I am working on Grog, the “grug-brained” alternative to Bazel. Bazel has a very steep learning curve and is pretty much overkill for most medium-sized teams. Grog already powers all of our internal mono-repo CI and is a lot more fun to work with.
While I agree with some of his sentiments the entire video reeks of half-baked conspiratorial thinking and shallow engagement with the facts.
A quick tell is that the video's title includes "Game Theory", while only referencing game-theoretical concepts twice in an off-hand comment. In both instances the usage is plainly wrong.
In general, he loves making big assertions without backing them up with evidence or explanations that go beyond hand-wavy examples.
Game Theory is the name of his class. He is a high school teacher. I agree his ideas about the conflict are only loosely connected to "Game Theory" in the Academic sense. If you engage with more of his content, he often repeats that he is probably wrong and exhorts you to think for yourself and make your own conclusions. His perspective on past and current events is certainly not mainstream.
I think we should hold people to a higher standard especially when they talk with this much confidence and present themselves as a professor. The issue is that "Game Theory" is a technical term so there really only is an "Academic" sense otherwise it's just a marketing term for whatever ideas you want to push.
He makes quite a few quite controversial assertions without evidence or even bothering to explain them. At the top of my head and paraphrasing:
- "The conflict is a game of chicken." Only in the vaguest sense in which any war or confrontation could be called that.
- "The USA is not equipped to handle a war against drones and fanatics". Idk they seem more capable than any other nation save Ukraine given that those two things have been a major feature of their recent wars.
- "Countries that are poor have more energy and are more cohesive". This is just demonstrably false, but he does not bother to explain why he thinks this.
- "The US wants to break Iran into ethno-states that compete for water until they are all dead." He even admits that this is pure conjecture and hand-waves this as the game-theoretic "optimal" strategy which is completely bonkers.
I do share his negative sentiment and outlook about the war, but there are way better critics that don't resort to this type of intellectual laziness.
- "The US wants to break Iran into ethno-states that compete for water until they are all dead." He even admits that this is pure conjecture and hand-waves this as the game-theoretic "optimal" strategy which is completely bonkers.
I think that there is a huge leap between using the Kurds to do your fighting (like in Syria) and what he claims if you look at the map that he pulls up in that section.
Sops can natively handle .env files. All you need to apply them to your process is a small wrapper script that sources the decrypted file before invoking your command.
There's a lot of gotcha bundled into this statement. It is true what you say, but it also hides away the nightmare of shell escaping bullshit that comes with the .env format the second you have to have some sort of transformation on the data that is orthogonal to the normal decryption path. I think that now they have a better story around some of the edge cases but if you go into SOPS you will see several issues around how the .env file format is just a complete nightmare with crazy escaped values such as a Google Service Account JSON.
The way I got around this on my own stuff is just to have a policy that all sops secrets have to be base64 encoded before the encryption hits them. That seems to solve basically every piping issue you could hit. Works super well with kubernetes, who supports native base64 encoded secrets, so you just take the value and inject it in, using data: instead of stringData: in the manifest of the created secret.
We just recently adopted this and it's crazy to me how I spent years just copying around gitignored .env files and sharing 1password links. Highly underrated tool.
For a long time up until about a couple of years ago the project was stagnated and was missing some pretty critical features. I'd say it was only halfway usable until then and it doesn't have near the ecosystem that things like Hashicorp Vault does. But for my self hosted infra stuff it is perfect. It just really doesn't gel well with compliance frameworks and audits, mainly because the auditability of the solution goes out the window the second someone is able to decrypt the secret - its access patterns are untraceable. These auditors really prefer to see a situation where access to the secret is tightly controlled and audited on rotation and sops, by nature of how it works, cannot really easily offer that.
That video is such an extremely weak argument. Sure Feynman probably has more fame than he is merited. But he is still one of the most influential physicists. He just also happened to be entertaining and wrote some books. Personality and self-marketing makes a difference, welcome to society.
Yah. He didn't write the Feynman Lectures on Physics. He just came up with the unique arguments in them and gave the lectures at Caltech; it fell to Leighton and Sands to do most of the work of knitting it into a cohesive, coherent book.
And his other books-- they're just his stories, trying to capture the characteristic style in which he talked, while editing it to be a cohesive written work.
This criticism is maybe valid for QED-- I am not sure what fraction of that he was really involved in-- but not the rest of his body of work.
Is this supposed to be bad?
