cbondurant

a cartoonishly cynical way of viewing human interaction.

Why do I play chess, despite the fact that robots have practically solved it? Why do I make crafts despite the fact that I could purchase stuff of the same quality, if not higher, for the same cost of materials and no cost to my time? Why do I practice piano?

Why do I watch youtube videos about hobby machine shop work despite not having a metal lathe or mill? Why do I watch channels like applied science, or usagi electric, or PBS space time, when I have no interest in becoming a material scientist, working with 50 year old computers, or becoming a theoretical physicist or astronomer?

It's because its personally enjoyable to me! Human beings are naturally curious creatures! We naturally want to share with and learn from others!!

Of course, the solution described here is not a perfect one, (as perfect solutions don't really exist when it comes to messy human things like international politics) but it at least follows from an easy to identify set of principles on how ambiguous situations like these should be handled.

Then you look at the current day with the "Gulf of America" which fails to be primary, common, or local, and just get disappointed.

I'd be interested to see how this compares to the same scaling procedure, but by population. Essentially seeing what the IPv4-per-capita is.

The very first three "egregious examples" are already leaving me with a low expectation for the rest of this article.

"aquire" over "acquire" I will readily agree with, that makes a lot of sense. "suficient" and "comunal" however? absolutely not. those doubled consonants are putting in legitimate work in indicating an alternative stress pattern. its suf-FI-cient and com-MU-nal. but without the doubled letters, my intuitive reading becomes su-fi-CI-ent and CO-mu-nal.

There's plenty of words that could stand a respelling in english, but those are terrible examples to call "egregious". doubled consonates have a clear function in the words they appear in.

I think it says quite a bit that I had already been thinking of Outside In before it was even mentioned in this article. Outside In truly is one of the great works of math communication.

I'd argue that its format, a dialog between a novice who is yet still sharp (is able to be the one that makes the connections between ideas) and an expert who guides with pointed questions (fills in background context that is needed for the problem at hand), is one of the most effective ways of formatting mathematical communication. Surreal Numbers by Donald Knuth is another great example of the style I'm referring to.

I was hoping to see if by "21st-Century" it meant "music theory that is applicable to the way modern music is generally written and interacted with". With details on things like microtonal music, increased focus on rhythmic theory, an increased appreciation for the role that timbre plays in the sound of music, the theoretical frameworks that underpin long standing musical traditions of other cultures and contrasting what makes each musical theory unique as a way of better understanding both western theories of music as well as the breadth of musical expression....

Nope! Just the same old, well beaten, rotting corpse of a horse in the form of a musical theory that entirely exists to prop up schenkerian analysis. The one that that racist, elitist music programs have been teaching since well before the 21st-Century. (The way you can tell is because it includes figured bass, which is totally irrelevant to any discussion that isn't about the harmonic style of 18th century european musicians.)

God forbid I want to, oh I don't know, make music that's similar to the kind that I actually listen to on a regular basis? Better understand its underpinnings and what makes it work in the ways that it does? No. Figured bass.

I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.

I think it would be meaningful to also compare the fatality rates of the time tested and proven forms of public transit to these self driving cars too.

The self-modifying executable that can modify itself on disk is kinda horrifying to me. In that kind of "ok yes, you have proven you can, but I really think you shouldn't" kind of way.

Incredibly impressive on a conceptual level though. If someone proposed doing this while having the executable only grab a read-only reference to itself, I think that would be a legitimately solid idea.

I think I can tell just how good a design this is by the fact that the moment I interacted with the demo it just felt right. To the extent that I had to focus harder to really recognize that it was doing exactly as described.

Truly, good design is design that goes unnoticed.

Had to reread this a few times to properly parse what the hypothetical was.

My first read was "if you could redo your life from age 17 what would you do". To which "figure out how to make an LLM" would be an insane answer.

I think his advice here is maybe... a year or two too late to be good advice. I can't foresee the job market for machine learning experts being better than it is now in 5-6 years time when said hypothetical 17 year old would be most ready to start career hunting. Either the bubble is gonna pop and the market will be flooded with laid off AI talent.

Even if I'm wrong about there being a bubble at all, I still think that in 5 years time the tech will just have matured to the point of diminishing returns on refining existing architectures. Plateauing until some PHD comes up with something as ground breaking as attention.

I feel like (as is usual with nontechnical reporting on cutting edge science) this article isn't doing a great job at communicating the underlying tech well here. Had to independently look up some descriptions of what super absorption is, and what actually makes it a quantum effect.

Sounds like the idea is, if you've got a bunch of light emitters spaced far closer to each other than the wavelength of light they are emitting, the light output becomes quadratic on the number of emitters. as opposed to linear on the number of emitters in the standard case. And the reverse becomes true as well.

Based on that, I'm pessimistic on the potential of this, as it sounds like charging requires a conversion from electricity to light, and then discharging would also be a conversion from light back to electricity, and we don't exactly have the most lossless processes for that conversion.

Maybe useful in certain kinds of optics or laser work though, where directly dumping the stored energy as light would be desired?

My gut instinct was that operations like sin, cos, tan, etc, were the kind that would get aggressively inlined by any modern compiler, and then after inlining the redundant conversions between radian/turns would be canceled out by optimization passes.

Of course, gut instinct can be wrong, so I checked in godbolt and was surprised to find out that even if I try to force lto, it still doesn't get inlined and remains a call.

I can only hope that the hard github dependency can be chalked up to just "this was the easiest way to get this out the door". Its not a good solution in the long term, (single point of failure, github is increasingly unreliable and disliked, what about people already on a different forge or repository source) but it does solve at least a few problems that would otherwise be thorny (minimum bar for submission, outsourcing identity and spam management to github, etc.)

And since the bar for validation is expressly stated to be rather weak, I guess this would be best conceptualized as a specialized search engine that can weed out the <80th percentile of mediocre formalized proofs, with a target audience of professional mathematicians who have the ability to make determinations on the final 20% themselves.

Maybe also something I'd wanna skim over at some point, as a non-mathmatician who just thinks lean is neat. Its not useful to me but its fun to learn about.

I think 14 exists as a test case for having a larger search space that needs to be efficiently ignored. Its not difficult solution wise, but if it is particularly slow that means you're doing a bad job at pruning potential steps. Making sure you're doing good early pruning of the empty chambers.

While impressive that the optimal can be proven, I feel like the example puzzles here aren't ones that are particularly hard to find solutions for (when move count doesnt matter). I'd be interested to see at least one example that has a lot of tricky dead states that would act as traps.