gcanyon

Good thoughts, thanks

Wow, 97% that there will be elections. That's high, but if you handed me a gun with a 3% chance of being loaded and offered me a billion dollars to point it at my head and pull the trigger, I would not. My foot on the other hand...

If they will pay me $10 million I will guarantee to find voter fraud or refund half their money...

Isn't this exactly what we should expect/hope for?

At least initially, chess computers were better than humans not because they were more creative or inspired, but because they thought harder/deeper. That's exactly the sort of "find counterexamples to this if they exist" work that we're seeing here.

Eventually computer chess got to the point where humans look at some moves and say, "That's an amazing, inspired move. That's not a 'bot' move at all, I can learn from this." We're just not there yet with AI/math in general.

This argument seems, frankly, absurd to me on multiple fronts.

First, it assumes that lack of genetic diversity in humans would be a serious handicap, when we're considering humans that are capable of making interstellar journeys. Assuming that genetics are going to be an issue compared to traveling/surviving 7 or more light year-journeys is a leap.

Second, it assumes that if this were a problem, humans would/could think of no way to address it. Two solutions come immediately to mind: 1. Choose the people making the journey more carefully to ensure diversity 2. Send frozen embryos chosen for diversity along.

Third, it ignores the time scale over which something like this would be likely to happen. Of course, you can't guarantee that beneficial diversity will re-occur, even over centuries, but a little effort on the front end combined with the time it would take to continue on to the next hop seems hopeful.

Fourth, it ignores the possibility of repeat journeys. If we're really going to constrain the available destinations in the way presented, it's silly to propose that there will be just one colonizing event.

But really, the first solution is all you need. The idea that we'll be able to survive multiple generations in space but not handle genetics issues is, just, a real stretch.

I read the main trilogy many years back; why would a faithful adaptation be a problem?

The IMAX screenings are pre-committed to future movies -- it might be the case that Spider-Man takes over in two weeks and the window for The Odyssey is closed, even if more people want to see The Odyssey in IMAX than Spider-Man.

The definition of "earth-like" in this context is almost absurdly broad: roughly it means: a rocky-metallic planet, around Earth mass (maybe 0.5 to 1.5 or so?), and in an orbit that might support liquid water -- not has water, just water would be liquid under some circumstances if it were there.

So:

   - no atmosphere? no problem
   - no water? no problem
   - average temperature 40c? fine
   - 4c? Yup

All to say, when someone says a planet is "Earth-like" that doesn't mean we should get out our picnic baskets.

AI didn't start the decline, it just finished it.

(in my experience) if this table included other flat-pack vendors the difference would be stark. Wayfair and the like are far more complex to assemble.

If the letter of the law doesn't enforce the spirit of the law, it was poorly written or it's out of date and needs to be amended.

I think if you rewrite that to, “If the letter of the law is demonstrably out of sync with the public sense of the spirit of the law, then it should be amended,” I’m with you.

But I think that’s not what you meant? If you meant “the letter of the law should define prescribed and proscribed behavior exactly,” then I think that’s impossible.

There will always be exceptions, and no set of rules can be exhaustive. The system should allow for humans to recognize that fact.

I asked it to draw "two circles connected by an arc" and it crashed before drawing the arc :-(

I wonder if this will help them get a wikipedia page. (not sure whether this comment is a joke or serious...)

I have a friend who had a spontaneous pneumothorax. He even wrote a song about it after he recovered.

I myself punctured and collapsed both lungs. My thinking is: if there's a reasonable chance I'll survive, go for it. If there's not, stop trying to prolong the inevitable. That said, when I had the accident they told my wife to get there as fast as she could because I was likely not going to make it, and that was thirty years ago. So: if they're confident I'm going to die, don't try to prolong it :-)

Interesting -- does that have any macroscopic/real world impact?

One interesting point is that China "can't" (more like "is significantly behind on") manufacture jet engines -- the blades are the sticking point, they are ridiculously engineered.

