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algorias

Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @03:13AM (#49989384)
Fourth, these hundreds of solved problems are the result of OpenAI attempting tens of thousands of problems and failing. When you hear claims that the average result took about 3 hours of model time, I simply do not believe it. If you account for all the time spend properly, it's probably orders of magnitude more.
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @03:03AM (#49989329)
The runtime looks very weird. The +2 can and should be dropped. This reduces my confidence that the bound is tight. Who knows how the model came up with that expression.
Re:AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse on Thursday January 08, 2026 @07:48PM (#46548699)
run them in a VM that doesn't have git installed. Sandboxing these things is a good idea anyways.
Re:CATL Expects Oceanic Electric Ships in 3 Years on Monday December 08, 2025 @03:04AM (#46189628)
The biggest problem with Electric is the battery weight, so it makes sense.

Ships deliberately use cheaper, less energy dense petroleum products (heavy fuel oil), for pretty much the inverse reasons why airplanes use kerosene.

This is a problem with the (lack of) environmental laws in many countries. All things considered, landfills are really cheap.
No, people get ill from excessive quantities of alcohol.
Re:"AI", students, and epistemic crisis on Sunday July 07, 2024 @07:22AM (#40896796)
Something assumed to be true without proof.

Think of it as one layer of abstraction above the model under discussion. Like a hyperparameter. In later years, students get taught the same topics again, with the hyperparameter tuned to be more realistic.

not the OP, but I think they meant to imply that the AU government is grifting. It does look like attaching a $520k bill to the man's freedom. Totally not part of the punishment...
Yeah, when I visited down there I initially misinterpreted what the "CBD bakery" was selling... xD
In this case, they're vaguely gesturing towards the "money being better spent elsewhere", instead of making a cost-benefit analysis including the time value of money.

Do you see how the argument is overly general? You can use it to shoot down anything that's not immediately useful. It's especially silly at the level of nations, which can obtain money much more easily than a random individual. Cash flow is much less of a problem at that level. The way it's phrased exploits people's tendency of thinking about a nation's budget like their own household budget, only bigger.

Not defending the overall claim, but there's a plausible reason why being underwater matters: the mammalian diving reflex. Holding your breath on land is not the same.
Re:Boeing 737 crashes during take-off in Senegal on Thursday May 09, 2024 @08:49AM (#40307656)
I have a question on manifold about Boeing's troubles:

https://manifold.markets/VitorBosshard/number-of-major-incid...

I'm only counting incidents where Boeing is at fault, this one might still be bad maintenance or other operator error.

Re:MIT abandons use of DEI statements on Sunday May 05, 2024 @08:47PM (#40270051)
> instead of knowing there was bias

Why do you automatically assume this? Might be related to why people wanted to hide these numbers.

or still do it, but know that YC's incentives and yours are pointing in different directions. Sometimes taking their advice is good for both of you, sometimes it is only good for them.
Re:How A.I. chatbots become political on Thursday March 28, 2024 @05:55PM (#39857835)
That paragraph twists the harm around though. NYT goes out of its way to highlight Gemini depicting PoC as Nazis, while omitting that it almost entirely refused to depict white people and/or males in any positive context.

Gemini was way worse in its treatment of those groups, and above all, it was disastrous in its lack of respect for truth and accuracy. That latter part is where the true harm lies IMO.

Re:How A.I. chatbots become political on Thursday March 28, 2024 @05:50PM (#39857776)
> The general "left leaning" mood is also to provide services that help single-family households to mitigate issues for children anyway, so I think it's much more of a nuanced "lesser of two evils" position to support things like divorce being available.

That's a good way to put it. In contrast, the right leaning mood would be to strengthen social cohesion, increase support that people have from families, neighbors, and so on, and decrease the impersonal, systemic "services" provided by some bureaucracy.

Not arguing, just describing. I see virtues and problems in both approaches.

Re:How A.I. chatbots become political on Thursday March 28, 2024 @05:47PM (#39857745)
The OP means that kids raised by married parents have better life outcomes. The policy proposals that would follow from this (e.g. restricting divorce) are right-leaning positions outside the overton window.

