leovailati

Regarding applications for robots that have to move very precisely without carrying a load, there are robotic measurement systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinate-measuring_machine

We use a C compiler for embedded systems that doesn't support link time optimizations (unless you pay for the pro version, that is). I have been thinking about some tool like this that merges all C source files for compilation.

It feels like OpenAI is mostly concerned with developing proofs of the untrustability of every digital medium

Which, to me, makes sense. Once the underlying technology exists, a malicious actor would not think twice before developing tools of deceptionlike those. It makes sense that OpenAI would work on that "in the open" to demonstrate that we now need to be skeptical of audios.

Hopefully I'm not being over optimistic, and I only vaguely understand the many tradeoffs that go into rocket design. But, technology-wise, starship seems analogous to a falcon heavy propelling a space shuttle. Both of which are manageable, proven technologies.

I think you are incorrect. If you build a 230-m tall pipe and fill it up with water, the water at the ground-level end of the pipe will be at the exact same pressure as the water 230 m deep in the ocean. Hydrostatic pressure only depends on the depth, not the container shape.

It is different this time. I bet that was also said when the transformations that you mentioned occurred, but this time it really is different.

LLM models are pretty general in their capabilities, so it is not like the relatively slow process of electrification, when lamplighters lost their jobs. Everyone can lose their jobs in a matter of months because AI can do close to everything.

I am excited to live in a world where AI has "freed" humans from wage slavery, but our economic system is not ready to deal with that yet.

A couple times already I found myself adapting functions from the Octave standard library to avoid paying Mathworks for some expensive toolboxes.

Apparently they produced it with agricultural by-products. So no net CO2 (other than the energy it takes for the transformation)

Too many times I have been the guy in the top left quadrant of the chart in the post. I eventually came to the realization that I have often been disrespectful to the intelligence and capacity of my colleagues. I am lucky that I get to work with smart people, and I have to remind myself that these smart people know what they are doing and don't want to do more work than necessary. This has helped me set my tone and ask better questions.

What the fuck indeed. I can't help but think of the Nuremberg laws in Germany. More specifically the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor" [1]. Sure, it's not _that bad_ (e.g., the Israeli law is not banning marriages per se) but has a similar sentiment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws#Law_for_the_Pro...

To complement your example, there are also cases when everything coincidentally happens to work fine. For example:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7280877/why-and-how-does...

People tend to emphasize the negatives, like you mentioned, but WhatsApp has revolutionized communication in the low-income country I came from. And I think ultimately creating a net benefit for society (even though the conspiracy theories are really bad). Calling/texting using the cellular networks is still pretty expensive, so a lot of mom-and-pop shops conduct a significant portion of their business over WhatsApp (for a fraction of the cost of an equivalent 1-800 number).

You got it actually, it's all about how long you leave your hand in. And that is why the probe has a very elliptical orbit, so it "touches" the sun briefly and goes back out into space to cool down.

Temperature is not what burns you, it's heat flow that does the burning. A boiling pot has a lot of molecules densely packed together, so heat transfer happens fast. The air inside the oven is hot but will not be as effective in transferring heat to your hand. There is more "thermal resistance" between your hand and the air inside the oven than your hand and the water inside a boiling pot.

doesn’t hurt anything because there isn’t anything better being done with it or better ways to store it

That's a very strong statement. If you unpack it a little bit, what you are saying is there is absolutely nothing productive ("better") that could be using that energy. I don't know if that's the case. Bitcoin mining might just be the most profitable thing to do, so nothing else was attempted.

Just wondering here, is there any way to protect oneself from that type of situation while at the same time keeping the source code open? Obviously, the name and logo are trademarked, but a third party could rebrand the program while using the same underlying source code.

Other people in this thread bring up great counterpoints. Namely, gaming is not nearly as intensive as mining and whatever value gaming brings to society is more than that of mining.

I'd also say that gaming at least occupies the human who is playing. Mining would be running in the background: the human would still be consuming energy doing something else. So one doesn't replace the other. Therefore using the inefficiency of one to justify the inefficiency of the other is not a valid argument.

