"the following is a conversation with peter wang one of the most impactful leaders and developers in the python community former physicist current philosopher and someone who many people told me about ..."

"you're one of the most impactful humans in the python ecosystem so you're an engineer leader of engineers but you're also a philosopher so let's talk both in this conversation about programming and ph..."

"scripting language i mean i i knew pearl i knew bash i was decent at both but python just made everything it made the whole world accessible right i could script this and that and the other network th..."

"love it's like over the years what has like you know you do a double take you you return too often as a thing that just brings you a smile i really still like the um the ability to play with meta clas..."

"can you uh put your finger on how to design a language such that it fits in your head certain things like the colon or the certain notation aspects of python that just kind of work is it uh something ..."

"very beginning aren't you an audience of one isn't ultimately aren't all the greatest projects in history were just solving a problem that you yourself had well so clay shirky in his um book on crowds..."

"in the in the first step and that even though it's flawed that just seems to work well for software projects well it does work well for software projects in general and in this particular space um wel..."

"cover of the basic needs of a scientific computing library if you look at the whole human story how much of a leap is it we've developed all kinds of languages all kinds of methodologies for communica..."

"head [Music] some people are really good at that and other people are not um and so when you have like for instance sometimes people have tried to build systems that uh make programming easier by maki..."

"the shoulders of giants so you're building like higher and higher levels of abstraction you do that a little bit with language so with language you develop sort of ideas philosophies from plato and so..."

"the sophistication of things that we build with computing one has to really pay attention to the difference between when an end user is expressing something onto a system that exists versus when they'..."

"human design or computer design ultimately what we hit the boundaries that we hit with these information systems is when the representation of the data hits the real world is where there's a lot of sl..."

"and more and more now we have i mean in fact i think the bright line in the sand between machine learning systems or modern data-driven systems versus software classical software systems is that the v..."

"system it's a next generation information system that is not like traditional software systems can you maybe describe what is a cybernetic system do you include humans in that picture so is it as a hu..."

"criteria but the human wasn't precise so for instance i just read the other day that um earlier this year or maybe it was last year at some point the um libyan army i think um sent out some automated ..."

"are you more concerned if you're thinking about cybernetic systems or even like self-replicating systems so systems that aren't just doing a particular task but are able to sort of multiply and scale ..."

"systems the software okay uh it's interesting but it would nevertheless perhaps be about class so the effect of algorithms might affect certain classes more than others absolutely i was more thinking ..."

"to see right and it kind of slowly gets in there so you've written about this idea of virtuality on this topic which you define as the subjective phenomenon of knowingly engaging with virtual sensatio..."

"when we rush madly into a world of simulacrum and and virtuality um you know the things that are lost are it's difficult once everyone moves there it can be hard to look back and see what we've what w..."

"money by building connection machines is it possible do you think to bring out the best in human nature to uh create fulfilling connections and relationships in the digital world and make a ton of mon..."

"are intelligent and they're uh introspective and they can reflect on the experiences of their life so for example there's been many years in my life where i i ate an excessive amount of sugar and then..."

"people so it just seems that we're in the very first stages of social networks that just were able to make a lot of money really quickly but in bringing out sometimes the bad parts of human nature the..."

"going to do and so one of the things that we have to reason about here is the social media systems or you know social media i think is a first our first encounter with a technological system that runs..."

"that our philosophies are actually not geared to understand what is it for a person to be to have an uh high trust connection uh as part of a collective and for that collective to have its right to co..."

"you've said that individual humans are multi-layered susceptible to signals and waves and multiple strata the physical the biological social cultural intellectual so sort of going along these lines ca..."

"so your body is this way i mean we just know physically you consist of atoms and uh and and whatnot and then the atoms are arranged into molecules which then arrange into certain kinds of structures t..."

"they're actually more intertwined than that but the intellectual level is the the level of pure ideas that you are a vessel for memes you're a vessel for philosophies you will conduct yourself in a pa..."

"these things and if we try to deny right so many philosophies do try to deny the reality of some of these things right some people say well we're only atoms well we're not only atoms because there's a..."

"look for order and reach for order when there's an excess of energy you know it's it would be odd to say a proton is alive right it'd be odd to say like this particular atom or molecule of of hydrogen..."

"we experience as consciousness no i don't think cells are conscious of that level but is there something beyond mere equilibrium state biology and and chemistry and biochemistry that drives what makes..."

"organism-looking type things what intuition do you draw from this simple mechanism well i i like to turn that around on its head and um and look at it as what if every single one of the patterns creat..."

