monktastic1

I find the irony of this comment overwhelming. I suspect one day we will be asking AI to summarize the smell of the forest, and the beauty of a wildflower meadow, because ain't nobody got time for that.

It's a bit like:

"Doc, I feel pain in my toe."

"No, sorry, the math says you don't."

"Okay, but like... I do."

"Sorry, you're just not good at accepting math!"

Not a perfect analogy, of course, but people have competing intuitions of what to do when the map fails to match the territory. MWI abandons the latter, most prefer the former.

Decoherence isn't an interpretation, but an experimentally established fact. What makes interpretations interpretations is that they cannot be experimentally distinguished (or in some cases, can only be with great difficulty). That said, the study of decoherence has certainly made aspects of the measurement problem easier to come to terms with, which in turn has bearing on the intuitive draw of some interpretations over others. In particular, it helps answer when universes should be said to "split" in MWI (though, as many will rightly tell you, that's not a complete solution to the measurement problem, as decoherence is still unitary--i.e., there's no in-principle irreversibility there).

That's fair. The example OP gave us was the use of the word "function." I'd be very impressed at a (useful) tutorial that never mentioned that word.

Were you hoping they would explain what is essentially a rather sophisticated math structure without using any... math?

Whenever I read this anecdote, I want to believe it is largely made up. I don't want to believe that none of these towering intellects (let alone von Neumann himself) didn't instantly recognize the more elegant way to view the problem. Technical abilities aside, that's the part that's always made them so impressive to me. I easily recognized it myself when I was younger, and I'm nowhere near as clever as them.

But this oracle doesn't just say true / false. It also gives a proof. That makes it much less exciting (and less beneficial for your career) to find another one (or even worse, the same one).

Thanks for this clarification of your position. The brief answer is:

> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.

The criticisms are directed toward people who did clearly act like they knew, not the ones who were honest that they did not know.

So you defined your own idiosyncratic version of "moving the goalposts" and used it to rebut his argument, with a condescending "you understand that's how science works, right?"--instead of being honest that it is you who are changing the definition, and not his failure to understand anything.

I don't see how that's any better.

Not sure how to suggest edits to titles, but @dang: his first name is Terence, not Terrence.

Yes, this is a huge omission, because it means that as engines improve, the stated advantage becomes increasingly meaningless to humans (which is the opposite of what we may intuitively expect).

What I really want to know as a player is how easy it will be for me to win from this position against someone of my opponent's strength, which is admittedly a very hard thing to define, let alone compute.

I think you're misreading the comment you're responding to. Its parent comment said that life can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you choose to look. They responded by asking whether the word "curse" is appropriate if it can be changed based only on perspective.

Indelible, probably -- though I admit that both trying to eat and trying to delete that passage failed. (I jest -- "impossible to forget," of course.)

Your account seems relatively new, so you might be unfamiliar with the rule to be charitable here. If you'd like to be snarky and lower the bar for discourse, Reddit is a much better place to do that (though ideally it would be kept out of public spaces altogether).

Huh, I would guess there's a different mechanism at work. In my experience, movies playing on TV during the holidays tend not to get people's deep, persistent, undivided attention.

My assumption here is that FAANG employees are not fundamentally different from the rest of the populace along that particular dimension (desire to inflate lifestyle). I chose them in particular to demonstrate that even when we have the choice, we can easily opt not to take it. Of course many do not have that choice.

And yes, I agree with your second paragraph. "The culture" celebrates it — but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches. We all participate in our own little ways — and the more of us that step off the treadmill, the less those messages find footing, in a virtuous cycle. Again, it's not about blame. But for those of us who have the capacity and desire to decondition ourselves, it's very much worth doing. It can affect the feedback loop more powerfully than we think.

Perhaps "retire" is the wrong word. One can still work (whether for pay or not) and improve the lives of the people around them without staying on the consumption treadmill. Very few actually do. Again, this isn't meant as a judgement — it's just highlighting that we each have a role to play in slowing down this insane freight train.

I wouldn't be so quick to divide the world so easily into victims and perpetrators. Every FAANG engineer I know, for example, could easily retire by mid-40s by keeping consumption in check. Instead, nearly every single one chose instead to "improve their lifestyles." Not blaming them, either, because it's cultural programming -- but until we all learn to slow down a bit and reflect, the madness isn't going to stop.

Right, each county is coextensive with one borough: Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, Bronx, New York (Manhattan), and Richmond (Staten Island).

I see. Thanks for the added context; that's much clearer.

If this were true, then why even bother to make atomic clocks? Why would an article about the "most accurate clock" be interesting to smart people like HN readers if there's no objective measure of accuracy (or if it didn't matter)? The correct answer is in a sibling comment to yours: we base it on other things we know (or believe, anyway) to be constant.

It being "nice" does not negate the fact that there's no way to pay for _only_ ad removal.

BUD/S /s.

> Yeah, I don’t get how you distinguish between a correct visual proof and a visual proof that looks right but doesn’t actually prove what it’s trying to prove.

This problem exists not only for visual proofs, but for standard written ones too.

> a government department

Looks like the propaganda worked. DOGE is not a "government department" and there is very little visibility into how it's run.

Like o3, which hallucinates more (as I learned from this piece)? https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/18/openais-new-reasoning-ai-m...

A little annoying that they use zero instead of o, but yeah.

Ha, I was in charge of data quality for Google Maps going on 15 years ago. Addresses were hard then, and I'm sure they're hard now. Alas, Google didn't want to invest in keeping this data high quality — a fact to which I actually owe my first promotion at the company (since taking over Maps data quality was a job that nobody else particularly wanted — nor did they want to move to Seattle, where Google wanted the team — but it still gave a lot of room for impact).

Sometimes I dream of going back, but the culture has changed too much (and not for the better, I hear).

I think it depends on the self-awareness of the user. It's easy to slip into the mode of conflating an LLM with a conscious being, but with enough metacognition one can keep them separate. Then, in the same way that walking on concrete doesn't make me more willing to walk on a living creature, neither does my way of speaking to an LLM bleed into human interactions.

That said, I often still enjoy practicing kindness with LLMs, especially when I get frustrated with them.

Huh, could have fooled me. My first experience of Austin was long stretches of ugly billboards (I think mostly on Burnet and N Lamar), and despite living here for years that first impression never left. Now that I think about it, without some kind of ban of course there would be way more billboards where I now live.