There's a line from the movie The Way of the Gun that I love about this. The number is higher, but it still applies. Some criminals are loading a $15 million ransom into the back of a truck, and a younger criminal says, "Boy, $15 million is a lot of money, huh?" and James Caan, playing an older, wiser criminal says,

"Money? $15 million is not 'money'. It's a motive, with a universal adapter on it."

The increased nuclear mass causes orbiting electrons to speed up to a significant fraction of the speed of light, where the rules of Einstein’s theory of relativity are important.

Fun fact: this is why mercury is liquid at room temperature. Its inner electrons move at close to 60% the speed of light, pulling in its outer electrons more tightly, making it harder for it to bond and be solid. (I am not a physicist, don't rely on my statements for your space ship design)

Thanks! If you have any thoughts or suggestions I'm all ears.

You're reminding me of the Yogi Berra quote (paraphrasing): "New York is so expensive no one lives there anymore."

You're not wrong, but millions (literally) of people do afford to live in NYC. I live in Harlem, which is more fun and more affordable than many areas.

Feynman's QED is an excellent read. It covers the topic in-depth in a descriptive, rather than mathematical way, covering many of the real-world effects that result from the way QED works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Lig...

I had an idea for a hard science science fiction short story about five months ago. I had grown tired of Star Trek digging their way out of every problem by throwing techno-babble at it, so I wanted to write something where one scientific leap is made and everything else holds as we understand it.

I thought to experiment with having an LLM help me write it. I wrote a bullet-point outline and had the LLM revise it -- that went pretty well, although it's not the outline I ended up using.

I asked the LLM to write the first section based on that outline. The result was (surprisingly) awful. LLMs are way worse at writing fiction than they are at writing business communication Or maybe I'm way worse at prompting, but the results of this contest make me think the former.

In particular, LLMs are incredibly terse -- the LLM took the bullet point outline and turned it into a twice-as-long bullet point outline.

I wrote the first section myself (expanding from the bullet points by something like 10-20x, and asked the LLM to write the second section, and it failed miserably again. I tried multiple ways to get it to do the job properly, and nothing came out the way I wanted.

So I wrote the whole thing myself, with LLMs serving two purposes: physics review for accuracy -- the story heavily involves special and general relativity, which I'm familiar with, but nowhere near competent enough at to keep the math aligned; and feedback on the story structure.

So I ended up writing the whole thing myself, with LLM consultation on a few bits. In the end it turned into a novella, and I had to re-write based on physics issues (I found about 30% of them, Gemini found 50%, ChatGPT and Claude found 10%, and Fable found 10% late in the game -- Fable's review was amazingly thoughtful) so many times I probably ended up writing a novel in the process :-)

In case anyone is curious: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19e3HfnK1lNHHBef-5c-KvNdD...

Shout out for Star City (and For All Mankind of course). The first ten minutes of FAM hit me unexpectedly hard, and the overall science fiction of both series is awesome.

Maybe I'm unusual, but I live in NYC, with a grocery store a two minute walk away, a Target and Trader Joe's a three minute walk away, and a Whole Foods a four minute walk away. (and various bodegas within minutes as well)

I went to that grocery store twice yesterday (picked up a bag of popcorn and a bottle of water to go to the movies, then later some potatoes and sour cream for dinner). I'm going in a few minutes to get eggs for lunch. So three times in the last 24 hours :-)

Isn't this pretty much a given? Performance per dollar has to be a ratcheting function because how would something more expensive replace something less expensive?

I think it's a useful distinction between learning about something and learning to do something. They have very different paths and methods of satisfaction.

I'll give a shoutout to Feynman's QED. It's approachable for anyone with high school understanding, and gives a reasonable insight into all sorts of phenomena.

I love barley in soup. I'd rather just eat it :-)

Is there a reason to think this is anything more than increased productivity? And that therefore the case has to be made that labor, more than capital, should benefit from that increase? I’m not saying that argument can’t or shouldn’t be made, just saying that “it was different before!” Isn’t the best argument.

Everyone talking about strength training: that’s nice, but it’s not what this study was about. That doesn’t make it a bad study, it just means you’re looking for a different study.