HN user
Mathematician (discrete, computational, topological graph theorist), programmer, hacker, artist, aspiring polymath, old-time fiddler.
Current employee of D-Wave Systems; Quantum Architect.
No, I'm interacting with people in person. I'd debate your claim that "most of the shit that humanity is producing" is internet-mediated, but your choice of noun renders that rather moot. Stop ingesting shit. There's a whole world out there.
I do not spend even 5 minutes on facebook. Aside from a comment or two per day on HN, the only human interactions I have on the internet are with coworkers, a of whom I regularly see in person.
If you find yourself consuming more than 5 minutes of content you don't find thoughtful per day, I would ask why. "Touch grass" seems to be the common advice to combat this.
This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way. Do you not engage in thoughtful conversation with the people you meet? Do you not know people who make art as a hobby? When techies propound such a dim view of humanity, I truly fear for our species. Nobody will shed a tear when your bodily resources are reallocated to paperclip production.
Do you prefer a web-weaving snail or an extra-bitey spider? I'm leaning spider.
I made the slightly alarming realization yesterday that some script kiddies are old enough to have grandkids by now.
it seems like a bad thing to compare inventions to haunted artifacts that mind controlled their users into betraying their friends to a powerfully evil being.
It's worked pretty well for Palantir?
So if liquid water is really a mixture of water and water, is it safe to say that this paper establishes that water is wet?
First letter of the Hebrew alphabet, used by mathematicians to denote infinities.
Large rockets are one thing; spacex doesn't really have the inventory to do much. It's the ~10M lithium bombs that are one OTA from weaponization that would make Musk especially dangerous if he were so inclined.
That's a typo, I meant CPU! I work with quantum computers, where we do discuss QPU (quantum processing unit) time, but that's not how I did this.
This is why I explicitly mentioned that in my puzzle ethics. I reject that as a valid solve.
(And amusingly I said "qpu time" when I meant CPU)
I crushed wordle within a few days of its popularity entering my sphere. It was pretty easy to brute-force a decision tree minimizing the average number of guesses using a lowly python script and a few days of qpu time.
Don't Wordle[1] is significantly more interesting; I've got a solver but the maximum score takes my lowly python script upwards of a day (per day) to solve using brute force. For now, I solve it with a heuristic that terminates in about 20 minutes. My old wordle solver was useful to find a good but suboptimal tree for identifying the answer in 5 undos or less.
Today:
Don't Wordle 1491 - SURVIVED
Hooray! I didn't Wordle today!
..... 8089
..... 4647
..... 2492
..... 1026
.Y... 231
..G.. 100
Undos used: 3
100 words remaining
x 10 unused letters
= 1000 total score
A great many real world problems have, at their crux, a mathematical problem. A mathematician paired with a subject matter expert can be powerful indeed when each sees deeply into the others' blind spots. But, I've heard statements like yours a lot over the years: assuming mathematicians aren't fully aware of the limitations of what you think math is.
If you're going to strike up conversation with strangers, it's best if you make it easy for them. If you're asking for a joke, you're making it easy on yourself and setting a bar for them. I'm a jokester but I don't have a good repertoire of jokes on hand -- I respond to banter. So if you ask me if I have a joke, I often just sputter and throw out the last bad pun somebody shared with me.
Make a joke yourself, if you're feeling funny. But be warned... a stranger once asked me why I was going on a trip. I was visiting my dad who was presently in surgery for cancer that would go on to end his life. I was too emotional to answer with anything but the truth. I certainly wasn't going to respond well to humor.
If tech isn't special, why are nine of the ten richest Americans in tech?
The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare.
Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.
Timnit Gebru was laughed out of town for overlooking research into making LLMs more energy efficient. By the logic used to drag her through the mud, Musk must be a total idiot to be buying so much fossil fuel capacity. Truly, nobody could see this coming. Must be 5d chess.
> AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."
This is unhinged.
The only way for Musk to become a quadrillionaire is hyperinflation. And a week later, we'll be quadrillionaires too!
What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?
Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?
If anybody has ever tried folding a very large paper (or, bedsheets, tarps, etc), they'll realize the wisdom of this comment. Our intuition from folding paper on the order of several to tens of centimetres does not scale to arbitrary size and precision. Paper is relatively rigid, but its rigidity is finite and ensuring local-to-global flatness becomes a painstaking endeavour.
It depends what you need that line for -- if you're projecting onto a wall, that sag matters. If you're projecting onto the ground, it doesn't.
I had the same thought -- with a checkerboard pattern of 1:1:2 "brick" voids where each brick would be surrounded by bricks of a differing offset, one could conceivably calibrate the injection step and the print might have less propensity to cleave along xy planes. But, given the complexity of that calibration (and need for a high-flow head) I'd rather use the brick infill available today.
a land border with a large continent that has a lot of guns and violence and criminality
That's a curious perception indeed, given that guns predominantly flow from the US to Mexico and not the other way around, and guns in Mexico are of mostly US origin.
As in, these kids are crushing tiktok reels?
There are degrees to these things. A nation's leader repeatedly and explicitly declaring intent to commit genocide is makes that "lift" an extremely light one.
Concretely, I know it's happening in the Vancouver BC school district, and thankfully many students are protesting. Probably many more places.
Teachers in public schools are being told to use AI in their curriculum. In some cases, this means students are being taught not to think (regardless of the intent of the lesson). When prices make this curriculum untenable but the kids already depend on it, that rugpull is going to severely harm a generation of kids whose education was already disturbed in 2020.
My favorite (dys|u)topian setting; universal child removal to robo-nurseries, gets closer to implementable every day.
Yes, and obviously: bots crushing servers in strict contravention of the robots.txt rules.
Where I work, interns are hired to work on projects that a senior person could do and failure won't wreck us. And your last sentence is where we see the real payoff: the bright ones come back and become valued team members.