wazdra

The clearest sign a tool is serving you is that you stop noticing it—it becomes invisible. You don’t celebrate its flaws because you’re not turning them into a hobby, rather you just get mildly annoyed and route around them.

I think this is more dependent on the user than on the tool. Surely, different tools will attract different users and we can probably measure strong correlation.

I also think this position lacks balance. Your tool is never perfect, sometimes you realize you could improve it, and you should balance implementing the change with the effect it'd have on your habits. Sure, the longer you use your tool, the smaller those changes are, but your usage evolves throughout your life, and it's only natural that your tools do so to.

This is assuming that you'll be priced the fraction of computing that you consumed. But you are actually paying for their infrastructure, for the R&D (and also the computation that went into training the model) etc. It is not clear that, for your own small computations, this kind of costs are needed, but you will still pay your share in the investment the provider made so that they could serve everyone's computation needs.

I agree with the feeling. But if you agree with the analysis of the article, this cat & mouse game ultimately amounts to stop disclosing our reasoning threads through commonly accepted linguistic structures. That's quite a price to pay as a society...

A tautology is a sentence vacuously true. This is called a pleonasm.

Are you being sarcastic? This has definitely changed with Apple Silicon. Looking at hardware value, the M-series are way more competitive than the Intel macs ever were, and if you want to run an LLM locally, they are undefeated.

However, it is quite ironic that while the value of their hardware has sharply increased, their software has become the slop that everyone is complaining about.

Tails works like this, and has gained a lot of traction in the past few years — although one may argue that running from RAM is only indirectly responsible for its popularity.

I think this idea appeals to many people, also concerning remanence: keeping your system and user data separate to the point that you could virtually mount your /home on any given UNIX host, with the added bonus that if the host is not compatible with your setup, you can always reboot it on your USB stick, run a live ISO on RAM, and retrieve a decent work environment.

I think there's a large cultural bias at play here. Different nations have different relationships to religion. As a french person, the decision to mark religious content as NSFW seems totally normal to me, but I also know that french people are (often too) fierce atheists.

I also understand things are different in many places, but I think the argument is too heated right now, maybe everyone needs to take a step back and think in a more "international" way?

Someone in the linked thread suggested a new tag altogether for religious content, that might be a sound decision.

Valuing how others remember you is definitely a motivation in life for many. I respect that it is not your own, respect that it may be mine. It is by no means "absurd".

I don't think we have such a lower bound: from a “theoretical" point of view (in the sense of the post), your processor could walk on the cube of memory and collect each bit one by one. Each move+read costs O(1) (if you move correctly), so you get O(n) to read the whole cube of n bits.

If you require the full scan to be done in a specific order however, indeed, in the worse case, you have to go from one end of the cube to the other between each reads, which incurs a O(n^{1/3}) multiplicative cost. Note that this does not constitute a theoretical lower-bound: it might be possible to detect those jumps and use the time spent in a corner to store a few values that will become useful later. This does look like a fun computational problem, I don't know it's exact worst-case complexity.

(I’m an EU-based user of Apple products) I see your point. However, Apple already provides a translation API[0], a speech recognition API[1], and a Text2Speech API[2], so not a lot more is needed than the API you describe. Also note that, while I have not looked into that thoroughly, it seems the kind of API you are discussing shares many similarities with the features of the Apple Vision Pro SDK (real time computation introducing new constraints…)

I think this situation also shows a strong divide between two visions of Apple end-game (and I think both exist within the company): exposing those APIs makes the Apple ecosystem better as a whole, with its satellite accessories/app developers; while keeping them private gives them an edge as a hardware selling company. Personally, I prefer when Apple embraces its gatekeeper status.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/translation/transl... [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech [2]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/speec...

Note that this is not incompatible with the author's view. The function abstraction does solve something: a problem we faced in the 20th century.

While I don't know whether I agree with their view, I do see that, once we've used the function abstraction to build a C compiler, and used this C compiler to build a proper OS, there is possibility for such an OS to provide entirely new abstractions, and to forego (almost) completely with functions.

Well, doesn't that specific meaning apply here? I mean, the lack of protection for end-users is at first compensated by investment money (low prices and huge effort on support). Once network effect is reached, the unregulated nature of the platform shows, end-users are wronged, only providers profit from the lack of regulation ...

Or maybe I don't understand the meaning of enshittification?

A few weeks ago, I saw a blog post here about their new billing policy[1]: if you don't use Kagi during a month, they'll pause your subscription. Personally, because of this one feature of their subscription, I don't feel too bad about such "trial schemes".

I'm not affiliated with Kagi, nor am I a paid customer.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42944371

https://archive.ph/2rVhO

Intuitively, it seems to me that those examples of classical "non-determinism" are radically different from the quantum ones, in the sense that quantum physics theorize non-determinism, while those situations are merely "left out" by classical theory. (I'm not a physicist, if any one reads this, I'd like to know what they think :)

By "left out", I mean that there are multiple solutions to the equations of motion which are compatible with the initial values of the situation.

I guess this could also explain why there is such an association in this thread between non-determinism and non-predictability ?

Am I the only one a bit disturbed by this whole communication ?

I mean, we all know helping disabled is not the end-game objective of neuralink. And right now, from a very cynical point of view, disabled people constitute a large reservoir of cobayes and free marketing for Neuralink

I don’t know how much has been invested in R&D on Neuralink, but I doubt we have ever invested that much money in any other technology to provide autonomy to the disabled.

