alan-crowe

There is a folk phenomenon, called The Hum

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13752688

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/xlsdk5/til_t...

so my guess is that LLMs see The Hum in their training data, and then put the word "hum" in their output. Since humans occupy varied, small media bubbles, many haven't encountered text talking about The Hum at all. The LLM's use of the word "hum" then stands out as excessive and a tell. And a mysterious one!

As a child, I noticed that the proofs of mathematical theorems were esoteric knowledge, known only to a few adults. I struggled to follow even the simplest proofs, and hoped that one day I might learn to create a proof or two of my own. This was not only a high aspiration, but a dangerous one. I saw no reason why certain knowledge of a true fact would be accessible to humans via proof. Any-one who embarked on the quest to find a proof risked embarking on a doomed quest to find a non-existent proof.

For me Gödel's completeness theorem is the miracle. Every valid statement has a proof. Amazing!

Aim a little higher, every true statement, and there might not be a proof. It is no surprise to me that this is true. It is a big surprise to me that Gödel was able to prove it; ordinary proofs are hard to find, and proofs of the limits of provability presumably even more deeply hidden.

Non-standard models of arithmetic are weird. Theorems that are true of the standard model of arithmetic and false in some non-standard model must surely be convoluted and obscure. The first order version of the Peano axioms nail down the integers, not perfectly, but very well. Restricting one-self to theorems that are true in all models of them, even the weird, non-standard ones, feels like a very minor restriction. Gödel's completeness theorem raises the possibility of writing a computer program to find a proof of every theorem that isn't convoluted and obscure. Gödel completeness theorem is the really big deal.

Except it isn't. That computer program turns out to be one of those wretched tree search ones that soon bogs down. The real problem turns out to be the combinatorial explosion inherent in unstructured search through the Herbrand universe. One needs Unification and one needs a still missing ingredient to give search a sense of direction. The interesting questions are about the "sense of direction" that lets us find some of the deeply hidden proofs that do exist. Will LLM's help? The answer will be interesting, either way.

In the UK, there are tax breaks for renting out your spare room https://www.gov.uk/rent-room-in-your-home/the-rent-a-room-sc...

I've done this for much of my life. It has always worked out OK. Perhaps because I've always picked a nice middle class person as my lodger. Even the mentally ill homeless person I rented my spare room to was a nice middle class mentally ill homeless person and a friend of a friend, who recovered from his reactive depression and moved on as anticipated.

If there is a university nearby, there are probably graduate students looking for a cheap place to stay while they finish writing up their PhD thesis. Since graduate students are pretty much guaranteed to be respectable, you may need to ask for less than the market rent to grab one, but you don't mention being short of money. They will have their own concerns about you, but your dog will vouch for you.

You don't mention having a spare bedroom that you could rent out, I'm just guessing that "working remote" implies living somewhere with affordable housing, and that you have extra space. If you live in a one bedroom flat, maybe sell it or rent it out entirely, and take the other side of the deal, becoming a lodger yourself.

That is not an option for me. I'm trapped by my stuff: grand piano, Boxford CUD lathe, too many maths books. I cannot vouch for that option, but it works for my lodger, so it works for some people. (I'm over sixty and he is older than me.)

I fear that my comment is a little "off" and not quite appropriate, but in my defense, it is responsive to "I sometimes panic when it's been too long since I've seen another person."

My "importance of privacy" story:

I get my gas and electricity from Scottish Power. Recently a rival company, Ovo Energy made a clerical error and sent me a bill, leading to a dispute. The front line of defence against this kind of dispute is that the bills give the serial numbers of the meters. The bill from Scottish Power gives the same meter serial numbers that are embossed on the front of my meters, and is therefore valid. The bill from Ovo Energy gives different serial numbers and is therefore in error.

Picture though the internal processes in Ovo Energy. A second clerk is tasked with attending to the problem. He has a choice. He can change the address to agree with the meter serial numbers, correcting the error. Or he can change the meter serial numbers to those for my address, compounding the error.

