There's something nice and showerthought-y about a relationship so mundane and inconsequential that it barely registers as a discrete idea being rendered as a factoid.
Around 2000, graphene was a very hot material. I was pretty excited by it and thought carbon-based high-Farad capacitors would essentially replace lead acid and lithium ion batteries in most consumer electronics within a decade, maybe two.
The strange thing is that is has been, for some of us, for a while now. The screws have been tightening my whole life and people don't realize how close to destitution they are until it hits them. It's like the poverty version of "If my neighbor loses their job it's a recession, if I lose my job it's a depression."
Illiteracy is a huge and intentional crisis in America and is a major reason we're in the mess we're in now. American education has been steadily hollowed out since public schools were integrated and now those chickens are coming home to roost. We are in for a long, bad time of rebuilding I'm afraid.
Yeah I think I used it incorrectly. I had in mind the notion of adding new data to existing ideas to form more sophisticated versions of them. And I guess dreaming might do that if you have the same type of experience all the time. I think that's probably why dreams about being at work (at least, my dreams) tend not to include some of the trippier aspects of my other dreams. They usually don't make sense, but they still feel very mundane and specific. Usually I'm just doing my job the whole time, with varying levels of anxiety about how badly things are going for no clear reason. All that similar input makes the concept very specific.
But you're right, it's not really driving toward anything, it's just semi-random jumbles of ideas and associations.
Yeah I think so too. It's a particular kind of thinking and processing and it probably helps with a lot of different things. The dream about one's teeth falling out, for example: Watching someone try to live without teeth, especially without access to easy foods, is probably pretty distressing. A dream where the same fate befalls you allows you to feel what your feelings would be if you lost you're teeth. At least for me, whenever I have that dream I always check on my teeth, if only with my tongue, to make sure they're actually there and firmly in place. I bet that dream has been helping humans take care of their teeth for longer than we've had words.
It is, at least superficially, really interesting to me that AI "mistakes" have a quality of unreality that so many people call dreamlike. It certainly seems like the kind of hard-to-define relationship that lends itself to seeing patterns that aren't really there, so maybe the similarity really is just superficial. The similarities are striking though.
It is. Reading the activation-synthesis hypothesis at the moment, which sounds similar to what I described. It's a fun deep dive and I love that the explanation is still basically ¯\(ツ)/¯ given how much thought has been spent on it.
That, and I occasionally pull things out of the pile then put them back on top, so they slowly organically sort into having the most frequently used things on top. I also have multiple piles that organically evolve into specializations. For example, I never intended to have a "old specialized cables" pile, but it emerged from the bottom of the "old hardware I seldom use" when I transplanted all the top stuff into a new discrete "electronics I might salvage someday" pile. It's not a good system 🙃
I don't think it's unimportant. I think clarity and disambiguation in communication are more important than strict adherence to a convention, and as far as I can tell °K was folded into K because the temperature interval °K is identical to the thermodynamic temperature K and the CGPM picked K because it more correctly conforms to the SI convention of single-letter unit designations. I get why they combined them, but considering that °K is (or was) exactly equal to K I prefer to use it to typographically distinguish it from other k-types in my writing, especially if I'm writing equations by hand. I've been reading up on the CGPM proceedings around defining the K and I think there are good pedagogical reasons not to use °K when introducing the concept of thermodynamic temperature to students because it isn't a degree on a scale like Celsius, it's a plain old base unit just like any other. It may be that I'm just old enough to have been indoctrinated into the °K school of thought and now it's ingrained but in any case the visual distinction helps me and, since it is identical to K I don't think it introduces any new confusion. I probably wouldn't use it if I were teaching physics in high school but for my own use? °K all day.
According to Wikipedia it was officially changed from "degrees Kelvin" to "kelvins" in 1967, so it's possible you were seeing the change ripple out as they were made. I wonder how long it takes for decisions like that to get from a decision announcement from the CGPM to an update in textbooks that students use. Probably varies by income level.
There's something nice and showerthought-y about a relationship so mundane and inconsequential that it barely registers as a discrete idea being rendered as a factoid.