Ah, thanks, I see now. You're saying that even if it's written with the small end before the big end according to the way the words flow, the direction of eye scanning and of mentally parsing and of giving a name to the number is still big end before small end? Similarly I might write a single word sdrawkcab in English text but the reader would still read it first-letter-to-last-letter.

Curious, when handwriting, what order do you write in?

Even better, Daniel then get to keep his equity

I missed this part?

Isn't this showing that Hebrew and Arabic write numbers little-endian? Surely big-versus-little-endian isn't about left-to-right or right-to-left, it's about how numbers flow relative to word reading order.

Ask me about the 2019 NYC Solstice Afterparty sometime if you want a minor ops horror story.

Consider yourself asked.

(I confess I have no idea how to interpret the agree-votes on this.)

Yeah, I was wrong to suggest/assume that the definition is original to you and not the way it's defined in other communities that I just am not familiar with.

It still seems like you're making the core mistake I was trying to point at, which is asserting that a word means something different than what other people mean by it; rather than acknowledging that sometimes words have different meanings in different contexts.

Like, people are talking about what sort of toppings should be on a donut and how large the hole should be, and you're chiming in to say you came around on donuts when you realized that instead of being ring-shaped with toppings they're ball-shaped with fillings. You didn't come around on donuts. You just discovered that even though you don't like ring donuts, you do like filled donuts, a related but different baked good.

I only came around on faith once I realized it was just Latin for trust, and specifically trust in the world to be just as it is.

This really just seems to me like you're asserting that what a word "really means" is some weird new definition that ~no one else means when they say the word.

(I don't know Latin. Nevertheless I am extremely confident that the word "faith" in Latin does not specifically refer to the concept of "trust in the world to be just as it is".)

Also now running as an in-progress youtube short series. (I haven't read the original.)

"It seems a lot of our pills cause vomiting as a side-effect?"

"Yeah, the company knows about it but it's tricky to fix."

"How so? Our competitors don't have this problem, and we make basically the same products, right?"

"Right, no, it's a corporate structure issue."

"?"

"If a pill does too much or too little of something, we have a group of clever people whose job it is to care about that and to reformulate it slightly to improve it. If it doesn't kill enough pain, the analgesic division will step in. If it causes clotting, the anticoagulant folks have a look. If it makes your bones brittle, it'll be the antiosteoporosises. You see? But if it causes vomiting-"

"Right, yeah. There's no one to take ownership of the problem, because-"

"There is no antiemetics division."

Oh, huh. Searle's original Chinese room paper (first eight pages) doesn't say machines can't think.

"OK, but could a digital computer think?"

If by "digital computer" we mean anything at all that has a level of description where it can correctly be described as the instantiation of a computer program, then again the answer is, of course, yes, since we are the instantiations of any number of computer programs, and we can think.

"But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of understanding?"

This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to it is no.

"Why not?"

Because the formal symbol manipulations by themselves don't have any intentionality; they are quite meaningless; they aren't even symbol manipulations, since the symbols don't symbolize anything. In the linguistic jargon, they have only a syntax but no semantics. Such intentionality as computers appear to have is solely in the minds of those who program them and those who use them, those who send in the input and those who interpret the output.

I can't say I really understand what he's trying to say, but it's different from what I thought it was.