rjtobin

There is at least one reason - it was a harder problem. Agreed that which IMO problems are hard for a human IMO participant and which are hard for an LLM are different things, but seems like they should be positively correlated at least?

Small point but the last link here (from 2008) is a different project with the same title.

I interpret the article quite differently. The triangle example (which as the author writes is actually an example from “Lockhart’s Lament” on American math education) isn’t about whether triangle-area-formula was ever justified to students. It’s that students aren’t given the chance to really ask the question themselves - a chance to approach math, or biology, in the way that a mathematician or biologist does in reality: trying to work it out for themselves, and being invited to wonder at just how improbable textbook biological facts are etc.

I agree with your point that some students will be more inquisitive, and will need less prompting to do the above thinking themselves. But many (most?) students are not like this, and it’s a shame that many of these students could enjoy a subject that they instead come to loathe.

I think the idea is that early Protestants like Calvinists believed in predestination - that it was already decided who would was going to heaven. One would think this would make the predestined not care about their actions, but the trick is that no one was sure who the predestined were. Since it was believed that the predestined would be exemplars of the faith, people would act like they thought the predestined would act.

I’m not a psychologist or a theologian, but it sounds related to that concept in child psychology: when a child misbehaves, it’s better to say “you did a bad thing” than “you are bad”. The latter leads to the child labeling themselves as bad, suggesting that’s the natural way they should act.

There is an interesting and seemingly not well-understood link between loss of sense of smell and decreased longevity: https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/poor-...

Wild speculation, but maybe there is some key circuitry in our brains that also doesn’t activate if we cannot smell?

I think the interpretation of "you don't get anywhere" is the crux. There are a few games I've put a few hundred hours in, and those hours were mostly fun and exciting. I gained skills in the game, some of which are transferrable to other things, but most of which aren't.

If I was to put the same time into a new programming language, I'd have gained a different set of skills, again some transferrable and some not. I think most people judge the second set of skills as more worthwhile than the first (maybe because it is tied to employability, and is seen as more "age appropriate").

Another aspect is that programming isn't designed to be addictive in the way some games are. Something like World of Warcraft seems designed specifically to hook into the part of the brain that rewards grind. In the moment, WoW is very compelling. But looking back on what was accomplished, I don't feel particularly positive about it. Compared to a programming project with a similar time commitment, in the moment it is on average less compelling probably, but the achievements are more satisfying in retrospect. Somehow this makes programming seem more worthwhile (though maybe I have just internalized the societal standards from above, and that's why I feel more satisfied with the programming projects).

Yep, I misread it also: I saw j = 2 * i (which would do evens and then odds when NUMBER is odd, or evens then evens again if NUMBER is even).

For what it really is - powers of 2 mod NUMBER - when NUMBER is large most reads should be out of the cache. So the first example has to read from main memory only every 64th index, and the second example has to read from main memory on almost every read. I think this agrees with what you are saying. This also explains why it is ~5x slower, which seemed too large from my previous understanding.

The cartoon picture is that the first example will read everything into cache once, whereas the second example will read everything into cache twice.

Cache lines are typically 64-bytes, so to write a single character to main memory the following things happen (again, a cartoon picture): First read the 64-bytes area that contains the byte of interest so that it is owned by my cache (this is called a RFO, "read-for-ownership"). Second, update the byte of interest. Thirdly (at some point) write the cache-line back to main memory.

In the sequential case, we just read one 64-byte cache line at a time, update those 64 chars, then write the cache line back to main memory.

In the second example, we first update all the even-indexed characters, which still forces us to read in every cache line. Then we loop around and do the odd-indexed characters, at which point we have to read the cache lines all over again (assuming the array is big enough that the whole thing can't fit in cache at once).

Maybe his wife, Fan Chung, who was also a close collaborator of Erdős (13 joint papers), or one of Ron's students will continue the tradition (maybe Steve Butler).

Very sad news in any case.

Doesn’t seem like there’s enough evidence that this is actually happening. The video from the reddit post has scaffolding to the left. And why surround the bricks with fences and signs?

The reddit poster dismisses this with “look at the other links people have posted here”. These are basically 3 or 4 photos or grainy videos of bricks in a city. Some photos don’t have bricks at all.