"yeah so and maybe mathematics extends your perception capabilities but it's still it's still finite it's just like yeah the mathematics we use is the mathematics that can fit in our head yeah you know..."

"we're looking self-centered a particular kind of thing yeah when i was at cornell i had a lovely professor of asian religions jamerry law and she would tell this um story about a musical a musician a ..."

"to cooperate with each other right come back here don't throw that rock at me let's talk our witnesses out so violence is also part of collaboration the threat of violence let's say well the recogniti..."

"part eric weinstein speaks very highly of you which was very surprising to me at first because i didn't know there's this depth to you because i knew you as a as a as an amazing leader of engineers an..."

"um this was in the early mid 2000s 07 time frame oh six or seven eric weinstein trying to use python right hyper bundles uh using some of the tools that we've built in the open source that's somehow e..."

"friendship um you know throughout since then you have a depth of thinking that uh kind of runs with eric in terms of just thinking about the world deeply and thinking philosophically and then there's ..."

"have you had interaction with him like discussion in the space of python no programming well um in the sense of sometimes he asked me why is this stuff still so hard um uh yeah you know everybody's a ..."

"honestly honestly robert kearn did all the heavy lifting so i have to give credit where credit is due robert is is the silent but incredibly deep um quiet not silent but quiet but incredibly deep indi..."

"20 watt computers in our heads what's cognition here cognition which aspect perception attention memory recall asking better questions that for me is a measure of intelligence doesn't roomba vacuum cl..."

"that we will be able to put them alongside humans so that they capture the full broad spectrum of what we are seeing as well and also looking at our responses listening to our responses even maybe mea..."

"transcended have gone off to explore other worlds gone to go communicate with the life forms living in the sun or whatever else so yeah um you know i think that's that's for me these are these seem li..."

"and say okay they can accrue resources well yes check you know by law they can um they can own land they can engage in contracts they can do all these different kinds of things so we in legal terms uh..."

"important thing because one one thing i do think we under-appreciate sometimes is the fact that relationships have relationships so it's not just individuals having relationships with each other but i..."

"where we um defer sense making to massive aging zombie institutions um or we just do it ourselves we go it alone go to the dark force of the internet so that's really interesting so you've talked abou..."

"half of dunbar's number five x dunbar's number yeah something on that order and we call them fictions but really they're rules of the game right rules that we we we feel are fair or rules that we cons..."

"some of these fictions are it seems like they're better than others they have worked this far to cohere um human to organize human collective action but you're saying something about especially this t..."

"interface you think um for uh having a little bit of a collective here that has agency you're right that there's many different ways that we can build trust with each other um my friend joe edelman ta..."

"right if you want to use like the ocean big five sort of model people have been pretty centered the less centered you are the fewer authentic connections you can really build for a particular unit of ..."

"mean we already have this to some extent if you look at the biggest sort of i wouldn't say ai system but the biggest cybernetic system in the world is the financial markets it runs outside of any indi..."

"have have agencies you have when you say one super intelligence superintelligence in that context means it's able to solve particular problems extremely well but there's some aspect of human-like inte..."

"um you know it really acts as a collective intelligence of eight intelligent arms right its arms have a tremendous amount of neural density to them and i see if we can build i mean just let's let's go..."

"that's great and in fact your your brothers and sisters will join you to help make this go better right and then she can let your brothers and sisters know hey you know peter is going to go do this th..."

"feeling of serendipity so the cell there's a feeling of serendipity even though it has no way of explaining why it's getting oxygen and sugar when it gets it so you have to each individual component h..."

"that we are already intelligent agents in such a system right in that one of these these like robots of one of five million little swarm robots or one of the borg they're just posting an internal bull..."

"still be able to go like rural texas buy a ranch go off the grid go full survivalist can you disconnect from the hive mind you may not want to so to be ineffective to be intelligent you have access to..."

"say that there will not be emergent higher level order on top of it and that's the thing that's the philosophical breakdown that we're staring right at which is in the western mind i think there's a v..."

"crisis coming out of that is precisely because well not precisely because i i believe that meaning is the consequence of um when we make consequential decisions it's tied to agency right when we make ..."

"gaining social status does provide meaning so that's why in this era of um abundant production we uh so many things turn into status games the nft kind of explosion is a similar kind of thing everywhe..."

"so conspicuous consumption fueling status games is really bad for the planet not sustainable the second thing is you can play these kinds of status games but then what it does is it renders you captur..."

"it's an idea and that idea is very closely connected to status um so why but it's also tied to like it's actually tied to law it is tied to some physical hard things so you have to pay your taxes yes ..."

