> I spent ages trying to work out what "who knew more about furniture than most" meant, thinking it would be expanded upon or referenced later.
Assuming it was an intentional, it could be a reference to one particularly violent piece of furniture. (I forget what kind exactly, it's been a while.)
Given it comes immediately after the bit about philosophers comparing memories to furniture, I simply assumed that was meant to be read as “Pratchett, who knew more about the goings on inside people’s heads than most”.
I've recently started listening to a podcast from a retired Anglican Bishop, "Ask N.T. Wright Anything".
IIUC, he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time. Rather, it's something that later theologians (Aquinas?) picked up from Greek philosophy (Platonism?).
I wonder if that means Wright would have a different take on the whole "only humans have souls" idea. (Beyond just differing on the choice of terminology, I mean.)
>he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time
That's a broadly accepted take among religious historians, although it's off by a half century, roughly, if you include the Jewish diaspora. Philo of Alexandria did begin to integrate Jewish scripture with Greek philosophy on the soul during his lifetime.
Most of the soul ideas that eventually made their way into Judaism (and many years later becoming heavily influential in sects like the one founded by Baal Shem Tov) originally came from diaspora Hellenic Jews who were familiar with Platonism. There was about a half century+ lag before these ideas diffused. That is, they existed but were not yet mainstream.
:) I figure there is always something left to improve. For some kernels which really want to keep 30+ live registers, the compiler might not do as good a job as careful manual tuning, so intrinsics can have a bit of a cost. But I also figure optimization time is limited, so better to get 90% of several kernels rather than one to 99%.
Not who you asked but I think the meaning is that since intrinsics for simd are different in each platform, being able to have something that is portable and sometimes works faster is something, while writing for Intel, ARM and a zoo of instruction sets is not an option for some.
I think we should go a little deeper on this idea.
We can all agree that both human "experts" and LLMs can sometimes be right, and sometimes be confidently wrong.
But that doesn't imply that they're equally fit for purpose. It just means that we can't use that simple shortcut to conclude that one is inferior to the other.
I’ve always thought of the definition of “expert” as reliably knowing the difference between what is known, what is speculated but unproven, and what is unknown. People claim expertise in all sorts of things that they aren’t experts in. But true experts should not be wrong. They should qualify levels of certainty. This definition certainly works in the sciences.
In reality few humans are true experts on every topic they open their mouth on. A high school teacher in science is hardly a true expert in every single thing they teach.
I'd think that depends on the model of responsibility at play.
For example, suppose I hire a building contractor to build a house, and the electrician he subcontracts makes mistake.
From my perspective, the prime contractor is equally responsible for that mistake regardless of whether he used a subcontractor, or did the work himself but used a broken tool.
This doesn't make the electrician any less of a "person" in the deeply important ways, but it's not a distinction that's relevant to my handling of the problem.
Assuming it was an intentional, it could be a reference to one particularly violent piece of furniture. (I forget what kind exactly, it's been a while.)
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