eh_why_not

I'm a pilot, and I don't fly turbofans/jets. Not claiming any "authority", but qualified to comment... It's not "something that basic" unless you fly in that category, there's a lot more to aviation experience than knowing a fact about an engine you don't use. (But hey, congrats to you that you know it!)

> I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this..

More restraint than saying "unclear <i.e. to me> why ...", an exact statement about what I didn't know, which harms no one and led to several informative explanations by people who know (most of them in good spirit)?

This is what good conversation is about.

...

Anyway, the point I was making holds and is this:

Orthogonal to whether they could/should have gone around at that point, and given that they stayed on the ground after all, it may turn out that that 4 seconds of indecision (instead of pure deceleration) may have directly contributed to the fatalities at the end of the crash.

>> CVR: 00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.

>> FDR: 00:15 Brakes were released at a groundspeed of 120 knots and throttles were increased to a value consistent with go-around thrust.

>> FDR: 00:11 The throttles were reduced to idle power and the brakes were re-applied. The groundspeed was 117 knots. The throttles remained at idle, and brakes remained applied until the end of the recording.

So they decided to go-around (i.e. do not land and climb immediately, going full thrust), then 4 seconds later changed their mind and went back to power idle and brakes (unclear how speed didn't increase).

While they were still late in calling a go-around (they should have done it before being anywhere close to touching down due to their unstable approach), guessing those 4 seconds contributed to the disaster by a lot.

Why do we keep hearing about researchers and investigators - who all appear to be unaffiliated with OpenAI - discovering these new sites one by one?

All site URLs that the agent swarms used would appear in the network logs and be preserved by the first forensics team that looked into it.

Subpoena the logs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOC3DisEOfg&t=119s

Curious what HN thinks of this pitch (not judging, had a debate with an old friend about it recently).

Would you hire someone who has been out and not working for years, and whose motivation to work being boredom?

Incidentally, last week Amazon changed their TOS [0] and now all disputes with them are to be resolved via Arbitration; class action waiver when you use their services, etc.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/amazon-reinstates-b...

Yes, Tao is guiding it to where he wants to go. But also, Tao is actively learning from it and relying on its explaining, analysis, and inference abilities. You can easily imagine this conversation having taken place between Tao and a PhD thesis student, or even another professor, explaining their results.

What can we imagine and predict about the future anymore? Maybe a year - or two model releases - from now, the AI assistant will be undeniably stronger than Tao, and not an equal anymore.

Of note: the author had AI help synthesizing the actual 10-page prompt that resulted in the proof! A powerful tool when you know what you're doing.

> Did you have first an AI help designing the prompt?

>> yes, I did! I basically had 5.6 Sol synthesize existing closely related work and their approaches, the past ideas I had, with OpenAI's prompt that had a lot of the presumably important mechanisms for how exactly the agent should act. Especially from the "results that do not count" section onwards is a lot of input from Sol.

https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tse6mq/ua_...

> If you develop the skill of judging information by its merit rather than source..

Did you read example #1? I'm not talking about some piece of code from an LLM that you can verify or some political opinion that you can take with a grain of salt, but information that you can only gain and/or judge through expertise:

If you're not a physicist yourself, you can't judge "information by its merit" on specific physics topics, because you don't have a solid baseline.

Similarly, in growing plants, each plant has its own peculiarities, and only people experienced in growing it can tell you anything useful - it's knowledge accumulated by trial and error. Not knowledge that your "great discerning mind" can assess on its own. Even a botanist can't tell you the ideal growing conditions of a plant that they've never studied before.

1) Some time ago I was searching for growing information about a specific and uncommonly-grown plant, and was led to a top-ranked website with long pages containing everything about it, including other plants. Surprised at how prolific the writing was, I spent more than an hour on the website, taking notes, etc. Every few paragraphs it would include an amazon affiliate link to something topical, which I thought was fair. Until I realized that the links near the bottom of the page were looking more random. Then it hit me, the website is all AI-generated, and the affiliate links themselves are also AI-chosen. And everything new I "learned" from that site was now useless because I had no way to know what was grounded in actual agricultural experience and what was hallucinated.

2) Recently I did a youtube search for a book I had just finished reading, looking for some reviews. Came across a channel that was reading the book as new audio (i.e. not the original published audiobook). I thought it was a fan making it. The voice was beautiful, soothing, and natural with all kinds of relevant emotions correctly included. I started listening to the book again, until I noticed a consistent error in word ordering being made every few lines. Then it hit me! The channel even included one upload with a video recording of a seemingly-real person reading with that voice. Both the audio and video are AI-generated, but very hard to tell.

3) Next to those videos, YT recommended many strange/new channels. One had the photo and the exact voice of a famous (and now very old) physicist, with tens of clickbaity titles about controversial topics in the domain. The only tell was that the voice was too vigorous and consistently energetic, while if you've listened to that physicist before, you know his cadence is slower. At first I thought maybe the channel is reading one of his books; no, the content itself was AI-generated, maybe based on his books. There was a lot of engagement, with many comments like "mind blown" and "learned so much today".

Both #1 and #3 are harmful, because you think you're learning from a reliable source but you end up learning hallucinated nothings. #2 I didn't mind much, still enjoyed the new voice, and even preferred it over my original audible version.

Elaborate? You heat your knives after every sharpening?

> "We know that richer communities and schools will be able to afford more advanced AI models," Winthrop says, "and we know those more advanced AI models are more accurate. Which means that this is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources."

... and am somehow reminded of the movie Gattaca.

So ubiquitous surveillance, literally overhead, without any need to have a nearby/local charging/physical-management station/crew?

> After power companies, we will service rail, road, telecom, real estate and other inspection markets.

Oh?

> After building drones for the Air Force and DARPA, ...

Oh

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprekar%27s_routine

https://x.com/TeamYouTube/status/1985378776562168037

For everyone else: the first paragraph appears to be a quote of C.S. Lewis around 1945 [0], and the second, of Thomas Jefferson in 1807 [1].

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/502048-why-you-fool-it-s-th...

[1] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...

> Its landing module, which weighs 495 kilograms (1,091 lb), is highly likely to reach the surface of Earth in one piece as it was designed to withstand 300 G's of acceleration and 100 atmospheres of pressure.

Awesome! I don't know how you can design for 300 G's of acceleration!