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Re:Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem on Friday September 04, 2026 @11:39PM (#49572880)
Lean is like a statically typed programming language and validity is guaranteed if it compiles. The only room for errors is in translating a non-Lean theorem into Lean, so that you are not proving what you think you are proving.
"And the trees are all kept equal / By hatchet, axe, and saw"
And the relative values of those stocks will shift requiring rebalancing. You might be able to do that with new dollars for a while but hopefully, eventually, the swings are much more than new dollars and then what? Pay capital gains tax on sales to rebalance? Convince yourself the new random allocation is fine?
Re:Morningstar values SpaceX at $780B, half its IPO target on Thursday June 04, 2026 @07:11PM (#48405925)
Value is tied to how people assess value. They used to assess it on the performance or potential of the company whose ownership you were taking a part of. Now speculation plays a much bigger role. This seems predictably correlated with distance to last deep crash.
Tesla is currently 2.2% of S&P 500. If it halves, losing $800,000,000,000 usd market cap, the index will go down by 1.1%. What big risk?
Re:Too much discussion of the XOR swap trick on Thursday April 16, 2026 @02:59AM (#47789585)
How about every value appears 0 mod n times except one which appears 1 mod n times? :)

Solution: xor is just addition mod 2. Write the numbers in base n and do digit-wise addition mod n (ie without carry). Very intuitive way to see the xor trick.

Re:China's BYD set to overtake Tesla as top EV seller on Friday January 02, 2026 @02:29AM (#46462345)
You assume the goal is to dominate the EV market. It seems pretty clear that this hasn't been Teslas revealed preference for a long time. The goal is to keep raising the stock price. If that involved selling fewer EVs Elon would do it. He turned Teslas humble beginnings as an EV company into just the first stage in $TSLAs booster rocket to the moon, one that it already separated from.
Re:The New AI Consciousness Paper – By Scott Alexander on Friday November 21, 2025 @09:25PM (#46011503)
All of us trained our human "LLM" in the same environment (a human baby body) so it's easy for us to agree. I think once we have LLM-like entities that are always on and output a constant stream of thoughts, lines are going to get real blurry. Things that always used to be coupled and so had one name might need to be split. I think consciousness is one of those. Consciousness does not have a single definition as far as I am aware but one definition is something like the feeling of a potential future I am passively predicting happening and becoming the past. Riding that "now" wave. This definition seems extremely substrate specific. What if this sensation is just an implementation detail of an evolved intelligence in an Earth animal? The feeling of information being processed. I suspect this is just what consciousness feels like, not what it is. I don't know what you're feeling but from observing and interacting with you I assume and act like you are conscious. You are "functionally conscious." I don't see why AIs couldn't be functionally conscious. I further assume that you are human and so I extend even more consideration to how I talk to you. I assume you have feelings that you like to feel and those you don't and I prefer to trigger the former and avoid the latter, not simply because I don't want to take the conversation there but because as a fellow animal I care about your feelings. But I can see how there could be entities in the future that are conscious "functionally" but do not have the accompanying human feelings. They would speak human, since thats useful to humans, but wouldn't "be" human. I don't think we need to understand how / why humans feel conscious for that to happen.
Re:The New AI Consciousness Paper – By Scott Alexander on Friday November 21, 2025 @02:29PM (#46007997)
The stateless/timeless nature of LLMs comes from the rigid prompt-response structure. But I don't see why we cant in theory decouple the response from the prompt, and have them constantly produce a response stream from a prompt that can be adjusted asynchronously by the environment and by the LLMs themselves through the response tokens and actions therein. I think that would certainly simulate them experiencing time without the hairy questions about what time is.
Re:OpenAI thought to be preparing for $1T stock market float on Friday October 31, 2025 @11:21PM (#45779005)
This is a critique of basketed index funds not total stock market index funds like FSKAX. When that observation is applied to FSKAX it reads like this

"An index fund, by its nature, must occasionally dump stock I like and buy stock I don't like simply because the entire stock market dumped the stock I like and bought the stock I don't like."