One last observation: you're assuming that all these video cards would still have been produced. Maybe production of hardware has gone up to serve the mining demand.

I generally like the idea of rewarding replication studies. Replication/validation could be a required process that runs concurrently to peer review. The researchers who run the experiments to replicate results could rewarded by being added as contributors to the original paper, so they also get the citations. And like you suggest, the paper would then be marked as "validated" or something similar. I wonder if any journals out there are already doing something like this.

There is, of course, the danger of collusion among original authors and validators. Hopefully the fear of having your results rebuked would prevent people from trying to publish bullshit in the first place.

Another problem is logistics. Research labs have their own ideas they want to push forward, so spending time and resources proving or (even worse) disproving some else's idea doesn't sound that great. Also, even if it gives you citations, it probably wouldn't help you with your thesis.

Anyways, it's a tough problem to solve.

You're right! English is my second language, so I was typing "Antartica". I apologize for that.

I wish there was a way to move Antarctica around.

Fair point! I guess I meant the entire powertrain, not just the motor per se.

Disruption is the price of progress. Like cars with electric motors vs combustion engines, sometimes you have to start from scratch. You can't just keep improving combustion engines forever, you eventually reach a technological limit.

To your point though, I do see a lot of unnecessary disruption particularly in the web dev world. I think people like working on new stuff. It's exciting to take the first steps, see order of magnitude improvements every commit.

I remember hearing something about the Cell processors on Playstation 3's being the ones with manufacturing errors. The 100% good ones were supposedly sold to the US military. I realize that second part was probably just a myth. Who knows, maybe it was all an internet myth! The PS3 was released in 2006, so the idea itself is not new.

I am actually in favor of a UBI, as long as it is truly universal. That means money every month, no questions asked.

I agree with your point: under a true UBI, workers would be able to seek their passions, do whatever they like to do. Doesn't matter if the position is risky or if the pay is low. Worst case scenario, if anything goes wrong, people can fall back on UBI and have their basic needs covered.

In my comment I meant to talk about the guaranteed government job thing that the article mentioned. In that case workers wouldn't have the kind of mobility or guarantees granted by UBI. Startups would actually be competing with the government for people.

I apologize I misused the term UBI before (which is what caused the confusion.)

Exactly that! As I read the article, I kept thinking "this guy is not following the money".

The author's ultimate assumption is that money supply is somehow decoupled from accumulation. People receiving money from the government and using it to buy their basic needs may not drive inflation because their labor is not being procured by anyone else AND those basic goods they are buying would not be produced otherwise. However, the constant money stream will drive accumulation on the other side of the economy.

The owners of capital (or the 1%, however you may want to call them) would become unimaginably wealthy in a scenario like this. And it would be hard to prevent that. A super wealthy class is already a big problem today. Imagine the influence that group would have in politics if they had 10x the purchase power they have today.

Another problem that I believe exists with instituting a UBI through money creation (e.g., MMT) is lack of innovation and market disruption. It essentially puts a tax on innovation. In order to hire people you now have to be able to afford to pay more than the government and still have sufficient funds to fight well-established mega corporations.

I agree. What is the purpose of applying gradient descent to a linear regression problem? I mean, the pseudo inverse _is_ a closed form solution! Is it maybe more efficient for very large problems? I just don't get it.

I agree. I was expecting something about protocol buffers or a binary based representation of JSON.

Previous post on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18224625

That is a very good point. When you talk about preventing addiction, are you referring to the war on drugs or providing quality of life improvements that might steer people away from drugs in the first place?

Micropayments is another possible solution that comes to mind. Say, pay one tenth of a penny every time you want to look at weather data. Assuming that we can come up with something that works for insignificant amounts and is fast, cheap, and secure to transact. If that is the case, you would just have to send a confirmation token with your first HTTP GET request to access a website with no ads. Competition would hopefully drive prices down and quality up.

I found it counterintuitive that it was predicted in simulation and then confirmed with experiments, rather than the other way around.