a3_nm
Joined 16 years ago
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857
Member since
Jul 27
https://a3nm.net
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Comment · 2 months ago
A perspective as I live in France:
- There was already an easy statewide system to opt-out of telemarketing calls
- Having always been on that system, I still got many scam calls that sound like telemarketing
So it's great to have a ban rather than an opt-out, but this will not solve the issue of scam calls
Comment · 8 months ago
I'm not sure whether I'm taking too seriously something intended as a joke, but this in fact can conceivably be useful! When studying mathematical problems, sometimes you have a number that has some special meaning in your problem (e.g., the first value for which some phenomenon does not occur), you may be able to compute this number by brute-force or by ad-hoc reasoning, and if the number is high enough then someone else finding this number may mean that they are looking at the same problem as you. Since there's a canonical way to write numbers, but not a canonical way to define problems, then this can be helpful for these people to find each other.
An example of a similar phenomenon here https://a3nm.net/work/research/questions/#words-without-shuf... where someone interested in the sequence "abcacbacabc" is plausibly looking at the longest and lexicographically smallest ternary word without a shuffle square substring. Just searching for "abcacbacabc" on Google yields papers who look at this -- and two people independently coming up with the concept could find each other in this way if they write examples the same way even if they don't use the same words to define the concept.
(A related resource in maths is the OEIS https://oeis.org/ to see whether the integer sequence you came up with has already been studied or has another non-obvious reformulation.)
Comment · 10 months ago
I think this APC system is terrible -- it's enshrining the principle that publication in ACM venues is only open to researchers in institutions that are rich enough to cover the publication cost (or be recognized as lower-middle income). Of course this is already mostly the case, and it is already the case with conferences and their expensive registration fees; but we will stand no chance of ever improving on that front if journal article authors get charged >$1000.
Compare this to diamond OA journals (e.g., in my field, https://theoretics.episciences.org/ or https://lmcs.episciences.org/) where reading and publishing is free for everyone. Of course, the people publishing in these journals are mostly academics from wealthy universities, but I think it's important that other authors can submit and publish there too.
Comment · 2 years ago
Can you be more specific about what you are referring to?
Comment · 2 years ago
About the 2% figure: many things are insignificant in terms of climate change if you narrow down on them. Also, this 2% figure of the share of air travel is projected to increase, because the number of revenue passenger kilometers flown is quickly increasing (doubled in the last 10 years), cf https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/airline-capacity-and-traf....
And unfortunately carbon offsetting is rather unreliable (companies buying offsets don't have any incentive for the offsets to be actual savings). I'd be wary of climate change solutions that consist of continuing business as usual and assuming that decarbonation will happen in some other sectors. I also suspect the 20% price increase estimate works for a specific price of carbon, but that price could increase if carbon offsets started becoming widely used (and the demand increases).
Anyway, I don't know what's the right way for the US to reduce travel emissions, whether that's electric coaches, cheaper rail, taxation to increase prices and reduce demand... But I don't think the solution can be "just keep planes and add carbon capture".
Comment · 3 years ago
Interesting! It looks like this is called the "Gyárfás tree packing conjecture".
Comment · 3 years ago
This came from a database theory study about queries on graphs: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517804.3524149 for the paywalled version, https://www.theoinf.uni-bayreuth.de/pool/documents/Paper2021... for the open-access paper. But honestly I find the problem intriguing for its own sake.
Comment · 3 years ago
Yes, ChatGPT is really bad at those things...
Comment · 3 years ago
The following open research problem. Given an undirected graph G with two vertices s and t, the task is to determine whether there is an undirected path connecting s and t which is simple (no repeated vertices) and has length divisible by 3.
It is not known whether this problem is NP-hard, or whether it can be solved in polynomial time; apparently the question is open since the early 90s.
(The problem is also open for paths of length p mod q for any fixed p and q (fixed means they are constants, and are not given as input), whenever q>2. The problem is known to be in PTIME for 0 mod 2 and 1 mod 2, and to be NP-hard when the graph is directed. Pointers to related work here: https://gitlab.com/a3nm/modpath)
Comment · 3 years ago
As much as I think that Wikipedia notability guidelines are way too strict, I'm wondering -- is it necessarily a bad thing for editor communities to split off and create separate specialized wikis? As long as the other wikis are also under a free license (here, CC BY-SA 4.0), you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles?
Comment · 3 years ago
Sorry, I don't understand this discussion about gender. If someone on the internet desires to be referred to as "he" and "him", or "she" and "her", then you do it, no? How is gender identity relevant?
Comment · 3 years ago
> Bug reports or questions generally do not require mentioning your race, ethnicity, nationality or identity preferences
Sure, but pronouns? If someone refers to you using the wrong pronoun (e.g., assuming you're male, which this Vaxry person apparently admits to doing), don't you want to point it out somehow?
Comment · 3 years ago
Unfortunately it seems that "be excellent to each other" is not specific enough to be understood by everyone.
E.g., "address people using the name and gender that they use to refer to themselves". You would expect this to be obvious, and yet... Or maybe making this explicit is promoting a "woke ideology"?