Re:US moves to cancel one of the largest solar farms on Saturday October 11, 2025 @09:32PM (#45554334)
Seems more of a 'how' than 'why.' Good stated reason that lets you keep the actual reason private.
Re:The Unknotting Number Is Not Additive on Thursday October 09, 2025 @05:47AM (#45525519)
Math is a purely logical tool. None of it "exists." That makes no sense. Some of it can be used to model reality. We call such math "physics." And I think physics is significantly closer to math than to reality. It's just a collection of math that models some measurements on some scales with some precision. We have no idea how close we are to actual reality.

I do not understand the framing of "translating math concepts directly into reality." It's backwards. You must have first chosen some math to model reality. If you get "bad" numbers it has nothing to do with translating math to reality. It has to do with how you translated reality into math.

Re:iPhone Air on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @04:27PM (#45188406)
This phone has the highest screen area to weight ratio except for the Galaxy S25 Edge.
https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bb.pdf

This paper contains many conjectures around BB that could be interesting to some.

Re:19% of California houses are owned by investors on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @04:52PM (#44817705)
This is naive. The problem is that there are enough people with enough power who want house prices to keep going up. The solution must involve making them upset that they cannot get their way. Anything that doesn't have this shape is a stalling tactic in their favor.
To me #3 sort of looks similar, but everybody else is clearly not close to similar.
Point is, there is flexibility in how different brands implement it. I think it will be the same as eco mode / sports mode / track mode.
I bet that when this tech is in normal cars some will have it tuned to drive much more aggressively and/or simply have that be a setting. I suspect that would be a big selling point / driving tacitly would be an anti-selling point.
There is money in them doing this nasty nonsense. The cost of something like a cellular connection will only keep dropping. Therefore, it is just a matter of time before such devices can connect to the internet without any way for the user to prevent them. Nobody is going to Faraday cage their house.
Re:How Pi Almost Wasn't on Friday March 14, 2025 @12:47AM (#43359659)
The real nerds celebrate Tau day on 6/28.
An insane amount of money was donated by pro-crypto lobbies to the campaigns, and they will make it all back.
Re:Cash burn baby burn: Meta's brave new horizons on Sunday February 23, 2025 @03:51AM (#43147885)
Meta needs VR to hit big with normies and what you describe will never hit with a billion normies. So it's not surprising they aren't focusing on it.
Re:Noether's Theorem Revolutionized Physics on Sunday February 09, 2025 @02:29AM (#42989129)
TLDR: Do an experiment, then move 10 meters to the left (or rotate 90 degrees, or wait a few days) and do it again. The results don’t change, because the laws of physics don’t change. This realization alone is enough to produce conservation laws. Translational and rotational symmetries produce conservation of linear and angular momentum, and the time symmetry produces conservation of energy. Each symmetry you find leads to new physics.

It's such an aha moment.

PBS Space Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04ERSb06dOg

Re:Addiction Economy on Saturday February 01, 2025 @01:25PM (#42900713)
Humanity was fine living in an environment much closer to what our bodies evolved for. But now tempting things are evolving faster than our biological countermeasures so we need sociological or chemical ones. What is the alternative? Coordinate so that everyone slows down making things and information people really, really like?
Re:Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years on Sunday January 26, 2025 @09:05PM (#42836586)
Are you implying that this somehow explains the full price? Those same few places are also the best places to buy investment properties, and this fake demand (not buying to live there) increases prices too, and this impact could be huge.
Re:Why is zero plural? (2024) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @10:24PM (#42788595)
I have no idea what you are talking about. /s
Re:Linux Cracking Bible – The GNU Testament on Saturday January 04, 2025 @10:31PM (#42599540)
nit: Profit is money after expenses. You may be robbing real people of money covering expenses, which seems much worse. Better to use revenue or income.
Sounds like Brain Dances (BDs) from Cyberpunk 2077.
Re:The end is nigh and here's why on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @04:05PM (#42455175)
Its the media (or more generally group dynamics) too. One side exaggerates how nasty the other side is, which gets people outraged and engaged, then they act nasty to them because its 'justified.' It also creates a feedback loop where regardless of what the other side did originally they are now much more likely to be nasty to your side simply because you were nasty to them. Maximizing engagement like this necessarily destabilizes discourse. There is a huge monetary incentive to maximizing engagement, while there is only a mild philosophical one to stabilizing discourse, so guess which one loses.

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