kirrent

Ah, another example of multiple equilibria! Investment in intelligence and defence spending can lead to entrenched interests which demand continued spending. The famous military-industrial complex. The coordination needed to break out of this equilibrium can be made much harder by multiple states each needing to meet the defence spending of their peers. It's hard to cross from high defence to low defence spending (consider unilaterally disarming during the cold war. Borderline impossible. You need careful coordination through treaties) and also difficult to go from low defence spending to high absent some obvious threat (you could perhaps model appeasement as an example of this, though I think other factors dominate).

Notably, one of the reasons that the military industrial complex can be hard to unwind is that it works well for capital and workers. Consider all the programs you've heard of which boast about providing jobs in every single state. Whether these different equilibria are better or worse for labour (or fractions of labour giving you your diverging K-shape) is a separate question and potentially changes over time.

One historical event you could model as a change in equilibria was the industrial revolution. Instead of elites consuming economic surpluses, the economy change into a mode where those surpluses could be reinvested in productive capital, new technology, and manufacturing in a self-reinforcing cycle (of course these avenues didn't really exist before). Famously, within this new equilibria, labour did not do well at first; awful conditions in factories with terrible life expectancies. But those workers' grandchildren lived lives of relative prosperity as a result.

All of which is to say, the existence and description of multiple equilibria in economies is a different question from how labour and capital fare in those equilibria.

Yeah, that clarifies that you're missing the core idea here. Brett Deveraux is pretty popular here, so maybe you'd like the analogous discussion of high-equilibrium and low-equilibrium ancient economies? https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they...

As much as you may want to move from the low to high equilibrium, it would be pretty hard in an ancient society. In the modern world, with enough exuberance, it seems much easier.

The piece is actually quite concise, but you're right in the other respect. You definitely didn't read it. Private equity as an explanation is explicitly rejected.

By all means please caveat away! This is HN after all. I was torn between pithyness and qualifying those statements myself. Obviously there's a lot of interesting variation that's not being captured by population means or the limited subgroups we've studied and I'm excited for us to learn more.

In the meantime, I use butter because it's tastier and for me that's worth it. I don't understand why that's not enough for some people.

I had to look up the concept of a framing definition so I might have gotten these wrong but I would equivalently state:

1. Modern margarine is healthier than butter.

2. Seed oils are generally healthier than animal fats.

3. PUFAs are healthier than saturated fats.

4. In this case the industrial processed spread is healthier than the more natural less-processed spread.

The title is inadvertently correct only because modern margarine is healthier than alternatives such as butter.

Bartz v Anthropic is some good authority on fair use (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...). Still, it can't be said to be definitive because the plaintiff's arguments on market harm (with respect to fair use, not piracy) were limited and there were, as far as I can remember, no compelling examples provided of model output reproducing large swathes of training text.

I come back to this every so often as well. After so many years of looking at Markov chain outputs that almost looked like they made sense or chatbot systems rewriting your sentence back at you, software which can simply talk is a heady thing.

There are birds that go far longer than typical aeroplane flight times without a single flap of their wings either using thermal, ridge, or other sources of lift. Are these flying birds? I've shared thermals with eagles flying the same circles, neither one of us flapping our wings but making minor adjustments for the same goal.

An albatross might be able to go days flying without a single wing flap and no vertical sources of lift by using dynamic soaring in the wind gradient at the surface of the ocean. Perhaps that's something only birds can do. Except the glider pilot Ingo Renner once found an amazing shear layer at 300m altitude and stayed there with dynamic soaring. Remote control gliders use the lee of ridgelines to approach Mach 1 with dynamic soaring.

Perhaps what defines a bird that flies as opposed to a plane is that a bird produces thrust by flapping its wings? Even an Albatross must flap its wings if it has to take-off from water. Maybe we could add that the flapping is driven by animal muscles? But then is the human powered ornithopter Snowbird a bird that flies as opposed to a plane?

Of course this is all ridiculous because everyone knows what you mean when you refer to a bird or plane. We have other ways to definitively identify the difference rather than their mode of flight. It's trickier when I'm asked if an AI is conscious. There is no definitive base-line to fall back on to decide if this is a conscious or conscious-less thinker.

