RogerL

The video didn't make this clear, but it is answering real questions. Its used in the study of geometrical optics, celestial navigation, etc. Ie set up a 'toy' problem that gives you insights into rather more complicated dynamical systems.

From Tabachnikov's book Geometry and Billiards:

Classical mechanics and geometrical optics, discussed in this chapter, are intimately related. The configuration trajectories of mechanical systems are extremals of a variational principle, similar to the trajectories of light. In fact, mechanics can be described as akind of geometrical optics; this was Hamilton’s approach to mechanics(see [3] for details). The brachistochrone problem is a good example of this optics-mechanics analogy.

The video contains no equations, but it cites original, ongoing, research that has been going on since the 50s. Sure, you could rip a bong and go "woah, cool colors", or you could follow the links and read, say, Tabachnikov's book.

Personally I found that the videos instantly made some group theory aspects of this stand out. Maybe I'm completely off, and that's not really how this is approached, but now I have a question/idea as a foil which I can use to look a bit deeper. In any case, the animation SW came from a researcher in the field, I don't think they are doing this to generate junk food, but to solve actual problems in their field.

IMO not enough talk about ordering. LLMs seem to have no understanding of e.g. the 5 Ws of journalism. Yes, they "know it", they just rarely use it. Nearly every programming response I get starts with the most lowest level fact "m_foo is [wall of text elided] hence the file format is wrong".

Whereas any human would say "I think your file format is missing a key/value pair for foo'ing. Let's trace through the code, and see if/where m_foo is set...."

It happens everywhere. Docstring type comments for a function endlessly just lists information about specific variables, implementation details, etc, and often never really even says what the function does. Then maybe a comment in the body might actually describe what it is for.

These days I've learned when facing these walls of text to check the last sentence first; it is often enough to provide the context for the text dump.

I have instructions to this effect in my claude.md. It doesn't help much on responses, but it give me a way to quickly say "reread claude.md and then rewrite that last prompt" and that can tend to go better.

Someone else mentioned model of mind while writing. The LLM has no model of mind; it does not consider how to present information, what you might already know or not know. We work in a huge mono-repo - it'll blithely just start listing variable names and I have no idea what file that is in, what it is referring to, how it interacts with 5 other classes it hasn't mentioned, or mentions out of order. It doesn't matter to the LLM. It can hold millions of facts in 'mind' at once; humans stall out at 5-7. If I replay saying it is leaving out info, many times it turned out it did dump all the facts out, spread across multiple prompts, often with key facts interspersed with all the vagueisms. No human mind can cope.

It's a very simple question - is this act statistically likely to improve the results? If the answer is yes, and either it is within the rules, or unlikely to be detected, then it will happen. There are billions on the table, reputations and careers on the line; if you don't pick them up, someone else will.

"But the driver's head might get chopped off". Not sure why you bring that up, it is not part of the equation. Will we likely get more points, will we get caught? Those are the only metrics that matter.

I suppose I exaggerate, but not by much. Drivers didn't want the halo because they thought it would hinder their driving. The first season out Verstappen literally drove over the top of Lewis' helmet, leaving tire marks (he would have been dead w/o the halo).

MC is used because there is no analytic solution. Only some likelihood functions have a conjugate prior. You have to rework the analytic solution for every model change (where most changes would result it in being non-analytic anyway), and they don't work well for high dimensional problems. Restricting the tool to analytic would mostly result in a toy app that just does Gaussians.

individuals can blow in the wind, but if you are a company who bought a thousand seats and spent a ton of time training people up, establishing policies, vetting which extensions are allowed, the transition cost is much higher.

You want me to enter my api key into a website?

Yes, I see the message about it staying local. No, I don't trust the message or that you will never be hacked.

7 trivial prompts, and at 100% limit, using sonnet, not Opus this morning. Basically everyone at our company reporting the same use pattern. Support agent refuses to connect me to a human and terminated the conversation, I can't even get any other support because when I click "get help" (in Claude Desktop) it just takes me back to the agent and that conversation where fin refuses to respond any more.

And then on my personal account I had $150 in credits yesterday. This morning it is at $100, and no, I didn't use my personal account, just $50 gone.

Commenting here because this appears to be the only place that Anthropic responds. Sorry to the bored readers, but this is just terrible service.

It's an AI generated article; don't trust anything in it unless you verify it.

it was light gathering. the D5 they brought is a very old camera tech wise, but it was ideal for the low light photos of the eclipse. they also brought a Z9 for much higher resolution photos.

I've purposely eaten insects while traveling. for me it is hard to get over the fact that they are not 'cleaned' - you eat everything in their digestive tracts. I intellectually understand that is safe, but my conditioning makes it hard to handle. taste and texture can be challenging once you get past grasshoppers and ants (for my palate of course).

yes, the correct sub for this is r/truespotify, and there are a dozen discussions on the problem.