Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Sure but... this is the technology at the most expensive it will ever be. I'm impressed that o3 was able to achieve such high performance at all, and am not too pessimistic about costs decreasing over time.
Comment · 2 years ago
It's funny; I spent a couple of hours last week helping some students debug out-of-bounds indices in their Rust code.

I've written bugs that would have been caught by the compiler in a memory-safe language. I think the last time was maybe in 2012 or 2013? I still write plenty of bugs today but they're almost all logic errors that nothing (short of AI tools) could have caught.

Comment · 2 years ago
I think it's simply that the blog author and commentators have an unrealistic threat model when it comes to how the legal profession uses MD5s.

After the first high-profile case where authenticity of evidence gets called into question because a seized electronic document was deliberately doctored to allow for a hash collision (if that ever happens), there will be a will to change to something new.

Comment · 3 years ago
Who picks the reviewers and nags them to complete their reviews? This is the principal actual useful work journals do these days.
Comment · 3 years ago
The situation is now counterintuitive in the other direction: if Monty Hall had opened those 48 doors at random and they just happened to not contain the car, then there is no advantage to switching, though many people would insist otherwise.
Comment · 3 years ago
It's not so easy for several reasons:

1. It's easy enough for a lone entrepreneur with no investors to make principled long-term decisions. It's not so trivial when you owe a fiduciary duty to a board of venture capitalists.

2. Your team of engineers (which has grown steadily as you've scaled up) have built The Thing and everyone loves it. Now what? You only need 5% of the team to maintain the software. You could fire 95% of the team, which will make your company mighty unpopular to future hires, and moreover your best developers won't want to stay and do maintenance for the next decade. Easier to have them work on gratuitous frontend redesigns, bloated features that increase engagement metrics, etc. In a restaurant the contractors who build and furnish the place aren't your employees.

Comment · 3 years ago
I've spent hours helping my students debug their Rust programs of incorrect array-indexing logic, incorrectly-reasoned loop invariants, incorrect conditional logic, and everything in between. They're not double-deleting raw pointers, but then again, most C++ programs don't use raw pointers these days either...

"Rust makes a few classes of bugs impossible to write by construction" is a very nice feature of the language. But I'm really turned off by how insufferable the Rust community is (which shines through in the OP's blog post and several comments elsewhere in the responses): it's never the quote at the start of this paragraph; it's always "writing software in anything but Rust is fundamentally irresponsible!" or "if a Rust program compiles, it must be correct!" No, not even close.

Comment · 3 years ago
The store may or may not be telling the truth. Either way, it's undeniable that SF has changed dramatically over the last several years, with dramatic upswing in property crime and complete unwillingness on the part of law enforcement to fight it.
Comment · 3 years ago
Because after your lean, highly-productive startup team creates the app that everyone loves, you get a bunch of funding and hire thousands of extraneous software developers and then have to find something for them to do.
Comment · 3 years ago
How much of the cooling cost of current chips is due to wires, vs. the transistors themselves?

Superconductors will not help with the latter.

Comment · 3 years ago
“Most important one in physics this century”: I’m hoping the room-temperature superconductor pans out, but even if it does, the century is young!

This time in the 20th century, relativity was “obviously” the most important discovery of the century, with the new theory of quantum mechanics right around the corner.

Comment · 3 years ago
Arxiv has its own problems.

You can find dozens of proofs on the arxiv that P=NP and that P!=NP. What does peer “review” look like here? Most people won’t bother to write an article specifically rebutting one random incorrect proof.

Now somebody tomorrow posts a proof that P!=NP. Will people pay attention? If it’s a “big name” or somebody at a university with a good PR office then yes; otherwise no. Doesn’t seem ideal to me.

Comment · 3 years ago
What I really like about this explanation is that it highlights the fact that entropy is not a natural property of the physics system: entropy is only defined with respect to some coarse-graining operation applied by an imperfect observer of the system. So as Sabine points out it seems we should really be talking about multiple different entropies, each of which corresponds to a different mechanism for coarse-graining microstates into macrostates, with each different entropy changing at different rates depending on the coarse-graining mechanism and physical system. (And in particular, God observing the universe would not see entropy change at all; even if there were uncertainty in the initial conditions of the universe, God would see that uncertainty perfectly propagated with no loss of information, in a way made precise by Liouville's Theorem.)

But even this is not the full story, because I can take a mass-spring network, and no matter how I choose to coarse-grain it, I will not see the entropy corresponding to that coarse-graining increase, because the trajectory of a mass-spring system is periodic. Entropy increase requires that the system is ergodic with respect to the chosen coarse-graining operation, i.e. that over long times the trajectory visits the coarse-grained states in a "random" and uniform way. It's not at all obvious to me why the dynamics of particles bouncing around in a box have this property, and particles attached in a mass-spring network do not; and neither the Sabine nor the Veritaserum videos address this or why we should expect all practical real-world physical systems to be ergotic with respect to practical coarse-graining mechanisms.

Comment · 3 years ago
Well since circa mid-2010s the Internet is apps. Or app-like centralized web sites (like Hacker News).

People want to install a single “Lemmy” app on their phone that shows them all Lemmy content and lets them post to all instances, using a single account and a *simple* user interface. If Lemmy cannot provide that user experience (abstracting away the federation), then yes it is doomed.

Comment · 3 years ago
What’s the endgame here? Who is buying ripened accounts with lots of karma and why?

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