cjcole

When you blanket a set of things with a pejorative, and it turns out that some of the members of that set are demonstrably and definitively NOT covered by that pejorative, and that all the pejorative means at bottom is "I don't like", all you've accomplished in the long run is to call into question any future legitimate use of that pejorative. It is tempting, especially when heated, to stretch an invective, but it will ironically only lead to the death of its utility over time.

He could have also used some kind of chemical reaction contained within a rigid tube to transfer the energy to a projectile, but I think he just really likes trebuchets in particular.

Find a Church which still does this:

"There were no needy ones among them, because those who owned lands or houses would sell their property, bring the proceeds from the sales, and lay them at the apostles’ feet for distribution to anyone as he had need." Acts 4:34-35

The Catholic Church has an ancient tradition asserting the inherent dignity of the human person (imago Dei), regardless of circumstance, including the very recent Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

In our supposedly rational age we've discarded structures which encoded timeless wisdom because we didn't recognize the value. We thought we'd outgrown it, but it turns out that now is when we need it the most.

"John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood"

Sounds like a Watchmen Comedian logo t-shirt. It could be construed as a bold choice but was probably just what was on the top of his t-shirt stack that day.

I'm not an enthusiast. I'm a Butlerian.

Imagine hearing pre-attention-is-all-you-need that "AI" could do something that Donald Knuth could not (quickly solve the stated problem in collaboration with his friend).

The idea that this (Putnam perfect, IMO gold, etc) is all just "statistical parrot" stuff is wearing a little thin.

Maybe.

“The laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.”

- Paul Dirac

“It is, indeed, an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realisation in external nature. What is intelligible is also beautiful. We may well ask: how does it happen that beauty in the exact sciences becomes recognizable even before it is understood in detail and before it can be rationally demonstrated? In what does this power of illumination consist?”

- Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

“I often follow Plato’s strategy, proposing objects of mathematical beauty as models for Nature.”

“It was beauty and symmetry that guided Maxwell and his followers.”

- Frank Wilczek

“Beauty, is bound up with symmetry.”

- Herman Weyl

"Still twice in the history of exact natural science has this shining-up of the great interconnection become the decisive signal for significant progress. I am thinking here of two events in the physics of our century: the rise of the theory of relativity and that of the quantum theory. In both cases, after yearlong unsuccessful striving for understanding, a bewildering abundance of details was almost suddenly ordered. This took place when an interconnection emerged which, thought largely unvisualizable, was finally simple in its substance. It convinced through its compactness and abstract beauty – it convinced all those who can understand and speak such an abstract language."

- Werner Heisenberg

Maybe (just maybe) these things (whatever you want to call them) will (somehow) gain access to some "compact", beautiful, "largely unvisualizable" "interconnection" which will be the self-evident solution. And if they do, many will be sure to label it a statistical accident from a stochastic parrot. And they'll right, for some definitions of "statistical", "accident", "stochastic", and "parrot".

"humans"

Donald Knuth is an extremal outlier human and the problem is squarely in his field of expertise.

Claude, guided by Filip Stappers, a friend of Knuth, solved a problem that Knuth and Stappers had been working on for several weeks. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem (from my quick scan) to have been stated how long (or how many tokens or $) it took for Claude + Stappers to complete the proof.

In response, Knuth said: "It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days."

Seems like good advice. From reading elsewhere in this comment section, the goalposts seem to be approaching the infrared and will soon disappear from the extreme redshift due to rate at which they are receding with each new achievement.

Nov 16

Update:

Rebecca Heineman - Organizer

It’s time. According to my doctors. All further treatments are pointless. So, please donate so my kids can create a funeral worthy of my keyboard, Pixelbreaker! So I can make a worthy entrance for reuniting with my one true love, Jennell Jaquays.

My daughter Cynthia Elizabeth Heineman, will be making the arrangements

Thanks!

(My son loves to play.)

BTW, the old Windows installer runs great under Crossover on Apple Silicon.

I'm going to try running this native. I'll file issues for what I can't readily fix.

“Our clients understand that a two- to three-minute ad load is more valuable than a nine-minute ad load,” says Mark Read, head of WPP, the world’s largest ad company and Groupm’s parent firm.

It's appropriate that even the chief of the purveyors of advertisements uses the same language ("load") that clinicians use for viral infections.