solresol

In some fields, all of those statements are true already.

In a large number of few fields, all of those statements will be true in the near future (10 years maximum).

There's no reason that the Humboldtian model should be the right structure for the next century's universities, just as it wasn't the right structure for the 18th century's universities.

I got banned for violating terms of use apparently, but I'm mystified as to what I rule I broke, and appealing just vanishes into the ether.

Has anyone else got examples of reasoning traces where it uses a word in a way that no human being would?

I just proved that constraint solving problems can be encoded as p-adic linear regression problems[+], and that therefore we can use machine learning optimisation techniques to get exact answers.

So of course no journal or conference is in the least bit interested, and I'm now reformatting it for another obscure low-tier journal that no-one will ever read.

Otherwise:

- automating the translation of a Byzantine Greek work that has never been translated into English before. https://stephanos.symmachus.org

- also preparing evidence for a case against the university I sometimes work for.

[+] Linear regression, but instead of minimising the Euclidean distance, minimise the p-adic distance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_valuation

Stephanos of Byzantium wrote what we would call an encyclopedia of people and places. Most of it has been lost, but shortened versions still exist. I've set up a bot to scan a version of what we have, translate it, extract out the proper nouns and try to figure out what was lost. https://stephanos.symmachus.org/ I'm also linking it to the translation of Pausanias https://pausanias.symmachus.org that another bot is doing.

Also, trying to finish a PhD on machine learning when you want to minimise a p-adic loss.

I create a separate Linux user (which doesn't have sudo rights) for each project. I have to log each user in to Claude code or codex, but then I can use ordinary Unix permissions to keep the bots under control and isolated.

The volume of cargo carried by sailing vessels in the old days was orders of magnitude lower.

Surprisingly, no, it wasn't. I'll slightly fudge the numbers and talk in terms of proportion of world trade that was carried by ocean-going vessels (because if you double the population then it's reasonable to talk about doubling the number of ships).

The world economy was very globalised in 1913. That level of globalisation in trade wasn't matched again until the 1990s.

We're only a little more global now than we were in the age of sail.

The British navy and merchant fleet was a wonder of its era.

Writing a course for a customer on how to use Claude Code well, especially around brownfield development (working on existing code bases, not so much around vibe-coding something new).

If the "outcompeting" is possible because of Chinese government subsidies, then it's important to protect local industry from unfair competition.

It's similar to the logic behind anti-trust actions against monopolists. If the playing field isn't level, then the USA government steps in to level it.

(Whether BYD is subsidised or not is another question, but the above is the logic of protecting local industry.)

Indeed. The obvious counter-example to the claim is "rainbows" which were definitely the topic of heated scientific argument for hundreds of years (and non-scientific ones before that).

I think of it as trying to encourage the LLM to want to give answers from a particular part of the phase space. You can do it by fine tuning it to be more likely to return values from there, or you can prompt it to get into that part of the phase space. Either works, but fiddling around with prompts doesn't require all that much MLops or compute power.

That said, fine tuning small models because you have to power through vast amounts of data where a larger model might be cost ineffective -- that's completely sensible, and not really mentioned in the article.

I have been wrestling with this too. I only see two options: no tech university or AI wrangling university.

https://solresol.substack.com/p/you-can-no-longer-set-an-und...

A beautiful implementation of the most exotic sorting algorithm I'm going to teach this semester:

https://bead-sort.arithmetic.guru/

Oh, and also a PhD on p-adic machine learning, but no one will remember that.

I'm not sure what's wrong with me, but I just wasted several hours wrestling codex to make it behave.

Here's my workflow that keeps failing: - it writes some code. It looks good a first glance - I push it to github - automated tests on github show that there's a problem - go back to codex and ask it to fix it - it does stuff. It looks good again.

Now what do I do? If I ask it to push again to github, then it will often create a pull request that doesn't include stuff from the first pull request, but it's not a pull request that stacks on top of the previous pull request, it's a pull request that stacks on top of main.

When asked to write something that called out to gpt-4.1-mini, it used openai.ChatCompletion.create (!?!!?)

I just found myself using claude to fix codex's mistakes.

Trying to measure how well LLMs can make scientific hypotheses, and more generally, execute on the scientific process (as part of a pivot in my PhD).

At the time when they need to be making connections and needing patronage you want PhD students to be showing up integrity and honesty problems and asking awkward questions about the powerful people in the community?

Of course that's what should be happening, but the incentives aren't pushing in the right direction for it currently.

It seems to be the season for scraping SEC filing archives and running them through AI bots to extract information. I made this:

https://boards.industrial-linguistics.com/

It only looks at information about directors on company boards, and unlike your much better project, I don't have any clear idea how to commercialise it.

(Australia)

I received my notice from the land valuer general yesterday (for unimproved land value).

Looking at building costs for my area and what other houses are going for in the street, the valuation looks spot-on.