Since the meter serial numbers are confidential, to me and Scottish Power, Ovo Energy does not have the second option; they do not know the serial numbers (which are long, like a credit card number, not just 1,2,3,...). Thus the clerical error gets corrected, or just left, but not compounded.

My guess is that confidential information, (such as meter serial numbers, credit card numbers, and account numbers), are the front like of defence against both clerical error and fraud based on impersonation. It is a rather weak defence, but it is light weight, and seems to how much of billing and billing disputes work.

We all have lots to hide: the confidential information that the system needs us to keep confidential to stop clerical errors from compounding.

I'm still using fvwm2

    $ pkg info fvwm
    fvwm-2.6.9_4
    Name           : fvwm
    Version        : 2.6.9_4
    Installed on   : Mon Dec  8 02:01:51 2025 GMT
    Origin         : x11-wm/fvwm2
    Architecture   : FreeBSD:15:amd64

On a 19 x 19 board the ranks are traditionally determined by the handicap needed to give an even game. So a 14 kyu would give 20 - 14 = 6 stones to a 20 kyu. 20 kyu is a rank that often sees rapid improvement, as the basic ideas "click" just through play and experience. You might be stronger than that now.

Handicap stones give a greater advantage on smaller boards, but 19 x 19 is the standard size. I've not seen any specific guidance for smaller boards.

I'm on the other side of this, meeting a friend two or three times a month to play Go and giving him a three stone handicap on a 13 by 13 board.

Sometimes I play a move with a huge, but hidden threat behind it. If he plays elsewhere instead of answering locally, I get to play a clever sequence and capture some stones. I could just wait for the blunder and win. Instead I give a quick lesson in tactics: here is my plan, if you want to play elsewhere, your move needs to have an even bigger threat behind it.

He is learning, and now I face my clever moves being player against me. This makes it harder for me to win (it is about 50:50 with the handicap), but also more fun for me to play.

You could ask your spouses brother for a "teaching game" or a larger handicap, or a bit of both.

You seem to be telling a tale of two industries, sports-betting and advertising. The sports-betting industry lobbies for reduced regulation, while the advertising industry sits on its hands, ticking along providing advertising for other businesses.

Eventually the sports-betting industry wins its lobbying campaign. But what did they win? The different sports-betting companies are in fierce and unprofitable competition, while the advertising industry walks off with all the profits.

That tale is at its most ironic when the advertising industry is consolidated and makes monopoly profits on advertising on behalf of sports-betting companies.

It is tricky to boycott Amazon because when I search for a product using Google, I get lots of links to Amazon, and not much else. So I look at the Amazon pages to get search terms and then type those in to other search engines, such as Bing, Brave, or Yandex, and keep going to find online shops. Since Yandex is Russian, I add my country code to my search terms. I also try adding my city name and sometimes find a bricks-and-mortar shop close enough.

LLMs have demonstrated that "intelligence" is a broad umbrella term that covers a variety of very different things.

Think about this story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44845442

Med-Gemini is clearly intelligent, but equally clearly it is an inhuman intelligence with different failure modes from human intelligence.

If we say Med-Gemini is not intelligent, we will end up having to concede that actually it is intelligent. And the danger of this concession is that we will under-estimate how different it is from human intelligence and then get caught out by inhuman failures.

What I found most interesting in the article was the frank acknowledgement by J B Rhine that Walter Levy, director of the Institute for Parapsychology was committing fraud.

I view research into parapsychology with a background assumption that I understand the motivation. Reductionist materialism suggests that death is the end. Parapsychology may imply the existence of souls, a spiritual realm, life after death, and maybe the chance of heaven. What wonderful balm for existential angst!

Does this make me doubt research into parapsychology? No, quite the opposite. A researcher can only soothe the pain of existential angst with genuine results. If they fake the research, they know that they faked it, and it provides no consolation. My take is that I cannot dismiss positive results in parapsychology as fraud.

