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pfortuny

Re:Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines on Friday October 02, 2026 @06:10AM (#49931799)
That is the joke, indeed.
The Jacobian Conjecture settles the "solve a math problem" and is controversy-free.
Re:Effective altruism is this century's biggest idea on Thursday October 01, 2026 @10:50AM (#49922429)
The basic idea of EA is the same many people have (especially those not used to the idea of nonlinear orders): quantifying everything, even "goodness" or "utility".

Not everything is quantifiable, and even more, not any family of things (investments, in this case) admits a linear ordering (they may even not admit a total order).

There can be incomparable outcomes from actions, and they may be maximal in their suborder.

This is difficult until you stop measuring everything and dedicate a minute to think of ordered trees.

Re:Ask HN: What're You Reading? on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @03:56AM (#49905810)
Right now, "The Lord", by Romano Guardini, a large collection of homilies covering the whole life of Christ. Obviously, this is a Catholic text.

Also, "Heaven on Earh", by Emma Wells, about nine or ten Gothic Cathedrals (mostly the history of their building and preservation). A bit too plain for my taste but includes interesting facts and anecdotes.

Finished recently:

-Flowers for Algernon, which I liked a lot.

-Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, so beautiful and surprising.

-The Great Gatsby, which I had not read yet and which I have loved reading.

Re:Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain on Monday September 28, 2026 @09:20AM (#49877511)
Are you from a main Spanish city? Because the chargers are being set up but not so fast, and parking is not exactly an easy thing to find for most people.
The father-mother-child-donkey conundrum. Its only solution is: to hell with anyone's thoughts, we'll act as we prefer.
Re:OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US Government agency sites on Saturday September 26, 2026 @02:35PM (#49859225)
Because egress firewalls have existed since way before "ai" and are very easy to set up.
Re:Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe on Saturday September 26, 2026 @12:29PM (#49858089)
And memorizing. Rote learning makes the brain.
Re:Microsoft Abandons Personal AI Chatbot Race with Copilot Reboot on Saturday September 26, 2026 @03:00AM (#49853971)
[un]believable. Thank you.
Sorry what? Honest question.
That is exactly what "training AI" needs: labeled data.
Re:Navier-Stokes Visualized as 1kB i386 demos on Friday September 18, 2026 @11:04AM (#49755421)
It might be that the velocity at the spiraling axis is not infinity (i.e. there is no blow-up in finite time). Viscosity is a bitch.
Re:The Shadows Lurking in the Equations – Underwater Islands on Friday September 18, 2026 @10:05AM (#49754606)
That has another name but I forget. Essentially contour plotting in high res.
Yep: the problem with IP is exactly the "Property". The texts are economically (even if only for leisure) valuable, so the producer deserves a fair comoensation unless he has explicitly dismissed it.

So paying a price for an intelectual product is reasonable. Nothing to do (per se) with property.

Wow, this is really interesting. Thanks.
Apart from the well-known dubious position of OpenAI wrt truth, the prompts/inputs do mot include the outputs.

You can train on a sequence of outputs. In the end, OpenAI outputs are OpenAI's property.

You can learn a lot from a single side of a conversation.

Re:OpenAI loses trademark dispute at EU court on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @01:58PM (#48924709)
Courts exist, among other things, to specify the rules in ambiguous cases. Rules will be ambiguous always.
Colima is in Mexico.

Kolyma is in Russia.

Re:A Metallurgist's Doubts About Self-Replicating Probes on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @07:39AM (#48919309)
As long as you can get an exogenous reaction from it, which is not guaranteed at all.
Re:A Metallurgist's Doubts About Self-Replicating Probes on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @01:09PM (#48909936)
The self-replication assumes also that there is enough energy stored in each planet (or coming from a Sun) to do the work... That is pretty much unlikely.
Re:Australia is offering free daytime electricity on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @01:05PM (#48909892)
Unbelievable: I read the title and the only thought I got was that households get 3h free energy in Australia.
Re:Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @01:02PM (#48909861)
OK, and the median?
Re:Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @08:25AM (#48905727)
Also "neuron" should be at least italized.
Re:Berkshire's $397B Bet Against an Overheated Market on Monday July 13, 2026 @07:22AM (#48890991)
Well, that is what markets do: behave. Rationally or not.

The 1929 panic was also irrational but it happened. There is no way to solve that.

Panics happen and bubbles too, and in the meantime, very long term investments tend to grow (in average), as long as the economy works as expected (improving in average, long-term).

Of course, catastrophes are not impossible (the Black Death, the French Revolution, World Wars...).

That summurizes it pretty well. The Commission is essentially omnipotent, and there is no relevat judiciary to stop it.

This is farcical.

Yes, from a PURELY MONETARY viewpoint, Brexit was a disaster. But there are more important things than money.

I'm from Spain btw.

The first thought when moving people must be "where/how will they shit?" Only once this is solved can you ask "what will they eat?".
Re:The AI Superforecasters Are Here on Monday July 06, 2026 @02:06PM (#48808287)
This is not even dumb. Unbelievable coming from act....
Re:Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe on Saturday July 04, 2026 @02:42PM (#48787727)
I guess they do not understand the relevance of the median in this. They just take the average and think it is "good enough"...
Re:The Fall of the Theorem Economy on Thursday July 02, 2026 @01:59PM (#48765151)
I would call it "Engineered (as machine-made trustworthy) Mathematics": you have results but nobody undrstands them but they were not produced by humans.

Despite that, people use them. In that sense, similar to the Finite Elements method. But the tools (statements) are machined like any other tool (screwdriver).

Similar to microprocessors in your example. But about statements.

Re:The Fall of the Theorem Economy on Thursday July 02, 2026 @06:26AM (#48759182)
Well, by "understanding" I mean "understanding by humans", indeed.

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