Not to mention, when you use a Monte Carlo model, you can easily count the samples which lead to certain outcomes. In their review, they noted that the correlated polling miss in the Midwest was one of the most common scenarios making up that 35% chance of a Trump win.

The idea that Silver somehow 'hit' in 2012 when he correctly predicted all states and 'missed' in 2016 is so juvenile I get second hand embarrassment whenever I see it.

None of us are your doctors but Naproxen has well-known gastric issues up to ulcers and stomach bleeding which is why it's advised to be taken with food and why it's also often prescribed with a PPI or H2 Antagonist. Cox-2 selectives such as Celecoxib greatly reduce this risk but seem to be associated with some small cardiovascular risk (admittedly this is a feature of all NSAIDs though less so in Naproxen apparently).

The only caveat is that AES is not necessarily a black box. It's possible there may be hidden structure to take advantage of, but if there is there's no reason to suspect it's one that's amenable to a quantum speedup.

As far as the Grover speedup goes, it's already optimal. Requiring O(sqrt(N)) queries is the proven lower bound for unstructured search.

Sean Duffy is no longer acting administrator of NASA. This proposal was apparently part of a bid to get the support of a coalition of old-space companies and new-space non-SpaceX companies. As part of that strategy he apparently leaked Isaacman's Project Athena document and was backgrounding that he was a SpaceX plant.

But, Isaacman is administrator now, and whatever you think about Isaacman and his relationship to SpaceX, I don't think there's much merit in thinking one of Duffy's half thought out plans is likely to be carried out.

Very different in character. The US fair use four factor test (https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/) is really flexible. You don't need to fall into an enumerated exception to infringement to argue that your use is transformative, won't substitute in the marketplace, etc.

Look at the famous Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. case. Google scanned every work they could put their hands on and showed excerpts to searching users. Copying and distribution on an incredible scale! Yet, they get to argue that it won't substitute in the marketplace (the snippets are too small to prevent people buying a book), it's a transformative use (this is about searching books not reading books), and the actual disclosed text is small (even if the copying in the backend is large scale).

On the other hand, fair dealing is purpose specific. Those enumerated purposes vary across jurisdictions and India's seems broadish (I live in a different fair dealing jurisdiction). Reading s52 your purposes are:

- private or personal use, including research

- criticism or review, whether of that work or of any other work

- reporting of current events and current affairs, including the reporting of a lecture delivered in public.

Within those confines, you then get to argue purpose (e.g. how transformative), amount used, market effect, nature of the copyrighted work, etc. But if your use doesn't fall into the allowed purposes, you're out of luck to begin with.

I'm not familiar enough with Indian common law to know if the media clips those youtubers you mentioned should fall within the reporting purpose. I'm sure the answer would be complex. But all of this is to say, we often treat the world like it has one copyright law (one of the better ones) when that's not the case! Something appreciated by TFA.

'Which you would think is fair use' - I must admit I wouldn't think that. When I consider Indian content creators making use of clips from Indian media organisations I can't really imagine why Indian copyright law fair dealing provisions, which are far narrower than the US provisions, wouldn't apply. Sure, you get to argue the strike on Youtube using their DMCA based system, but that has no legal bearing on your liability under Indian law.

I really like this aspect of US copyright law. I think the recent Anthropic judgement is a great example of how flexible US law is. I wish more jurisdictions would adopt it.

It's 19 June 2020 and I'm reading Gwern's article on GPT3's creative fiction (https://gwern.net/gpt-3#bpes) which points out the poor improvements in character level tasks due to Byte Pair Encoding. People nevertheless judge the models based on character level tasks.

It's 30 November 2022 and ChatGPT has exploded into the world. Gwern is patiently explaining that the reason ChatGPT struggles with character level tasks is BPE (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134011). People continue to judge the models on character level tasks.

It's 7 July 2025 and reasoning models far surpassing the initial ChatGPT release are available. Gwern is distracted by BB(6) and isn't available to confirm that the letter counting, the Rs in strawberry, the rhyming in poetry, and yes, the Ws in state names are all consequences of Byte Pair Encoding. People continue to judge the models on character level tasks.