Grifters are real. It is possible in principle that researchers in parapsychology are faking results with an eye to making money selling pills that "boost your ESP". I think that I am able to spot and dismiss grifts without difficulty, and that it is not what is at issue here.

But now I learn that I'm wrong. Walter Levy's results are fake. I have to flip from modus ponens to modus tollens. Instead of saying "I understand the motivation, therefore Levy's results are genuine", I have to say "Levy's results are fake, therefore I don't understand the motivation".

I'm in a pickle. A central principle of how I understand the world is that fraud is motivated. No motive, no fraud. Now what? Since there is motiveless fraud, much of what I thought I knew about the world is on shaky ground.

I've been thinking of the issue like this: a traditional approach to symbolic artificial intelligence frames problem solving as a search of a tree. Do you go depth first, dodging infinite branches? Or breadth first (do you have enough memory?). What about iterative deepening?

Sometimes the solution is in the tree, but it is too deep, and one runs out of time before it is found.

Statistical based learning could act as a branch predictor. Sometimes guiding the search to go very deep in the right place and find the hidden solution. Sometimes guiding the search to go very deep in the wrong place; one runs out of time as usual.

Notice the strength of hybrid approach. One isn't accepting the probably correct answer of the statistical part. It is only a guide, and if the answer is found, and the symbolic part of the software is correct, the answer will be reliable.

I think this is already being done with maths problems. The LLM is writing proof attempts in Lean. But Lean is traditional symbolic AI. If the LLM can come up with a proof that Lean approves, then it really has a proof. From your comment I learn that Stockfish has already got something like this to work very well.

We may be underestimating the effort that goes into cleaning up LLM messes. LLMs learn to program from code bases written by humans. Not just written by humans, maintained by humans. So the bugs that humans spot and remove are under-represented in the training data. Meanwhile, the bugs that evade human skill at debugging lurk indefinitely and are over-represented in the training data.

We have created tools to write code with bugs that humans have difficulty spotting. Worse, we estimate the quality of the code that our new tools produce on the basis that they are inhuman and have no special skill at writing bugs that we cannot spot, despite the nature of their training data.

Nuclear powered ships and submarines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion

The attraction is that high enrichment permits a smaller reactor and less frequent refuelling. US submarines go over 96% enrichment.

Bunker fuel is in the news. Cheap oil for marine diesel engines is both polluting in the traditional sulfur etc sense and in the modern CO2 global warming sense. There are occasional attempts at wind powered sailing ships, or at least sail assisted ships, to reduce the burning of bunker fuel. Nuclear power for shipping is currently out of fashion, but is a legitimate topic for research.

I've no idea. I just want to mourn the utter failure of my 2001 prediction that telepresence would displace business air travel. http://web.archive.org/web/20160305121400/http://www.cawtech...

LLMs have taught us that there is more than one kind of intelligence. They are definitely intelligent, but not the specific kind of intelligence we were hoping for. We get to be wise after the event and move the goal-posts. It is not so much that they have the wrong kind of intelligence, as that we never suspected the variety of possible forms of intelligence. We are clearly making progress towards ASI, but we don't know how distant the goal really is, because we don't know what the goal actually is.

Fusion is much better understood. We are not going to create "the wrong kind of fusion" and have to come up with a new plan.

There is an interesting phenomenon with polynomial interpolation called Runge Spikes. I think "Runge Spikes" offers a better metaphor than "hallucination" and argue the point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43612517

I've suggested Runge Spiking as an alternative, non-anthropomorphic metaphor

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43612517

I was expecting ancient history, the story of the Turing Institute in Glasgow. Established 1983. Dissolved 1994. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Institute

The article is about the second try, commencing 2014.

