I think that people who are creative have to know the history and repertoire in order for their brain to make the new connections to make the new thing, but I think that creative leap when your brain makes those new connections is not something an artist controls directly. It comes from experience and being "into something", and random accident from experimentation.

The artist doesn't necessarily know why something is new though, even if they have a lot of experience, it's just a primal response they get to a new piece of music they are working on for example, and then they can try to analyze it after the fact. Most artists I know aren't as methodical as the way you seem to describe, it's a lot more intuition and experimentation, and then because of their vast listening experience their brains are adjusted so that they aren't satisfied with existing stuff

I agree. I'm not saying they're methodical, I'm saying you have to know the rules before you can forget the rules and let your real creativity come out.

Got any proof of a case where this happens? I'm using it to redirect to https:// and it redirects deep links to the right deep links, and nothing goes to the home page

> "civilised world" is kept together by midddle- and working class people.

Well, sort of. I think first you need technological innovation, and then the middle- and working class fill the labor to maintain that technology, but they for the most part didn't create it. They are users of it. Companies do investments and allocation of capital to produce that technology. Without a central source of capital, it would be hard to get the investments needed to research and produce it. I think technology (in all its forms from basic to advanced) is what enables the motion of society and individuals and the freedoms.

And also civilized society is just as much about daily life and consumption of information and perceived oppression or unfairness as it is pure work. It feels like a lot of modern arguments are about these perceived unfair situations, but on a personal level rather than systematic level. This leads to systematic "macro" chaos but predictable individual "micro" movement in the system (based on emotion and current view of the world). As long as the technology and resources can be maintained, there will be some order in the basics in society, since everyone needs food, shelter, clothing, security and so forth, so I would say, the whole system is what keeps the civilized world going and then some day, something fundamental breaks in some way, due to the accumulated macro momentum of micro scale movement, and then the macro breaks, or something like that.

Edit: also as an addon, these micro movements are decided today, by so called "thought leaders", and so these thought leaders are also responsible for the civilized world in that sense. An idea or representation of something has a huge effect I think.

With WP I think it's a problem when people sell others pre-existing plugins and themes as their own work. I think a self proclaimed WP developer should at least know all there is to know about Theme development. That means they need to know all the wordpress internals as it relates to themes, hooks, filters, theme templates, custom post types, basic php logic, html, css, standards etc... They don't need to know plugin development, as plugins can contain so much and be basically anything, but by the time they know most of the theme aspects, they would be able to make basic plugins anyways. The problem is a lot of people don't even know those things, since pre-made plugins and themes make it easier to set up

Incorporating themes and plugins strikes me as basically equivalent to using a framework written by a third party in your software product, which few would say disqualifies you as a "developer," even if you couldn't write framework components yourself. I'm not making claims about the amount of expertise required to be a WordPress developer, only whether the title could be appropriate for a person who cannot "write code."

I believe that what walod refers to is the astounding number of people calling themselves "developers" while installing vanilla WordPress with a few plugins and a theme, and changing a few admin options. There's certainly nothing wrong in using WordPress as a framework (which many of us do to cut down time wasted on building CRUD and ACL and DB layers etc), it's just that now everyone is suddenly a WordPress developer once they know how to install WordPress from the web host's admin panel.

Yes, I understand. My main message is that it seems a software developer need not be a programmer in the sense of writing code as we currently conceptualize it. It isn't hard to imagine a future where ordinary people can create their own software using primarily visual tools, as I presume WordPress developers do.

I'm also obliquely objecting to the lionization of software developers in general, as much software development is glorified plumbing, while some of it is among the most intellectually challenging work available. If one is going to take pride in one's job, I tend to think it should result from the work itself, rather than the job title.

I don't mind the job being done by people building products with visual tools. I just believe that the "developer" title has a unified and consistent meaning across different platforms, languages, communities and what not, and new types of services (like composing elements with visual builders) need a new title to avoid ambiguity - say, site builders, webmasters, implementers, super admins or so forth.

That would be more than sufficient - creating a new job group for people with similar skills and service offerings, allowing SMB clients to reach out to those and large businesses connecting with developers.

When you say "information" what do you mean exactly? I can see information as a set of constraints that arises in the system due to how it evolves, and that those constraints enable structure to emerge, and that with the law of conservation of energy no energy can be created or destroyed, it means that all those structures can only do what they can do, any deviation from the constraints will require new energy or removing energy from the system to alter the course.

I like your needles - hyperdimensional record analogy. I would say mathematics encodes for and predicts a certain set of constraints, but we can never be sure we have observed or found the most fundamental constraint, and so to us, an incomplete mathematical 'law' will look like it needs energy added or removed to fit with the real world, but in reality it's just a constraint somewhere that we haven't seen that will readjust the series. All of this is kind of written on a whim, I'm not sure I thought it through enough :

> Some people won't need your plan because they stay at low weight no matter what they eat.

This is just not true. I find that the people who say that actually eat a lot less calorie wise than they think. Eat 4500 calories per day for 2 years and see if you stay skinny. McDonalds 2 times a day is more like 2000 calories at the very high end. It takes time to eat 4500 cals per day, most skinny people can't do it at all but it's easy for fat people. Eating only unhealthy food every day doesn't really say anything about energy in vs energy out

> “Periodically when caverns are empty you can actually shoot sonar images of the caverns,” says Corbin. “And that gives you a three-dimensional way of looking at them.” Some have interesting shapes, he adds. The outline of one chamber, for example, would resemble a large flying saucer.

Mm yes this is a conspiracy theory waiting to happen

If the economy picked up there wouldn't be a problem. It's apparently better than a total crash, because the economy has to go on either way. The problem is what products and services can we make to make the economy grow again and to employ people. Also you may get malinvestments, but that is what risk is all about. No risk, no gain, you know. You just need a few homeruns to cushion the bad ones and the big homeruns are the ones that create whole new markets and longer employment. How to function and survive in the economy is difficult for everyone and it's a big clusterfuck of complexity and short term thinking, so it's all related in many ways. I think QE and 0% interest rate is the smallest of our problems as far as long term goes

What I can't wrap my head around is the difference between "computation" and consciousness when it comes to intelligence. If intelligence is just the ability to receive the right signals and then output the right signals to reach a certain goal, then the more inputs and outputs you have, the more intelligent you are. But then this is not how we usually think of intelligence. Intelligence is like the ability of a limited organism with limited inputs and outputs to make the most of a situation. We can already design a super intelligent system that will process inputs exactly right and output exactly right, but you need the central control and the limited body that will enable some kind of will and prioritization, and I haven't even gotten to conscious experience yet.

Rather than being complex computation, intelligence is about flexibility, but it may be that due to the complex nature of our biology, all that flexibility is just a lot of inputs and outputs, in which case we're back to square one and the limitations of the body etc. In some odd way, intelligence is quite disappointing