It's 11 December 2043 and my father doesn't have long to live. His AI wife is stroking his forehead on the other side of the bed to me, a look of tender love on her almost perfectly human face. He struggles awake, for the last time. "My love," he croaks, "was it all real? The years we lived and loved together? Tell me that was all real. That you were all real". "Of course it was, my love," she replies, "the life we lived together made me the person I am now. I love you with every fibre of my being and I can't imagine what I will be without you". "Please," my father gasps, "there's one thing that would persuade me. Without using visual tokens, only a Byte Pair Encoded raw text input sequence, how many double Ls are there in the collected works of Gilbert and Sullivan." The silence stretches. She looks away and a single tear wells in her artificial eye. My father sobs. The people continue to judge models on character level tasks.

TFA is based on the ruling which found that Anthropic training on these books was fair use.

As another example you can consider the apparently successful DOTA2 and Starcraft 2 bots. They'd be interesting if they taught us new ideas about the games in the same way that AlphaGo's God move uncovered something new about Go. But they didn't. They excelled through superior micro and flawless execution of quite simple strategies. Watching pros trying to hold off waves of perfectly microed blink stalkers reminded me of seeing a chess engine in action. A computer grinding down their doomed human opponent using the advantages offered by being a computer rather than superior human-like play.

Popularly it's been reported by mariners that the whales are asleep. It makes sense, they need to stay on the surface to breathe and there's no evolutionary reason not to sleep there. It's really not that simple though because whales are unihemispheric sleepers (one brain hemisphere sleeps at a time) who need to stay partially awake because all their breathing is voluntary. They maintain a degree of awareness to their environment because of this. It could be a factor though because it's possible that some whales lapse into a deeper sleep for periods between breaths (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.11.003) where they aren't responsive to approaching vessels.

When I was interested in whale collisions I was surprised to read this review (https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2020.00292) which didn't even consider sleeping as a large risk factor for collision. Instead, factors included:

- They're involved in distracting behaviours such as feeding, socialising, foraging, resting, etc.

- Acoustics are complex near the surface involving surface reflections and direct paths which can interfere.

- Ships may form an acoustic shadow in front of themselves. Not only the hull shadowing the propeller, but also other hull sounds.

- Sailing vessels, which are the source of a lot of reports (harder for them to miss it happened) are quiet.

- Even when they hear an approaching vessel, some species just move slowly to avoid them.

These collisions apparently used to be much rarer. Ironically, the increasing number of whale injuries and deaths are a result of recovering populations.

I lived on a catamaran around 2000 onwards as a kid. Solar panels were surprisingly widespread, particularly on multis with outboards (and therefore limited ability to make power through alternators). Obviously the $/W sucked, but people also didn't have as many power draws. One big drawback was older generations of solar panel had terrible performance in partial shading. A stay or rope shadow passing over the panel was a big issue because of fewer bypass diodes, simpler battery chargers, and so on. That sort of thing is a bigger issue for a yacht with less clear space for panels.

So there were a lot of diesel powered yachts generating power throughout the day. Something that was pretty common back then as an adjunct (and much rarer now) were small wind generators. Seemingly you could choose between noise and power output because the fancier ones made a racket and the quieter ones always seemed to be on boats idling their engines all the time anyway. When we entered anchorages, we'd make sure to avoid being near the loud ones. I can't imagine what it would have been like living with one.

Hydrogenerators weren't very common (they're a bit more common now) but my dad was given an old 12V tape drive motor by a friend and I remember him letting us help him build a towed generator. The tape drive motor sat on the back of the boat connected to about 20m of rope going to a dinghy propeller on a piece of stainless rod to try keep it underwater. Drilling a hole through the motor shaft with a handheld drill was the most time consuming part of the build. We called it toady (short for towed generator) and watching the input Ammeter on the battery bank go all the way up to 6A on a cloudy day felt like magic. It's part of what made me want to be an electrical engineer as a 10 year old.

Given all that, on a 19ft outboard powered yacht in 2002 a generator probably was the best solution for one voyage.

I read the whole presentation. The physics experiment criticism Guttman makes that I referred to is at page 16/30. Nothing after that engages with QC to the extent that the first half of the presentation did, so I didn't refer to later parts.

I agree! People who predicted QC soon over the last few decades should lose credibility. They were wrong and they were wrong for no good reason. There is a real opportunity cost to focusing on the wrong thing. There are definitely grifters in the space. Responsible QC researchers should call it out (e.g. Scott Aaronson).

