IanKerr

Yep, exactly. I glossed over that detail a bit because explaining how a meagre set has a truly zero probability of being picked, while technically still being a possible result of a random process, is a bit messy to wrap your head around colloquially.

Are irrational numbers even on a number line?

Yes, e is between 2 and 3 and Pi is between 3 and 4. There are geometrical lengths corresponding to each number.

Isn’t it definitionally impossible to pick it as a “point along the line”?

No, it's mathematically possible to have a random process which picks a random real between 0 and n, with equal probability. Imagine it akin to throwing a dart at a line and picking the point it lands on as the number. Since there are only countably many rationals and uncountably many irrationals (i.e. not just infinitely more, but so many that you could never pair off the rationals with the irrationals, there are just too many) on any such length of the real line, chances are the number you end up with is overwhelmingly likely to be irrational.

We are so, so far beyond that point already. The complexity of the world economy is beyond any one mind to fully comprehend. The microcosm of building black-box LLMs that perform feats we don't understand is yet another instance of us building systems which may forever be beyond human understanding.

How is any human meant to understand a billion lines of code in a single codebase? How is any human meant to understand a world where there are potentially trillions of lines of code operating?

This is the beginning of the end of the public internet, imo. Websites that aren't able to manage the bandwidth consumption of AI scrapers and the endless spam that will take over from LLMs writing comments on forums are going to go under. The only things left after AI has its way will be walled gardens with whitelisted entrants or communities on large websites like Facebook. Niche, public sites are going to become unsustainable.

Now account for the amount of mental overhead required for the average person to calculate change or coinage of a random amount in base two coins, as opposed to multiples of 5 or 10, and see if your 3.19 coins per transaction really saves you time.

For anyone curious: it tastes like a bowl of salt.

Source: I was an adventurous 5 year old.

For an interesting exploration of how even the simple physics of two blocks hitting one another can lead to surprising conclusions, I'd highly recommend this 3Blue1Brown video called "Why do colliding blocks compute pi?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsYwFizhncE

It's been pretty incredible watching these companies siphon up everything under the sun under the guise of "training data" with impunity. These same companies will then turn around and sic their AIs on places like Youtube and send out copyright strikes via a completely automated system with loads of false-positives.

How is it acceptable to allow these companies to steal all of this copyrighted data and then turn around and use it to enforce their copyrights in the most heavy-handed manner? The irony is unbelievable.

She was excellent at whatever she was in. An absolute icon of cinema. RIP Maggie Smith.

It's always very impressive to me seeing our ability to detect such obscure objects in advance getting better and better. We'll soon have such good detection capabilities that we may start to take these kinds of predictions for granted the same way we take accurate weather forecasts for granted. Can't wait to see the local meteorologist talking about actual meteors.

I've had this thought about payment cards for a long time now. Corporations are pulling a reverse Superman III on us and keeping our pennies and dollars on these gift cards and payment cards that can never quite be zeroed out. If you added up all the lost change from all of these cards over someone's life it could be a fairly non-trivial amount of money. Add this up over a whole economy of people and you have millions of dollars of change that you've siphoned out of people by making it too difficult to spend.

There should be a law mandating the ability to convert gift cards or payment cards back into cash, or to reverse the transaction onto a credit card.

To an extent that's the fundamental issue driving these changes. It becomes increasingly difficult to monetize old material for lack of demand. Should lack of attention from society be enough reason to throw old media into the trash permanently? I don't believe so. We owe it to future generations to preserve what we can.

We're going to lose so much more cultural history to corporate greed in the next century. Preservation of music, media, games are all being attacked in the name of profits. Future generations will not be able to enjoy the vast wealth we're creating because folks would rather destroy it than make it available for distribution, even for a fee.

I'm imagining this happening to someone on a highly metered connection and blowing through gigs of their limited monthly upload budget before realizing their OS has just gone rogue on them. Treating everyone like they have an unlimited bandwidth budget and greedily using it without permission is just awful behavior.

Pretty interesting to me that we're starting to go from humans programming computers to computers programming humans.

Absolutely loved everything Dragon Ball growing up. I still get excited hearing about new Dragon Ball movies and series. He'll be sorely missed and his influence on anime will last generations. Far too soon, RIP Akira.

And that complex higher order being came from where?

Fair enough. There still seems to be a disconnect though, as the cost of various goods, such as housing, have far exceeded inflation. Are there any charts that try to track wages against a basket of goods?

Those charts show wages growing at an annualized rate of 1.5% at best. Any years with inflation greater than 1.5% were effectively years of wage LOSS, rather than growth. Most of those years had inflation greater than 1.5%.

Edit: this math is bad, see sokoloff's comment below.

Thanks!

Sorry if it's too much to ask, but would you mind posting a list of your common sources? I'm familiar with everything you've posted, I'm always looking for new sites.

Right, they're not identical, but they're generally paired up so neatly via Noether's theorem that they're treated as the same thing.

In seems like physicists are finding more general conserved quantities associated with more general spaces of physical operations such that not every action is reversible, but there are still conserved quantities associated to the underlying systems, AKA symmetries.

I don't have any solid physical intuition as to what makes an operation irreversible in this context, though, whether it's related to entropy or not.

Think of a symmetry as "something that remains the same" when you do something to a system.

Imagine a pair of denim pants, one could say it has the property of being made of denim, and when you bend the pants or move them around the room, they keep being made of denim. Anything you do to the pants that you can undo, like moving them around or bending them, those are invertible symmetries. Now imagine I rip the pants in half: they're still made of denim, but this action is not so easy to invert. So there are actions I can perform on these pants that are hard or impossible to undo, but still maintain the property of them being made of denim, these are non-invertible symmetries.

The example given in the article is a system being split into a superposition in a way that's hard or impossible to undo, sort of like the pants being torn in half, but just because the system is now in a superposition doesn't mean there weren't properties preserved along the way.

Here's a link to the full resolution images: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/117/01G...

Feels similar to me as well. Everything is a reboot of a reboot, nostalgia for the sake of a cash grab, very few big studios are taking chances on new franchises anymore.

I've tried to grapple with questions like this by imagining having woken up with total amnesia. Without any memories or understanding of who I am, or what I've done, I would have absolutely no connection to the person I am today, I would be a stranger to myself. Yet, there's still a sense in which "my" consciousness has persisted, in theory, as "I" would still be seeing through my own eyes.

I'm not sure how to fully reconcile this except to give up and say that full amnesia is as good as having died and "someone else" is now inhabiting my body, but that doesn't seem quite right.

Continuity of experience is part of what seems to make "my" consciousness mine.

OpenAI won't be the ones to kill their golden goose. The point is that this kind of tech will become "easy enough" to replicate for other companies or highly motivated individuals and they will be the ones to release it. OpenAI doesn't have a monopoly on this kind of tech and they will never be able to enforce one.

These are still relatively early days when it comes to the capabilities of these models. ChatGPT will be considered a toy in a few years and will likely spawn many comparable models that can be run on consumer level hardware.

In a world where employees and employers have equal bargaining power and knowledge what you're saying makes sense. Given the opportunity though, businesses will do their best to hire workers that they can pay as little as possible and work as much as possible. It's the natural state of profitability to tend towards such a situation. In general this means there's a tendency towards increased work for lesser or equal pay, fewer benefits, poorer working conditions, etc. etc. Without a force pushing back on businesses in the form of regulations they will continue the race to the bottom as that is the most profitable thing to do.

I've also seen SCRIPT-8 as another FOSS alternative: https://script-8.github.io/