You appear to be parroting the nonsense from Collier's "I hate Feynman" videos. Feynman gave the FLP lectures at Caltech, which were recorded and photographed, but at that time there was no intention of making them into a book. Leighton and Sands (with the help of some secretaries and grad. students) transcribed these lectures, and then lightly edited them, for use by Caltech students as study notes. These fell into the hands of publishers a couple years later, and they were the ones who proposed turning them into a book. I am now the Editor of those books. To say Feynman "didn't write" FLP may be true in the most literal sense that he did not set pen to paper, but the content is his, as you can easily verify by going to The Feynman Lectures Website, where you can listen to the recordings and see the photos of the original lectures and compare them to the book - they are the same, except for very minor changes that would be required to make any spoken lecture readable.
Do you mean he didn’t write the lectures he gave to students? I know the books weren’t put together by him and were substantially edited, but I thought the original lectures as delivered by him were either all or largely his work.
I once worked through part of the first volume of his lectures in the published book while listening to the recordings of him partly out of curiosity to see how much the original lectures as he gave them matched the ones which were compiled and published in written form (which I already knew was something not done by him). I came away feeling impressed one could either stick so closely to some lecture notes when lecturing and/or put together a written work which so closely matched a spoken one without coming across as being a transcript. It’s quite the accomplishment and one which I felt was a credit to everyone involved.
> Leighton deserves the credit for this. Feynman did share his notes, but Feynman's notes are.. an adventure.. to work through.
It's pretty clear he also used the recordings of the lectures themselves. Otherwise there'd be a much bigger difference between the lectures as presented in the books and the audio recordings[1] of him actually giving the lectures. Leighton deserves a lot of credit, but the lectures Feynman gave were substantially similar enough that it's absurd not to act as though he didn't co-author them.
> Feynman did share his notes, but Feynman's notes are.. an adventure.. to work through.
I don't doubt his notes would be, however they also used the audio recordings of and took notes during the lectures themselves for the books. I'm not sure how much they relied on Feynman's notes themselves though. It's been about 15 years since I last read and listened to them together, but I recall the experience of the combined activity being that the book was surprisingly close to being a transcript of what he said (including references to figures which the books reproduced).
This is why I thought it was impressive that the book didn't read like a transcript on its own. I rarely encountered professors who gave such well-structured lectures, but it seems like something Feynman could not only give prepared lectures in this way, but could do this off the cuff as well.
> Leighton deserves a lot of credit, but the lectures Feynman gave were substantially similar enough that it's absurd not to act as though he didn't co-author them
I'm sorry that it's difficult to convey tone on the internet. My intent was to highlight that absurdity that seemed to be present in the comment that I replied to-- Feynman only came up with the physics and gave the lectures, but didn't actually "write the book" is not much of a gotcha as far as the accomplishment goes.
It doesn't take away from Feynman, but it maybe adds a lot to each of the Leightons that they could capture such a range of ideas and Feynman's tone so well without simply repeating things verbatim in that transcript style.
> (including references to figures which the books reproduced).
Yes, this is one of the areas of significant challenges in reproduction. So Leighton definitely deserves a whole lot of respect for producing the work, from audio recordings, a few spare photographs, and notes. Even more impressive is what the Goodsteins did with the "Lost Lecture" to recreate the figures from just a few pages of surviving notes that looked like this:
(And it seems Feynman gave this 60 minute lecture quickly wandering between history, geometrical ideas, and dynamics-- that still seems well organized-- with these few pages of sparse notes).
No worries! That makes sense. I got tripped up by "just came up with the unique arguments [...] and gave the lectures" and "Leighton and Sands [did] most of the work of knitting it into a cohesive, coherent book". It felt like glossing over the degree to which the books' contents match the words he spoke.
> Yes, this is one of the areas of significant challenges in reproduction.
I feel this deeply. I'm very slow at writing by hand and have trouble paying attention to what someone's saying if I'm also trying to simultaneously summarize it. In college I solved this by becoming very, very swift with LaTeX. My pure math notes were easiest, but I struggled with physics notes the most. I settled on a middle ground of learning TikZ and making a bunch of LaTeX macros for common stuff. This did well enough for most simple diagrams. I'd fall back to hand-copying more complicated ones and just typing the text. I'd either scan the drawings afterward and add annotations as needed or convert fully into LaTeX. Converting these hand-drawn ones into LaTeX was a ton of work. After doing this for a short bit, I realized that I was remembering the more complicated diagrams better than the easier ones. I figured out that being able to take almost verbatim notes easily wasn't making me absorb the material at all, so I started spending more time afterward tidying everything up to make things stick a bit better.
> Even more impressive is what the Goodsteins did with the "Lost Lecture" to recreate the figures from just a few pages of surviving notes that looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/zQessy9.png
That's really cool. That note looks about as inscrutable as the ones I have from when I was being taught a crash course in QCD.
