangle. It's one of these beautiful little iron triangles that you find in life sometimes. And it's the connection between the code correctness and kind of expressiveness of code, the semantics of the data, and then the kind of correctness or parameters of the underlying hardware compute system. So there's the algorithms that you want to apply. There's what the bits that are stored on whatever media actually represent. So the semantics of the data within the representation. And then there's what the computer can actually 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
“Something onto a system that exists versus when they're extending the system to increase the system's capability for someone else to that interface with. And we happen to use the same language for both of those things in most cases, but it doesn't have to be that. And Excel is actually a great example of this, of kind of a counterpoint to that.”
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, not quite back to Excel, but the idea is when we have a human conversation, all languages for humans emerged to support human relational communications, which is that the person we're communicating with is a person, and they would communicate back to us. And so we sort of hit a resonance point, right? When we actually agree on some concepts. So there's a messiness to it and there's a fluidity to it. With computing systems, when we express something to the computer and it's wrong, we just try again. So we can basically live many virtual worlds of having failed at expressing ourselves to the computer until the one time we expressed ourselves right. Then we kind of put in production and then discover that it's still wrong, you know, a few days down the road. So I think the sophistication of the things that we build with computing, one has to really pay attention to the difference between when an end user 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
“To give us ability and capability over these things. Now, the one exception to this rule, of course, is the most popular programming system in the world, which is Excel, which is a data flow and a data-driven immediate mode, data transformation-oriented programming system. And it's actually not an accident that that system is the most popular programming system because it's so accessible to a much broader group of people. I do think as we build future computing systems, You actually are already seeing this a little bit. It's much more about composition of modular blocks. They themselves actually maintain all their internal state and the interfaces between them are well-defined data schemas. And so to stitch these things together using like IFTTT or Zapier or any of these kind of, I would say compositional scripting kinds of things. I mean, HyperCard was also a little bit in this vein. That's much more accessible to most people. It's really that implicit.”
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, when we program, we're giving very precise instructions to iterated systems that then run at incomprehensible speed and run those instructions. In my experience, some people are just better equipped to model systematic iterated systems. Well, whatever. Iterated systems in their head. Some people are really good at that and other people are not. And so when you have like, for instance, sometimes people have tried to build systems that make programming easier by making it visual, drag and drop. And the issue is you can have a drag and drop thing, but once you start having to iterate the system with conditional logic, handling case statements and branch statements and all these other things, the visual drag and drop part doesn't save you anything. You still have to reason about this giant iterated system with all these different conditions around it. That's the hard part, right? So handling iterated logic, that's the hard part. The languages we use then emerge.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the act of programming or using grammatical constructions of some underlying primitives, that is something that humans do learn, but every human learns this, anyone who can speak learns how to do this. What makes programming different has been that up to this point, when we try to give instructions to computing systems, all of our computers, well, actually this is not quite true, but I'll first say it and then I'll tell you why it's not true. For the most part, we can think of computers as being these iterated systems.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that was a little bit better for what they needed the MATLAB, and they were going to leverage what everyone else had built. So naturally, almost in kind of this annealing process or whatever, we built a very modular cover of the basic needs of a scientific computing library.”
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, it does work well for software projects in general. And in this particular space, one of my colleagues, Stan Siebert, identified this, that all the projects in the SciPy ecosystem, you know, if we just rattle them off, there's NumPy, there's SciPy, built by different collaborations of people, although Travis is the heart of both of them. But NumPy coming from Numerica and NumRi, these are different people. And then you've got pandas. You've got Jupyter or IPython. There's Mattplotlib. There's just so many others. I'm not going to just name them all. But all of them are actually different people. And as they rolled out their projects, the fact that they had limited resources meant that they were humble about scope. A great famous hacker, Jamie Zawisky, once said that every Geeks' dream is to build the ultimate middleware, right? And the thing is with these scientists turned programmers, they had no such deed. They were just trying to write.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very telling that when you look at all of the impactful big projects, well, they're fundamental projects now in the sci-Py and PyData ecosystem, they all started with the people in the domain trying to scratch their own itch. And the whole idea of scratching your own itch is something that the open source or the free software world has known for a long time. But in the scientific computing areas, these are assistant professors or electrical engineering grad students. They didn't have really a lot of programming skill necessarily, but Python was just good enough for them to put something together that fit in their domain. So it's almost like it's a necessity of mother invention aspect. And also it was a really harsh filter for utility and compactness and expressiveness. It was too hard to use, then they wouldn't have built it because there was just too much trouble, right? It was a side project for them.”
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, so Clay Shirky in his book on crowdsourcing or in his kind of thoughts on crowdsourcing, he identifies the first step of crowdsourcing is me first collaboration. You first have to make something that works well for yourself.”
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 it's more of a taste thing, but one thing that should be said is that you have to pick your audience, right? So the better defined the user audience is or the users are, the easier it is to build something that fits in their minds because their needs will be more compact and coherent. It is possible to find a projection, right? A compact projection for their needs. The more diverse the user base. The harder that is. And so as Python has grown in popularity, that's also naturally created more complexity as people try to design any given thing. There will be multiple valid opinions about a particular design approach. And so I do think that's the downside of popularity. It's almost an intrinsic aspect of the complexity of the problem.”
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 just enough things there. It's like a very simple, comfortable tool. It's easy to reason about what it does. When you don't stray too far afield.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really still like the ability to play with metaclasses and express higher order things when I have to create some new object model to model something, right? It's easy for me because I'm pretty expert as a Python programmer. I can easily put all sorts of lovely things together and use properties and decorators and other kinds of things and create something that feels very nice. So that to me, I would say that's tied with the numpy and vectorization capability. So I love thinking in terms of the matrices and the vectors and these kind of data structures. So I would say those two are kind of tied for 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
“I think there's not a specific thing as much as the design motif of both the creator of the language and the core group of people that built the standard library around him. There was definitely a taste to it. I mean, Steve Jobs used that term as somewhat of an arrogant way, but I think it's a real thing that it was designed to fit. A friend of mine actually expressed this really well. He said, Python just fits in my head. And there's nothing better to say than that. Now, people might argue modern Python, there's a lot more complexity, but certainly as version 152, I think, was my first version, that fit in my head very easily. So that's what made me fall in love with it.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source