There is the supposed video of police leaving bricks. They seem to be examining bricks in the back of their car, and lining a few up on the side of their car (not on the roadside). Not very convincing.

Not saying this isn’t happening, but the evidence is literally a few photos of bricks in cities at this point. I expect most of the time we pass by piles of construction bricks without noticing them

I'm somewhat skeptical. Firstly, I don't think the language is the problem with scientific code. You can write messy code in any language. So the warning then has to be about writing software in general. In that case, I think a warning like "don't try to write software unless you have years of training" is a bit much. Many people with no training learn to write nice code. Many projects made by amateurs might have ugly code but still add something to the world (eg. many games).

The problem here is the project is influencing decisions in healthcare.

Having worked in HPC and academia, I've seen code like this a lot. There are two archetypes I've noticed: (1) the well-meaning older academic maintaining legacy code, who have often done a lot of convergence testing, but still have code that isn't up to modern engineering practices, and (2) the domain experts with the attitude that "programming is much easier than my area of domain expertise". These are problems that require attitude changes within academia, not better warnings on online tutorials. The second group are going to ignore the warnings anyway.

Remember many of the people writing this academic code also teach programming courses in their departments! They view themselves as programming experts.

Hah, I also came here to post that my dad worked for them in the 80’s (though in Oslo, even though he’s Irish). Didn’t expect to see two other people saying the same thing!

I think there’s still a Norsk Data coffee mug in his house somewhere.

Although I think this is wonderful, I wonder is there a non-public outreach reason for not just showing pre-recorded videos of people?

I’m also curious about how well these eels can perceive screens. Some animals seem to be able to process things on a screen while others seem to totally ignore it. Is there some biological difference here, maybe the frequencies of light emitted by a TV/monitor being designed for human eyes?

There is an upcoming contest to write an AI for an (American) football based board game, Bloodbowl. The players have different stats as you describe, and the teams can be asymmetrical (though for the competition, both teams select 11 players from a fixed 12 player roster, so not too asymmetrical).

Here is a link to the competition: https://njustesen.github.io/ffai/bot-bowl-ii

(As an aside, just wanted to mention that the original article is actually about soccer, rather American Football. The comment I'm replying to is certainly about American football, so I feel my comment here is fair.)

I’m a little surprised by this sentiment (maybe I’m naively optimistic). I’m curious, do you (and others) think elementary and high schools will be back next fall?

The list by itself is of limited use, since each college on the list has made different announcements. I’d say the summary is most have vaguely worded statements leaving open the possibility of either remote learning, in-person learning or some combination of the two.

A related problem is the complete lack of tone in text-based discourse, and the brain's penchant for subconsciously assuming text was written in a certain tone, with no mental "error bars" around this assumed tone.

I see on Twitter all the time conversations that escalate to arguments, usually starting with a minor disagreement that one party reads as more hostile than was perhaps intended. It takes a lot of effort to write text that cannot be misread in a negative light, and people usually don't bother.

Listened to a podcast with Matt Mullenweg recently about remote working, and his company advocates a policy of "assume positive intent" when reading messages from colleagues. I think this is helpful: share the burden of avoiding misinterpreted tone between both the writer (who currently shares the blame usually) and the reader.

I think there’s a chance it will be different: at least now there is the potential to offer customers an ad-free package for an extra cost. Some services like Hulu already do this (offering cheaper plan with ads and a slightly pricier plan with no ads). I think with cable this would have been difficult or impossible to achieve.

One nice thing about this is it makes plain how much the networks make from showing ads to your household. I happily pay a little extra to “outbid” the ad networks.

Might be stored as an int in cents (or whatever the tick size is).

And sadly all three authors of "Winning Ways" have now passed away within almost exactly a year: Berlekamp died on Apr 9 last year, and Richard Guy died in March (he was 103!).

Thanks for making it, super cool! Btw, if it wasn't clear, my "controversial" comment isn't to be taken seriously

Here were my two experiences, one I felt would be easy and the other hard:

Title: Build recommendations. Message: "I'd like to upgrade some components. My current rig has an old i7 and an RTX 2060. Looking for something midrange that can handle modern games at high settings (but maybe not ultra)."