Conway's Surreal Numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_number#Arithmetic

One wants the money supply to expand to match a growing economy. One way is to permit fractional reserve banking. Bank deposits can grow beyond the amount of gold, both increasing the money supply and creating the possibility of a bank going bankrupt. An alternative is fiat money: the King prints a limited amount of extra money to match the money supply to the growing economy and avoid deflation.

This is nice for the King because he benefits from the seigniorage. (But also potentially fatal, as he gives in to temptation to print too much and then some more, leading to hyper-inflation and the guillotine.)

Fiat money can be combined with fractional reserve banking. Now the monetary authorities can create extra money to overcome banking crises. Notice that society has a trade-off to make. Perhaps high reserves, so that the banks do not create much money, in which case the King/President will have to print extra fiat currency. Perhaps low reserves, and a small base of fiat currency. Now the banks create most of the money in circulation and get to charge interest on it, as an kind of on going seigniorage.

Which is best for the country? One off seigniorage accruing to the national treasury (due to printing), or the recurring seigniorage of interest paid to the banks on the money created by the fractional reserve system? There is something to be said for fractional reserve banking, as a kind of automatic stabilizer. If the economy contracts, there is a credit squeeze and the money supply contracts. Pick the reserve ratios and minimum lending rates correctly and it contracts the correct amount for price stability. And this works in reverse, expanding the money supply as the economy recovers, avoiding needless restrictions on growth due to deflation.

Experience shows that reserve ratios are too low, leading to economic instability. Why do we ignore this experience? Follow the money, low reserve ratios are profitable for bankers. We could have have a much more stable economic system with a two part strategy of 25% reserves and the monetary contraction implied by raising reserve rate being countered by printing the right amount of money.

As far as I understand it so far, the idea that the trees are "unlabeled" over simplifies.

The most common kind of binary tree is defined as

binary-tree = nil | node of binary-tree label binary-tree

for example

empty-tree

node nil Alice nil

node nil Bob (node nil Carol nil)

node (node nil David nil) Edward (node nil Fred nil)

node (node nil George nil) Harold nil

If we erase the labels, there remains an implicit label Alice = 00, Bob = 01, Carol = 00, David = 00, Edward = 11, Fred = 00, George = 00, Harold = 10 encoded by the pattern of empty trees.

The trees in the article seem to be doing it slightly differently, with implicit labels 0,1, or 2. Edward is erased, leaving an implicit 2 and the erasure of both Bob and Harold leaves an implicit 1 for both of them, removing the distinction between 01 and 10.

Edited to add: I'm up to page 27 (pdf reader says page 39 of 176) and some nodes have three children. 0, 1, or 2 children represent "values". "It follows that trees containing a node with three of more branches is a computation that is not a value, and so must be evaluated."

That is very helpful. I particularly appreciate the carefully written text.

I think the second figure, captioned "Stem with a single leaf child" has a mistake, with the line down from the triangle descending to a square. But that square should be a circle.

Statmist

Another example of "wasn't widely deployed because of its cost" is the Kalthoff 30-Shot Flintlock from 1659. Here is a video from Forgotten Weapons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghKrbNpqQoY

I'm starting to see Henry Maudslay's screw cutting lathe (1800) as a turning point. Before it, inventors could invent really cool devices, and carefully hand make one or a few, but they would be too expensive. Then machine tools made shaping metal cheaper. That included shaping metal to make machine tools. So costs fell and fell, and eventually all sorts of things became cheap enough for wide deployment.

That is scary, because the "right time" to invent something depends on the capabilities of production machinery setting the production cost. As an inventor, one likes to think of success of the inventing lying in ones own hands, but there is an ecosystem of production machinery that has an out sized say in how much your invention will cost to mass produce. It can even veto an excellent invention by saying "Not yet!".

The review distills the book's view of the difference between pure mathematics and applied mathematics. "applied" split from "pure" to meet the technical needs of the US military during WW2.