And it is not perfectly clear to me that, for the sole prospect of helping paralysed people, Neuralink is the best way to go. It sure is the one that looks the coolest, but it’s going to be very expensive, hard to fix when something goes wrong, and it is also hard to trust. Those issues do not seem to be avoidable

Don’t get me wrong, I admire the huge QoL gain for the three patients. As individuals, they sure benefited from this. Idk if the same is true of the disabled as a social group

https://archive.is/LiIkr

\times denotes the cartesian product (to my knowledge) universally. If 3rd-semester calculus is when you introduce a general definition of continuity (I am not from the US, wouldn't know how the programs usually work there) on either metric or topological spaces, the cartesian product starts to appear quite a lot I guess ?

I found your comment quite agressive, and a bit out of place. I, for one, do have trouble getting others to read my handwriting (on boards mostly, on paper it's ok). I'm left-handed, and the system of traditional writing education you seem to value so much has left people like me unattended for most of recent history.

And it is not the kind of mentality that transpires from your comment that would have helped anything change as --thankfully-- it did.

It is unknown whether quantum computing makes NP-complete problems easier to solve. There is a complexity class for problems that can be solved "efficiently" on using quantum computing, called BQP. How BQP and NP are related is unknown. In particular, if an NP-complete problem was shown to be solvable efficiently with Quantum Computing (and thus in BQP), this open (and hard) research question would be solved (or at least half of it).

Note that BQP is not "efficient" in a real-word fashion, but for theoretical study of Quantum computing, it's a good first guess

I think you have understood "writing" in a very narrow sense. As mentioned in other replies, Stephen Hawking was a very prolific author. He did not write much, but he sure knew how to write.

PG is obviously talking about the mental process of writing, i.e. of organizing a complex network of thoughts in a linear hierarchy that others can grasp, not the physical one.

Idk if that was parent's ref, but clopen is a term used in topology

I'd like to point out that llama 3.1 is not open source[1] (I was recently made aware of that fact by [2], when it was on HN front page) While it's very nice to see a peak of interest for local, "open-weights" LLMs, this is an unfortunate choice of words, as it undermines the quite important differences between llama's license model and open-source. The license question does not seem to be addressed at all in the article.

[1] https://www.llama.com/llama3_1/license/

[2] https://csvbase.com/blog/14

Fun how Microsoft is on both ends of the "exploit"

I had the chance to follow Goubault-Larrecq's very nice course on Logic and Computation, that went over this in a very similar way. Unfortunately, the whole material is in french, but might still interest some : http://www.lsv.fr/~goubault/Lambda/loginfoindex.html

(The relevant part is the "Lambda calcul pur" one")

I think we can all agree to disagree

Let's hope it spreads as well :p

excluded middle: the logical axiom that, for any proposition P, (P v ¬P) is a tautology/valid/always holds.

contradiction: a proof of ⊥. The definition of ⊥ does not matter (it just means false), thanks to the ex falso quodlibet principle.

A proof by contradiction: proving P by showing that (¬P -> ⊥).

Notice that I haven't defined the ¬ operator. This is due to the fact that its definition differs between classical logic and intuitionistic logic. Since the intuitionistic definition of ¬, i.e. "¬P" is a short-hand for "P -> ⊥", is classically equivalent to the definition of ¬ in the classical context (¬P is the statement "P does not hold"), it makes sense to adopt this definition. The astute reader will notice that, with this definition of ¬, a proof by contradiction is exactly a proof of ¬¬P, and it happens that ¬¬P -> P is an equivalent formulation of the excluded middle.

Now, back to Euclid's proof. Let P = "√2 is rational". We want to show Q = ¬P. We can do so by contradiction: assume ¬Q, and derive a contradiction. It *happens* that, when using the scheme of proof by contradiction on a property of the form ¬A, you can simply rearrange the negations to get rid of the use of the excluded middle.

So, going back to your statement,

Note that Euclid's proof is intuitionistically valid, so it can't use excluded middle.

Well, whether Euclid's proof is intuitionistically valid is a question of point of view. Historically? I doubt it. I doubt that Euclid gave any kind of thought to whether he used the excluded middle, and probably used it pervasively, as all "classical" mathematicians today. However, I agree that it can be made intuitionistically valid using a purely syntactic rewriting. Said differently, Euclid's proof does not rely on the excluded middle. This does not mean you cannot use it because that's how you think or because you prefer it that way. When you see the blow-up of sizes of certain proofs in the non-classical context, you understand why many mathematicians would rather not give a thought to their use of the excluded middle. The same way many people in this thread used the PTA to show that √2 is irrational: that's overkill, but they prefer it that way !

but it has standardised on that phrase!

To me, the only formal distinction you can make between the two lies in the use of the excluded middle. However, this distinction has not standardised in mathematics, as many mathematicians simply do not care for intuitionistic logic.

Such a mathematician could see the above proof as: I want to show ¬P by contradiction. Therefore I assume ¬(¬P) which is just P to me (the unintuitionistic mathematician has just used the excluded middle, without really caring). I derive a contradiction. Therefore ¬P holds.

While I personally enjoy the kind of subtleties that can be thought of about mathematical reasoning, I also think the rant-train on contradiction vs negation must stop. You are expecting a consensus from the wrong community.

It seems to me you are missing the forest for the tree here.

A society where we have open, legal access to all the cultural pieces of the last century is very different from our own. And it seems difficult to know how it would affect both the consumption, but also the creation of media.

Sometimes, when I argue about this IRL, I'm told that we are practically there because of piracy. But this is a debate of tech enthusiasts, we know how to download, we now how not to get caught. The majority does not