Matches: Nvidia (19%), IndianGaming (8%), GamingLaptops (8%), pcgamingtechsupport (6%)

Title: Travel advice. Message: "I'm returning to Ireland in July from the USA. My visa is up. I know I will have to self-quarantine for two weeks. I cannot move back to my family home due to elderly parents. Are there any recommendations for people in this sort of situation? I'm happy to pay for a hotel, but don't want to put a hotel worker at risk. We have an old house down in Wexford I could stay in, but would involve taking a train when I arrive, and the HSE guidance says not to take public transport. Any advice?"

Recommendations: LegalAdviceUK (8%), IWantOut (7%), AskUK (5%)

Overall I think this was pretty good, even if it wasn't perfect. I thought it would struggle more with the second one (maybe getting confused and suggesting vacation planning subreddits). A little controversial that it kept suggesting "UK" reddits for a question about Ireland though :)

At time of filing H1B, the employer makes an LCA (Labour Condition Application) which includes information about the job like salary range and hours (which may be a range, maybe 30-40 hours). If the job changes enough that the LCA is no longer accurate, some action is required (an amended filing may be sufficient, to be honest I'm not sure).

If job responsibilities have changed, especially in a way that reduces the qualification requirements for the job, again they might be required to amend their H1B petition.

I'll just add again that I'm _not_ a lawyer, and only have a cursory understanding from being in the middle of all this myself :)

Small typo in title: "ans" -> "and"

The paper itself is linked here: http://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/Documents/Chapter1/cyborgs....

Not a lawyer, but to any fellow H1B's who are concerned about being laid off, and facing the near-impossible task of leaving the US on short notice during a worldwide lockdown: a 2017 law provides a 60-day grace period for "those whose employment ceases prior to the end of the petition validity period". Ie. if there is time left on your I-94, you should have 60-day grace period where you will remain in-status while you look for another job.

Here is the full document: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2016-11-18/pdf/2016-2... (search for "60-day nonimmigrant").

Note that during these 60-days you can then file for a change of status, and then you will still remain in-status while that request is pending (the change you file must be "non-frivolous" though!).

If you follow this route and try to change status, USCIS has the right to revoke the grace period retroactively (in cases of abuse, for example). Documentation that you were actively seeking new employment should help avoid this.

Anyway, concerned people should certainly speak to an immigration attorney (again, I am not a lawyer), but it is comforting to know that most likely we have 60 days to get our affairs in order...

Oh cool! That's good to know. Sadly too late to edit my original message, but have upvoted yours so people won't learn from my errors :)

The title "Rare Second World War Footage of Bletchley Park Emerges" isn't quite accurate. The footage is of Whaddon Hall, rather than Bletchley Park. Whaddon Hall was MI6, whereas Bletchley Park was GCHQ (GC&CS back then).

The title of the linked article uses the wording "Bletchley Park-linked" which seems more accurate!

Some other Git features that I find super useful, which past colleagues of mine haven't known about (which maybe suggests they are not universally known).

git rev-parse branch-name: gets the hash of a branch name, useful for verifying two branches are at the same place (so "git rev-parse HEAD" gets the current hash)

The ^ and ~ notations for navigating commits: my_branch^ points to the commit 1 before my_branch, and can be repeated multiple times, ie. my_branch^^^ to get the commit 3 from the top. Likewise the tilda notation allows one to jump a fixed number of commits up: my_branch~10 is the commit 10 above my_branch.

git rebase -i HEAD~10: interactively rebase the last 10 commits. Easy way to re-order, squash, drop, and/or edit the commit messages of recent history in a single git command.

From the twitter thread, it seems like it’s a data error: https://mobile.twitter.com/mersenneary/status/12444399368766...

At first it seems plausible, due to decreased traffic fatalities and so on. But traffic fatalities are about ~3000 a month, this effect is 15-20x greater than that. So it seems like there should be a high burden of proof here.

The source posted answers that too. In one of the studies contained in the 538 article, the probability of a woman being taller than a men if both are selected randomly was .102. Compare this to the observed probability of woman in a couple being taller than her male partner being .075.

How big is this difference? Well if 25 percent of women only dated taller men, and the other 75 percent of women were totally indifferent, we would see this. So not quite as extreme as one might guess from a statistic like "92.5 percent of men are taller than their partners".