I tried... it started with the idea was that log loss might not be the best option for training, and maybe it should be a loss related to how wrong the predicted word was. Predicting "dog" instead of "cat" should be less penalised than predicting "running".

That turns out to be an ultrametric loss, and the derivative of an ultrametric loss is zero in a large region around any local minimum, so it can't be trained by gradient descent -- it has to be trained by search.

Punchline: it's about one million times less effective than a more traditional architecture. https://github.com/solresol/ultratree-results

When I last looked up the literature, Keto diet was one of the least effective interventions.

That is, if you follow it, I'm sure it works.

But the vast majority of people drop out of keto diets very quickly. So it's lousy advice and an unsuccessful intervention.

It's a bit like saying to a patient "you gotta sacrifice -- you should doing 3 hours a day of cardio". If they do follow through with it, it will work. But the vast majority of people won't be able to maintain doing that.

I administered the CDT to ChatGPT and got Claude to diagnose what was wrong with the "patient" based on the results.

There are signs of pre-frontal cortex damage or early stage dementia.

Writing up a paper for my PhD on machine learning with non-Euclidean loss functions.

Taking over the affairs of one of my elderly relatives now that she can't manage by herself.

A project with a medical insurer for adjudicating insurance claims using LLMs.

I wrote about this phenomenon 4 years ago: https://blog.ifost.org.au/2020/09/something-funny-is-about-t...

Pretty much. The Greek pantheists weren't that different to Marvel or Star Wars fans. The point of the mythology was to have a common identity. If you asked the priest at the template of Demeter "Next spring, I'd like to go and meet Persephone on her journey to home to Demeter, which road does she normally take?" -- they would think you were some kind of fool getting reality and myth confused, while thinking up some mythology about your journey that would turn into a nice play next year.

The modern-day equivalent would be meeting a travel agent at a DC Comics convention and asking them to book flights for you to Gotham City. The best-case outcome is that they write some fan-fiction about you.

This was one of the reasons that Christianity was very disruptive, and exploded across the Graeco-Roman world over the following centuries. It provided a common identity with historical grounding -- if you wanted to go to the temple in Jerusalem where Jesus had kicked the merchants out, you could, and there was no ambiguity or vagueness about which one this happened in even after it was destroyed.

Linear models that aren't estimated with OLS: - Theil-Sen - Huber - RANSAC

Models that can cope with more parameters than observations: - Ridge - Lasso

i think plausibly being able to use youtube video as training data was the major reason for google to buy youtube in the first place

When I asked Eric Schmidt the "why did we spend so much money on buying youtube?" question his answer was "if it's the future of television, it was a bargain; if not, we overpaid."

There didn't seem to be any expectation among senior management at the time that it was anything other than "televisions carry advertisements, we want in on that market."

What's your sales experience? If the answer is "none", then you'll discover that bootstrapping is not nice at all.

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1. Services business, had a few clients that I knew would say yes. 2. None. But trying to pivot away from services to products -- dozens, none successful. 3. When you have a good pipeline of clients, it's great. Then it can all come crashing down to zero in a matter of weeks. 4. I want to, but now I'm essentially unemployable. 5. Solo. 6. Found myself back in academia of all places, and simultaneously advising large corporates on how to make use of language models.

I've got a list of 200+ things that I've accumulated since 2019 that the world seems to need, or that someone has said that they needed. It's a very raw list with ideas that range from the trivial and unresearched "why doesn't (thing) exist?" through to ideas that I've worked on for some period of time before I've realised that I need to hand it over to someone else and haven't yet met that someone. (My email is in my profile if anyone wants a copy.)

One of the things that has frustrated me is that there are many ideas that are worth pursuing that could make a big difference to the world, but can't be done in a way that is likely to be commercial viable -- and so can't be solved by starting a business.

If I had to provide guidance, I'd say "pursue a niche". Find something small that's obviously wrong and do something about that. You're more likely to have an impact than if you try to tackle some big headline problem. There will always be someone else more qualified and capable of handling that big problem: but there will always be too few people looking at all the small problems of the world -- and in aggregate, the small problems add up to more than any big problem.

It shouldn't matter, should it? Mosh keeps the state and only sends the differences. You would miss most of the animations, and there would be the overhead of sending the colouring escape codes (a few percent extra), but other than that, it wouldn't be any slower than an unanimated version that I can see.

It's pretty rare for a child growing up in an anti-science household to be convinced to change their worldview by abstract philosophy, not least because they won't have access to those sorts of books.

It's quite common for a child growing up in an anti-science household to be convinced to change their views on science by devout Christians writing about evolution, dinosaurs, astronomy and so on. Fundamentalist parents are often quite surprisingly happy for their children to read those kinds of books because they are written from the perspective of the in-group. There's a reason that Life of Fred is popular.

If you want to write a book about the theory of science and what truth is, go ahead, but you aren't going to make much of an impact on that particular target audience.