My best example of the split is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_of_second_derivatives Wikpedia notes that "The list of unsuccessful proposed proofs started with Euler's, published in 1740,[3] although already in 1721 Bernoulli had implicitly assumed the result with no formal justification." The split between pure (Euler) and applied(Bernoulli) is already there.

The result is hard to prove because it isn't actually true. A simple proof will apply to a counter example, so cannot be correct. A correct proof will have to use the additional hypotheses needed to block the counter examples, so cannot be simple.

Since the human life span is 70 years, I face an urgent dilemma. Do I master the technique needed to understand the proof (fun) or do I crack on and build things (satisfaction)? Pure mathematicians are planning on constructing long and intricate chains of reasoning; a small error can get amplified into a error that matters. From a contradiction one can prove anything. Applied mathematics gets applied to engineering; build a prototype and discover problems with tolerances, material impurities, and annoying edge cases in the mathematical analysis. A error will likely show up in the prototype. Pure? Applied? It is really about the ticking of the clock.

The important context is that life is short, just seventy years, and has stages, your early twenties are a magical time. Losing your ambition and wasting your early twenties are a subtle danger, but nevertheless a serious danger.

My analysis it that it is a plot by a company that makes "child proofing" gadgets. People are having fewer children, so sales of child-proofing gadgets are falling. People are keeping dogs and cats as pets instead, but neither dogs nor cats have the dexterity to make child-proofing gadgets a must-have pet accessory. Pet Raccoons could save the child-proofing gadget industry, with only a minor pivot to tougher, gnaw resistant gadgets.

The documentation pages for FreeBSD include manual pages, for example

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hcreate&manpath=Fr...

A basic exercise in mathematical logic involves looking for minimal sets of connectives. You can base logic on just NAND. But you get NOT by joining two inputs together, so you might refuse to count that and say it is NOT and AND. Another possibility for binary logic is implication, =>, and NOT. Because (NOT A) => B is equivalent to A OR B and obviously (OR and NOT) work just as well as (AND and NOT). What though are minimal sets for ternary?

The familiar 74181 has control inputs to let the circuit summon any of the 16 operations on two bits. (A two bit operation has four possible inputs, and two possible outputs for each input so 2 ^ 4 = 16 possible operations). A similar ALU part for ternary would have two trits as input so nine possible inputs. Each would have three possible values, so 3 ^ 9 = 19683. It would need nine control inputs, each a trit. But 19683 is so much more than 16. How many gates do you need to be able to combine them to produce all possible (trit,trit)->trit gates?

Here are three gates that get you a long way mathematically. First a swap gate

-1 -> 0

0 -> -1

1 -> 1

Then a permute gate

-1 -> 0

0 -> 1

1 -> -1

This lets your generate all permutations

Then you need a "spot" gate that spots one input, say (0 0) and output 1, and 0 otherwise. Since you have all permutations you have all spot gates. And inverse spot gates. Does that solve the problem? It is late and I'm tired. And I can see that the mathematically minimal set is impractical.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Balanced_ternary_ope...

has six operations. There are three for doing arithmetic, the units from multiplication, the units from addition, and the carry from addition (it is part of the attraction of balanced ternary that there is no carry out from multiplying digits). There are also three for doing logic, based on -1 is false, +1 is true, and basically degenerating into binary logic.

Is that how this is done? The Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) has two kinds of words, numbers in balanced ternary, and bit-rows in degenerate binary. The hardware is built with a pragmatic mixture of binary and ternary logic gates, with the ternary gates heavily used in the Arithmetic Unit, barely at all in the Logic unit, and only opportunistically in the rest of the hardware, that is mostly binary gates as usual?

I have a bizarre mad science interest in this because I see how to build AND gates with mechanical linkages, http://alan.sdf-eu.org/linkage-logic/now-with-labels.html and wonder if the same technique works for ternary gates. But what are the operation tables for ternary gates? I should attempt the specialized ones for arithmetic first.