> We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures.
I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually represented by intimidating greek letters) as "this guy". Weirdly, the casual anthropomorphism made the math seem more approachable. Perhaps 'metaphors with creatures' has a similar effect i.e. makes a problem seem more cute/approachable.
On another note, buzzwords spread through companies partly because they make the user of the buzzword sound smart relative to peers, thus increasing status. (examples: "big data" circa 2013, "machine learning" circa 2016, "AI" circa 2023-present..).
The problem is the reputation boost is only temporary; as soon as the buzzword is overused (by others or by the same individual) it loses its value. Perhaps RLHF optimises for the best 'single answer' which may not sufficiently penalise use of buzzwords.
A decade ago I gave a presentation on automata theory. I demonstrated writing arbitrary symbols to tape with greek letters, just like I’d learned at university. The audience was pretty confused and didn’t really grok the presentation. A genius communicator in the audience advised me to replace the greek letters with emoji… I gave the same presentation to the same demographic audience a week later and it was a smash hit, best received tech talk I’ve given. That lesson has always stuck with me.
Most human brains just aren't very good at coping with abstract concepts. It reminds me of the Wason selection task[1]. You give participants a formal logic problem to solve, "how many cards do you have to turn over to show that the rules are being followed". If the rule is "a card with a vowel on one side _must_ have an even number on the other", people do very badly making illogical assumptions. If the rule is "one side has a bar order, and the other side has the age of the person making the order. The person must be above the legal age", it makes sense and people do well, because we understand bars, drinks and the laws thereof.
This is sortof like how Only Connect switched from using Greek letters to Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm not sure if it was a joke or not but it was said that viewers complained that the Greek letters were "too pretentious" and obviously the hieroglyphs weren't.
I’m fairly positive the Greek alphabet mixed in Latin would measure quite poorly for legibility, if anyone did that study. Long before it’s an issue of pretentiousness
I had a similar experience explaining logic, especially nested expressions, with cats and boxes. Also for showing syntactic versus semantic. We _can_ use cats if we wanted and retain the semantics. Also my proudest moment as a teacher was students producing a meme based on some of the discrete mathematics on graphs. They understood the point well enough to make a joke of it.
> I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually represented by intimidating greek letters) as "this guy".
I also had an instructor who was doing that! This was 20 years ago, and I totally forgot about it until I have read your comment. Can’t remember the subject, maybe propositional logic? I wonder if my instructor and your instructor have picked up this habit from the same source.
My instructor for Epsilon Delta proofs and limits would always talk about "his cousin in Romania" picking the Epsilon and him picking the Delta.
i.e. forall epsilon > 0. exists delta > 0. forall d with |d| < delta. |f(x) - f(x+d)| < epsilon.
If we had a proof, no matter what epsilon his cousin from Romania picked, we could always find a new delta which would satify his cousin and let him pick the worst d in range.
This worked better than just saying "pick any epsilon", as it convayed the adversarial approach better.
Another book I read used the Devil as the one you are trying to convince, but it's nowhere near as fun as "his cousin from Romania".
I had a calc prof years ago that would say f of cow, or f of pig instead of x or g. It was more engaging trying to keep track of f of pig of cow than the single-letter func names.
He was one of those classic types; you could always catch him for a quick chat 4 minutes before class, as he lit up a cig by the front door. Back when they allowed smoking on campus, anyway.
I had a similar, really great prof, who would always ask for what the next variable would be, so we'd end up with trees and smiley faces. His point was to not make assumptions (c is always a constant etc), but it made the classes more engaging too.
And, somehow every example ended along the lines of "then you hand this to your boss, kick up your feet and have a nice glass of scotch."
They give everyone the false and very misleading impression that with One prompt all kinds of complexity minimizes. Its a bed time story for children.
Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety
asserts that for a system to effectively regulate or control a complex environment, it must possess at least as much internal behavioral variety (complexity) as the environment it seeks to control.
This is what we see in nature. Massive variety. Thats a fundamental requirement of surviving all the unpredictablity in the universe.
What other forcing functions is everyone using? (externally-imposed like meetings, or self-imposed)
I don't use forcing functions enough, which may imply missed opportunities to trade slightly higher-stress and increased busywork for greater productivity.
A similar announcement was made a few months ago, and Terence Tao came out a few days later and said it wasn't what it seemed at first, in that it was a rediscovery of an already known (albeit esoteric) result...
They literally have a quote from Tao in the article saying it was a novel approach humans hadn't tried, and that the problem hadn't been solved even after a lot of professional attention.
I have an ‘old’ model (iPhone 14 pro max) and text frequently misses characters due to the lag/input delay. It’s most pronounced when using safari for some reason.
In any case, it’s odd that hardware is multiples better yet it doesn’t always nail something as basic as typing
In my experience, iOS only misses keys during the time the keyboard is loading (which can be over a second- crazy!)
