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ccppurcell

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I agree with your broader point but I'm always skeptical of the claim "we should teach xyz in schools!" Because, well, choose your least favourite subject at school. A language, history or geography, mathematics perhaps. How much do you remember? The reason you don't remember is because you weren't motivated to learn, since you didn't, at the time, think it worth learning. If you think kids are champing at the bit to learn systems thinking, or how to file taxes, or law or anything else really then you are unfortunately wrong.

Tree cover is great but I wish cities would just consider shade a bit more. As the world heats up, it's insane that so many places humans need to be for extended amounts of time have enough shade for a handful of people at best and often nothing. I'm thinking long sidewalks, waiting areas, playgrounds.

Which phone and is it android then? Maybe I'm out of the loop on Motorola. I just bought a pixel, thinking of trying graphene. I was a bit miffed about the lack of jack until my partner pointed out I hadn't used the one on my old phone for over a year. I'd like to in the future though.

Claude Fable 5 1 month ago

Hey man, fellow Brit here. The American view on certain aspects of British life is insane. I've lived in not one but two places that have been called Muslim no-go zones in American media. My main memory of living near the east London mosque is an elderly Muslim trying to offer my his seat on the bus (I was on crutches) while two drunk gammons looked on gormlessly.

On the other hand, it is quite alarming that I can no longer say I support all non violent protests against the genocide in Palestine because that would include the group Palestine Action. It's amazing that supporting them openly is essentially equivalent to supporting Al Qaeda.

Well exactly.

One way to make money is to create a great product that solves a problem people have and market it effectively. That's a sort of idealised situation, an aspiration, but it's what I would call socially valuable. Another way is to help people who are already rich move their money around so that they become richer, in return for a fraction of the increase in wealth. I personally have no problem with that, everybody has to make a living, but that is not socially valuable. It is debatable how socially valuable pure mathematics research is. But you take a fixed fee and all your best work is public domain.

I think you've slightly straw manned the lamentation there. Not that I agree with the lamentation, but using your talent to make the rich richer (which is what quants do, they are paid a fixed amount to provide a larger value up the chain), as opposed to advancing human knowledge, is the reason for the lament, not some sort of respectability issue.

Sometimes people will bring up the fact that Plato thought reading and writing were ruining real thought in response to things like this. Or "you won't walk around with a calculator in your pocket"

But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!

AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.

Well it only works when there is no information at all apart from the past frequency.

It's the solution to the tank problem. You know that the enemy number their tanks as they're produced. You capture a tank and know its number, N. What's the best guess about how many tanks the enemy has produced so far? As a pure mathematical model with no other details, the best guess is 2N. Of course in reality you have some ideas about how long it takes to make a tank, how many resources the enemy has etc.

Analogously you have information about the way trends develop.

Googlebook 2 months ago

I'm a similar build and I could imagine using ai for this purpose but come on. 194cm is like top 1% of human height. It's not a solid business model.

Someone once came over to tell me I was using a machine wrong and I thanked them, collected my things, and left. Haven't been back to a gym in two years! But to be honest I enjoy body weight exercises and cycling better anyway.

For a puzzle of this sort I would expect to be able to create multiple path segments and connect them later. I would be able to do this with paper and pencil. For instance on the first puzzle you can deduce the way 2 and 3 must be connected without knowing how to connect 1 and 2.

I think your characterisation of this as discovery is a little naive. What you are describing is a part of enshittification and it happens too often to be an accident. Revenue maximisation is always the end goal. Also it's not that the user is willing to pay with attention. There is no alternative. In fact it's the very opposite, more than once now a product has basically been pitched as "pay us to avoid ads" and then once it dominated the market they introduce ads. That's users trying to choose to pay with money over attention and ultimately being unable to do so.

I will get downvoted for this but I can't help thinking that billions of dollars have gone into chatgpt over a period of years and an LLM can direct all its "attention" (in a metaphorical sense) on one problem. I think if you gave top mathematicians a few million (so a fraction of a percent of chatgpt budget) to solve this problem over four years, they probably would have at least made significant progress. I don't think chatgpt has solved thousands of similar problems (even stretching that across all ham disciplines). Basically my thesis is that universal basic income could have had a similar impact, and also encouraged human flourishing elsewhere.

Around the same time, Gödel proved the incompleteness theorems and Turing gave us the halting problem. These and the uncertainty principle tell us not only that the universe is somehow statistical and not mechanical, but that there are certain unknowable facts. That's got to be a major psychological blow.

Not just that but the 30s was the tail end of a period of reduction and unification in science. If physics and biology (large portions of it) could be reduced to a handful of principles, why not economics and politics. Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, Hilbert, the Vienna Circle. It must have seemed like science was on track to explain more or less everything.

Goodbye to Sora 4 months ago

The tone of a discussion is shaped as much by who doesn't comment as who does. A product comes out and a lot of people are excited by it, they comment accordingly. People who aren't, don't, unless there is something outrageous about it. Maybe there is in this case but the point still stands that when the product fails, it's a very different set of people who feel compelled to comment. And this is totally expected because "that's a shame, I liked it" doesn't seem to contribute to the discussion. Neither does "this product doesn't excite me", even more so because that's kind of the default assumption. So an online community or institution or publication can seem very fickle, especially when the commenters are pseudonymous.