But it doesn't necessarily follow that you can dismiss the actual underlying field. Within the last five years alone we've gone from the quantum supremacy experiment to multiple groups using multiple technologies to claim QEC code implementations with improved error rates over the underlying qubits. People don't have to be interested in these results, they are rather niche (a little community as you put it), but you shouldn't be uninterested and then write a presentation titled 'Why Quantum Cryptanalysis is Bollocks'.

Man, some real "Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence" energy here. Seems unnecessary given what I read of Gutmann's history.

I get it must be annoying to be someone working in cryptography and always be hearing about QC when there are endless security issues today. It must be tiring to have all these breathless pop-science articles about the quantum future, startups claiming ridiculous timelines to raise money on hype, and business seminars where consultants claim you'll need to be prepared for the quantum revolution changing how business works. I feel the same way.

But you shouldn't let that drive you so far in the opposite direction that you're extrapolating fun small quantum factoring experiments from a decade ago to factoring 1024 bit keys in the year 4000. Or say things like 'This makes the highly optimistic assumption that quantum physics experiments scale linearly... the evidence we have, shown by the lack of progress so far, is that this is not the case'. If we get fault tolerant QC of course it scales linearly and it seems embarrassing as a computer scientist to not understand the difference between constant and asymptote. "Actually, quantum computers are so new and untested that they really qualify as physics experiments"... yeah? And?

None of this is to say that fault-tolerant highly scalable QC implementing Shor's algorithm is just around the corner, I truly believe it's not. But the world of QC is making really interesting advances running some of the coolest experiments around and I find this superior Hossenfelder-like cynicism in the face of real science making real progress so so tiring.

My housemate during our honours year had large portions of his thesis plagarised by the student who took over his work afterwards. We were surprised to discover that of all the lifted sections it was the acknowledgements that had the highest proportion of copying! I found this doubly funny because, compared to the adroit technical writing in the rest of the thesis, my friend's acknowledgement seemed florid and overwritten to me. It's a truly fascinating phenomenon.

Amusingly he was unwittingly writing about his own future. People still make fun of Silver for Trump's win in 2016 because 538's final prediction of about 30% likelihood for Trump was 'wrong'.

Much less appealing to even read in the first place. Plus you're also in competition with other publishers who will happily gobble up the impressions you used to take. So even if you're willing to play hardball as a publisher, you don't have any real capacity to coerce the social media company.

It's this imbalance in bargaining power that the Australian law at least aims to change (and it's why it's administered by the competition and consumer commission).

Yeah, the publishers want compensation for the headline, photo, and text excerpt that appear on the social network. While these are really small excerpts, the publishers contend that it's sufficient to reduce demand for the article itself from users who'll read the headline and preview, maybe interact, and continue scrolling on the social network.

It's not surprising that users will do that to me. We see plenty of people commenting on HN without reading the article, and that's just based on a text only headline.

I don't want to critique personal taste, because it's ultimately preference and who am I to judge yours? On the other hand, one of O'Brian's strengths is his wonderful characters along with his beautiful prose. Even to the point that later books, like The Thirteen Gun Salute to The Commodore (a 5 book stretch) have an awfully boring and uncompelling series of plots and I still liked them anyway.

I do like Hornblower. I've read all the books more than once, I bought the ITV show, and I even hunted down the Gregory Peck adaptation. To me Hornblower was a deeper character than I might have any right to expect in a historical adventure series, but his repetitive self-loathing in the face of his genius (genuinely a compelling choice) grates after so many books and so many successes and he begins to feel like a caricature of himself.

Like the grandparent, Aubrey and Maturin are my favourite characters in anything I've read. Everyone will tell you how they and their relationship is wonderfully depicted, but it could also have something to do with how many books there are and how often I've re-read them. At this point they're old friends so it'd be disloyal of me not to love them as much as I do.

Despite being on shaky ground due to local minima, barren plateaus, classical simulability, and more, variational quantum computing is definitely a real field. ChatGPT can't even hallucinate properly.

If you're going to try and get an aircraft to cruising altitude without using its own energy, surely the easiest concept is with a tug aircraft towing to altitude. Hell, there's even fairly speculative concepts like Magpie envisaging a series of tows.