But even beyond a specific policy proposal, there is a viewpoint in right-leaning circles that atomized individualism has caused lasting damage to the fabric of society and needs to be reigned in.

(NB: I can't speak to whether the claim that kids have better outcomes because their parents are married is actually true, as there are obvious confounders there)

I learned about it from a physical therapist. This seems to be old knowledge that was somewhat widespread (in the german-speaking world at least), then discredited in modernity as medicine was looking to be more evidence-based, and is now making a slow comeback.

NB: I have nothing against evidence-based medicine. But our bodies are much weirder than the high modernists were willing to admit.

No, I'm saying that they also have a comparable rate of post-viral syndrome, and a comparable rate of severe cases. It is not clear at all at this point if covid will be able to do this much damage to the next generation (whose first exposure was as babies). Maybe this blood brain barrier thing is something that all viruses do if the immune system doesn't respond appropriately. I genuinely don't know.
There is no ongoing pandemic. There is now an endemic virus that's part of the regular rotation of pathogens that cause colds and flu, and covid doesn't seem particularly more dangerous than the rest (NB: influenza can be very nasty too! I'm not minimizing the harm of covid).

The pandemic was a unique situation because the entire world population was immuno-naive to covid. This is no longer the case; we all get exposed dozens of times per year and keep our natural immunity up.

Calming the sympathicus is one of the very few things that somewhat works for me. It helps to relax and get good sleep.

One technique I'll add to the list: skin massage (literally pinching it with your fingers) around the sympathicus area: along the lower ribs, up the sternum and into a V-shape around the neck (roughly following the collarbones). The nerve endings on the skin literally stimulate the sympathetic system, allowing it to "reset". I don't know the exact mechanism, but I can vouch for it actually working.

Re:Boeing whistleblower found dead in US on Monday March 11, 2024 @07:17PM (#39674304)
Ahem. The base rate for a healthy person dying in the week or so leading up to their important testimony is tiny. It's reasonably likely (20%+) that this was foul play.
Re:Boeing whistleblower found dead in US on Monday March 11, 2024 @07:15PM (#39674292)
It's a meme. Same as "shot himself in the back of the head"
Re:Boeing whistleblower found dead in US on Monday March 11, 2024 @05:53PM (#39673657)
Same. I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but that is very strange wording.
I can imagine it. You're skipping over the actually hard part, which is the question of where the current AI paradigm will top out. Don't pretend this is not an open question.
> I am broadly anti-Worldcoin but it is reasonably competently executed at a technical level. It would be good to understand what they actually did before declaring it to be impossible.

+1 to this. I'm very skeptical of the project (even though I know some of the people working on it), but the problem space is extremely hard and they're giving it an actual shot. If you can think of a potential problem in 5 minutes, I guarantee you that they've thought of it too.

First of all, it's very hard to make a printout that looks like the real thing to a camera. Images stored on a computer capture a lossy representation of what the camera actually "saw".

Secondly, I believe that the protocol is based around the idea that the operator is trusted, i.e., they won't allow such uses of the orb. If an operator isn't trustworthy, I guess there needs to be a way to revoke the validity of all their scans.

Re:Why Jalapeño Peppers Are Less Spicy Than Ever (2023) on Monday February 26, 2024 @09:59PM (#39519639)
I cultivate all three of those on my balcony. They are all extremely forgiving plants.
Re:Gender differences in Dutch research funding over time on Monday February 19, 2024 @02:27PM (#39433637)
Overcorrecting is a bad thing. It means that you're explicitly and knowingly discriminating by gender, with a flimsy justification about the guilt of our ancestors.
Re:20 years of Mars Express on Sunday December 31, 2023 @08:50AM (#38824012)
I appreciate what you're saying, but images are nothing more than representations of something we measured with sensors and then combined into an array of data.

It's misleading to call this a photo. It's not easy to rigorously define what we mean by "photo", but I'd say it should involve measuring only photons in the human-visible spectrum.

However, I'm perfectly fine calling this an accurate image, because that's what it is.

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