Feynman's ability to give an off the cuff lecture is astounding and probably an area where he is world class. I think of the one recorded interview with him, and his shockingly deep answers to simple questions that were off the cuff. His response to "why do magnets push/pull eachother" and what the issue is with asking "why" requires a lot of introspection is stellar.
So someone took recordings of his stories and compiled them into a text....? What does that matter I have seen that entire video in the past, its unsubstantiated garbage that fails mild skepticism. Every point can be explained away trivially. They have an axe to grind against Fenyman / Men generally, and since this goes against the established narrative its therefore heralded as being correct and people blindly follow it.
I think you can come to a balanced view here where you acknowledge that Feynman was overhyped posthumously while maintaining that he was an exceptional physicist with some personal flaws. That's precisely the point of the video.
It's less axe grinding and more counter-acting an inaccurate narrative.
He was a top 10 20th century physicist-- and the 20th century was full of rock stars-- and a Nobel Laureate. He also did more interesting work outside his core domain than you'd expect; the cooperation with Thinking Machines, the Rogers Commission, early use of computers as an instrument, institutional/advisory roles, etc.
I think anyone who has read his narratives realizes the dude had some personal flaws.
I would say read up a little so that you are in a position to make up your own mind. Also compare the video recordings and published book to figure out whose material it was.
It's easy to throw muck at someone who is not around to defend.
And you seem to be saying that it is a reasonable thing to do in this particular case.
I don't think we are hurting for prominent Jewish Physicists that there needed to be a conspiracy to promote him. Feynman, Einstein, Von Neuman, Niels Bohr, etc. Plus there is the whole [Martians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)) group.
He was very serious about his physics and wrote that stuff down.
Someone else wrote down his stories. His stories were probably often not entirely accurate, and whomever wrote down his stories also probably had an agenda. So books "by feynman" should be treated with some caution since they're written not by feynman.
His physics and science are obviously not "a sham". It is in fact possible for someone to be great and awful at the same time.
There is just a big market for "X great person of the past was actually awful" and "what you learned in school is actually a conspiracy". That these things get spread like wildfire whenever they are brought up, because some people thinks it make them seem smarter I assume. They also drop all introspection or skepticism about it. I would put "Feynman is actually awful" in the same bucket as the "Mercator project is a racist conspiracy" (No one owns a globe apparently) or the multitude of "actually x woman is responsible for scientific advancement, not the man" stories that get spread around. They all fail at any real analysis.
Even worse so: Why does he not simply ask these people? What is it with this trend of sneering at expert decisions without even doing the bare minimum of engaging with them?
In the case of the humanities, art, or architecture in academia if you disagree with the orthodoxy you might end up labeled something you don’t want to be labeled as, and you don’t get very far.
In architectural design I think it’s rather pronounced. We already know how to design great buildings for the human environment. There ain’t anything new to learn here, so in order to stand out in the field you have to invent some bullshit.
Well, you do that, you create Brutalism or something similarly nonsensical, and in order to defend your creation you have to convince a lot of other academics that no, in fact, buildings that look like bunkers or “clean lines” with “modern materials” are the pinnacle of architecture and design.
And as time has gone on we still go and visit Monet’s
Gardens while the rest of the design and art world continues circle jerking to ever more abstract and psychotic designs that measurably make people unhappy.
Not all “experts” in various fields are weighted the same. And in some cases being an expert can show you don’t really know too much.
Eh, that's overstating the case. There's clearly some aesthetics that are more appealing to more people but for many architectural movements in particular the reason that they look that way is for the way that specific ideological reasons interacted with material constraints and the intended message. Brutalism in particular was intended to be cheap and honest; given the constraints many of these buildings were designed under, it makes sense. There are some quite appealing brutalist buildings; a core tenet of the style was integrating the buildings into the natural landscape, in contrast to the artificial styles that had previously been popular. The post-war shortages limited the available materials, shaping the constraints they were operating under. Raw concrete was honest, cheap, and was allowed to weather naturally.
There's a lot of ugly brutalist buildings, but there's a lot of ugly buildings in every style. At lot of them look cheap because they were supposed to be cheap; to a certain extent looking inexpensive was intended. In some cases the hostile nature of the institutional building was part of the point, conveying strength unstead of offering a pleasant experience, but there's also some quite pleasant brutalist buildings that have a lot of nature integrated into the design.
I am working on Grog, the “grug-brained” alternative to Bazel. A mono-repo build tool where all you do is provide your build commands and interdependencies and the Grog will run everything in parallel with aggressive caching.
I am working on Grog, the “grug-brained” alternative to Bazel. A mono-repo build tool where all you do is provide your build commands and interdependencies and the Grog will run everything in parallel while caching as much as possible.
https://grog.build/why-grog/
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