But I often have input lags where I will press several keys, and then a period of time (which can be multiple seconds) will pass before my taps are registered.
The 14 Pro Max launched less than four years ago, and should not be slower than an Android which launched a decade prior.
The article makes out like auto completion and help on hover are new things, but RStudio IDE has had them for years and years.
R/RStudio was my first language/IDE. I was horribly shocked when moving into other languages to discover they didn't have things you got out of the box with R/RStudio. "You mean I have to look up documentation for a function/method!?! - that's supposed to be automatic!".
R has a bunch of features which other languages lack to the degree that it's a rude shock to learn that other ecosystems lack them. One is the REPL with extremely convenient RStudio keyboard shortcuts to run lines of code (to achieve similar with ruby, I have an elaborate neovim/slime setup that took hours to configure and still isn't as good as RStudio gives out of the box).
A sign of a brilliant tool is when an idiot can get more done with it than an expert can with alternatives.
Maybe that explains why I was confused about this article. I kept wondering what exactly on offer, and that it couldn't be as simple as help on hover and auto-complete, because those seemed pretty basic and prevalent. It took me a few years to move to RStudio, but at this point, I literally don't know anyone who doesn't use it. To the point that I once had to explain to a labmate that R and RStudio were, in fact, not the same thing.
So either this is not that exciting, or else the additional things that are on offer are not very clearly explained to the point that I missed them.
I suspect the main benefits are portability (since tree-sitter uses wasm and javascript it can run in any webpage - compared to the previous way of parsing R code which needed an R runtime, so not just any old website could do it; e.g. a shiny app probably could because it has an R runtime available but a standard HTML page couldn't). And the other is tree-sitter is a widely used tool so now anything that uses tree-sitter can now work with R, since the R grammar is available.
Looks like R's tree-sitter grammar has been in use for GitHub search for a while (since 2024), so it's a nice improvement due to R/tree-sitter, although we've probably been benefitting from it for a while already, perhaps without knowing exactly how it worked!
In my opinion, RStudio is still the best data science IDE and it's not even close. I've been using Positron a bit more lately just for Claude Code reasons, as I prefer having the pane itself rather than using the terminal, but man it's really tough to shake RStudio. Even with the work put into configuring VSCode to get it kind of close to it, it still just always feels a bit janky.
Emacs + ESS is superior IMO. RStudio has a bunch of frills I don't care about and doesn't let me configure files as I'd like. ESS showing the function signature in the minibuffer to me is the killer feature. Wish I could get that for EVERYTHING.
What if you want to share something outside of your precious IDE?
- Merge request on GitHub
- Presentation with reveal.js (kind of like PowerPoint)
You'd be stuck with either bland, uncoloured, text-only characters, OR with a fuzzy PNG screenshot where you can't zoom or copy. Or maybe you "parse R" with Regex.
tree-sitter integrates into any web-based technology, allowing you to _share_ code.
Yes, your comment really should be the focus of article, i.e. genuinely new capabilities and improvements, not existing capabilities done a slightly different way. In any case it’s a minor nitpick and it’s awesome progress for the language and tooling
The ESS package in Emacs has also had several of these features for R for a long time. The difference here is portability and generality. Tree-sitter is a partial solution to the n×m problem, and now R has been invited to participate in that solution. That's something to be celebrated, even if it doesn't have immediate impact on our day-to-day, because it means future innovations in tooling for programming languages get automatically shared to R, instead of having to be reimplemented.
(The n×m problem is that for n languages and m tools like autoformatting, etc., we need an implementation for each tool specific to each language. With tree-sitter, we get n+m implementations instead: generic tools that work across multiple languages.)
> Its best-known use is in certain orders of Classical columns that diminish in a very gentle curve, rather than in a straight line as they narrow going upward. The human eye would allegedly perceive that the middle of the column was diminishing in a concave curve halfway up the column, and entasis corrects this.
Good analogy because they compete for patronage and talent to an degree, but (just like vim and emacs) the user can choose which tool is best for the job, including learning and using both at the appropriate times, so in a way they're perfectly complementary.
I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually represented by intimidating greek letters) as "this guy". Weirdly, the casual anthropomorphism made the math seem more approachable. Perhaps 'metaphors with creatures' has a similar effect i.e. makes a problem seem more cute/approachable.
On another note, buzzwords spread through companies partly because they make the user of the buzzword sound smart relative to peers, thus increasing status. (examples: "big data" circa 2013, "machine learning" circa 2016, "AI" circa 2023-present..).
The problem is the reputation boost is only temporary; as soon as the buzzword is overused (by others or by the same individual) it loses its value. Perhaps RLHF optimises for the best 'single answer' which may not sufficiently penalise use of buzzwords.
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