<story><title>A brief history of computers</title><url>https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vfRpzyGsikujm9ujj/a-brief-history-of-computers</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sdfgionionio</author><text>&amp;gt;And from what ChatGPT tells me, it&amp;#x27;s likely that this would have been an investment with a positive ROI.&lt;p&gt;Wonderful.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s interesting to me that, in just a few months, I&amp;#x27;ve already developed muscle memory for checking whether or not things I read online are machine-generated. The first thing I do on any website is search for &amp;quot;GPT&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Bing&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;AI&amp;quot; and stop reading if I find them.&lt;p&gt;Reading someone&amp;#x27;s writing is an exercise in trust. If they claim something, I have to be able to trust that they have done enough of their homework to back it up. If they cite a source, I have to be able to trust it says what they claim. Otherwise what&amp;#x27;s the point? If I can&amp;#x27;t rely on the author, then reading their writing requires checking everything they&amp;#x27;ve said. Their writing is useless to me since I&amp;#x27;ll need to do my own research anyway.&lt;p&gt;If you write something and ask me to read it, you are asking me to trust that you have done the legwork. If you really just typed it into ChatGPT, that&amp;#x27;s more than just stupid. It&amp;#x27;s a betrayal.</text></comment>
<story><title>A brief history of computers</title><url>https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vfRpzyGsikujm9ujj/a-brief-history-of-computers</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Sharlin</author><text>Boole didn’t introduce propositional logic; what he did was come up with an &lt;i&gt;algebra&lt;/i&gt; that encodes propositional logic.&lt;p&gt;Abstract algebra was a new snd developing thing back then, the idea that you can generalize from numbers and addition and multiplication to other structures that have something like numbers and addition and multiplication.&lt;p&gt;Boole found that if you take the two-element set {0, 1} and choose saturating addition as the addition-like operation and normal multiplication as the multiplication-like operation, you get an algebra (specifically a ring) that is isomorphic to propositional logic with its AND and OR operations.&lt;p&gt;So the idea that the number 1 can represent true and the number 0 false was Boole’s insight and the foundation of modern digital circuits.</text></comment>