"think of as the antonym of craft whereas a craftsman will come to you know a problem uh maybe a piece of wood and then make it to a chair it may be a site to build a house or build a stable or build y..."

"point in time consumption is the thing that drives a lot of the economic stuff not the need but the need to consume and build status games on top so we have homogenized when we discovered i think this..."

"we then capitalism is always looking for growth it's always looking for growth and growth only happens the margins so you have to squeeze more and more demand out you got to make it cheaper and cheape..."

"experiences that would then give meaning it has done that to some extent i mean it's not all good or bad in my perspective you know we can always look backwards and offer a critique of the path we've ..."

"live we have also created the infrastructures to allow continued research and development of additional science and medicine and various other kinds of things the organizing principles that we use to ..."

"value you mean like direct use of tools that leverage direct yeah yeah even that's billions a day yeah yeah right easily i think like the things they could not do if they didn't have these tools right..."

"one of them will be racing to do it right but finding the right people fostering the right collaborations getting it adopted by the right other people to then refine it that is a thing that was organi..."

"question of how we allocate resources has to be revisited at a fundamental level because the kind of software these people built the modalities that those human ecologies that built this software it t..."

"he really his heart is really in it he cares a lot um i've gotten that sense having interacted with them it's so interesting yeah such a good he's a really good dude and he and i you know it's so inte..."

"a beautiful way to phrase it no matter how much fog there is appointed the same star yeah and i hope he feels the same way i mean i hope he knows that over the years now um we both care a lot about th..."

"like can we seize this moment to do that because like a lot of the other open source movements it's all nerds nerding out on code for nerds you know um and the this because it's scientists because it'..."

"python package management what is that a lot of people speak very highly of conda which is part of anaconda which is the package manager there's a ton of packages so first what are package managers an..."

"it so when people want to install something they can it's just one command they don't have to you know set up a big compiler system and do all these things so when it works well it works great now the..."

"just want to ask you about that particular one what do you think about the move from python 2 to 3 now why did it take so long what were from your perspective just seeing the packages all struggle in ..."

"that so some of it was karen stick i actually have to uh shamefully admit that it took me a very long time to switch from python 2 and python 3 because i'm a machine learning person it was just for th..."

"then i think also it has to be easier to take some of those things they've written and flow those back into deployed systems or apps or visualizations i think if we don't do those things then we will ..."

"oftentimes you kind of what start a class you start learning about types yes i don't know functions like this is you know python is the first language with which you start to learn to program but i fe..."

"you talk about scripting the adobe suite with python in the 3d graphics world python is a scripting language some of these 3d graphics suites use and i think that's great we should better support thos..."

"python for for data transformation you've been at the center of the python community for many years if you could change one thing about the community to help it grow to help it improve to help it flou..."

"questions i have about sort of open source at communities best there's a kind of humility is that humility prevent you to have a vision for creating something like very new and powerful and you've bro..."

"leader and i'm going to read all these harvard business review articles on leadership and all this other stuff like it i was a physicist turned into a software nerd who then really like nerded out on ..."

"every morning at six to take my kid down to the bus stop oh wow so there's a hard there's a hard thing yeah for a while i was doing polyphasic sleep which is really interesting like i go to bed at nin..."

"wake up it's like you had an extra day in the middle yes and i'd read somewhere that you know humans naturally have biphasic sleep or something i don't know but um i i read basically everything somewh..."

"reason i moved to mac was uh it's it's got a linux prompt or no sorry it's got a unique it's got a unix prompt so i can do all my stuff but then um i uh i don't have to worry like when i'm presenting ..."

"okay i've been i've i've used dos since version 1.11 or 1.21 or something so i've been a long time microsoft user and i will say that like like it's really hard for me to know where anything is how to..."

"going to use emacs you know you know also kinesis fan um uh uh west mckinney the creative pandas oh he he just he banged out pandas on a kinesis keyboard i believe i don't know if he's still using one..."

"um collapse is non-linear but it will be managed and so if you are in a particular social caste or economic caste and it's it's not um i think it's it's not kosher to say that about america but americ..."

"to have as many of those individuals as possible right but even the power of one is kind of magical it is it is we're in a mode now where we can do that i think also you know part of what i try to do ..."

"we've been sneaking up on this question all over the place let me ask the big ridiculous question what is the meaning of life wow um the meaning of life yeah i don't know i mean that i've never really..."

"meaning why are we reaching for order when there is excess of energy i don't know if i can answer the why any y that i come up with i think is gonna be um i i'd have to think about that a little more ..."

"yeah right so if you walk that thought experiment through what happens when we touch another person when we hug them when we hold them and it the the reason this ties into my answer for your question ..."