piannucci

How about rthym or some variation?

Someone call @keithw. He put a tremendous amount of brainpower into getting the Unicode side of this puzzle "right" (or, as "right" as it is possible to be) when he wrote mosh. I'm sure he and Hashimoto could have a grand old (but zero-width non-joining) conversation!

If the analogy to warped spacetime was exact, then there would be a “scale factor” for every point depending on the local transit speed. Then it would be possible to do as this page does and for the answer not to depend on starting point.

However in the real city the transit speed at any point is not isotropic, the space is 3-D, and some paths are forbidden (getting on-off the train between stops).

Does it still go rancid if it’s kept at boiling temperatures? I’m guessing that if it’s too hot for microbes, then you only have to deal with oxidation at the surface, which can maybe be fixed with periodic skimming. Maybe?

AIUI, there is a technical criterion for an ambient EM field to imbue circuits within it with broken time-reversal symmetry.

One example of a system that meets the criterion is a ferromagnet. Another is this altermagnet.

One example of a system that doesn’t meet the criterion is a diamagnet. Another is the anti-ferromagnet.

Roughly speaking, some systems are microscopically “asymmetric enough” to be useful in a certain way, and others are “too symmetrical.”

Ferromagnets have a downside that altermagnets avoid: their microscopic fields don’t average out to zero over macroscopic distances.

I think, but honestly don’t really understand, that the goal is to cause the material to treat currents of spin-up and spin-down charge carriers (think electrons or holes) dissimilarly. Constructing materials that distinguish between charge carriers of differing spin is a step towards spintronics. Again, I don’t know why that’s important, but it is what it is.

:shocked_pikachu:

Renegadry aside, for those who are more interested in the Information Theory perspective on this:

Kolmogorov complexity is a good teaching tool, but hardly used in engineering practice because it contains serious foot-guns.

One example of defining K complexity(S, M) is the length of the shortest initial tape contents P for a given abstract machine M such that, when M is started on this tape, the machine halts with final tape contents P+S. Obviously, one must be very careful to define things like “initial state”, “input”, “halt”, and “length”, since not all universal machines look like Turing machines at first glance, and the alphabet size must either be consistent for all strings or else appear as an explicit log factor.

Mike’s intuitive understanding was incorrect in two subtle ways:

1. Without specifying the abstract machine M, the K complexity of a string S is not meaningful. For instance, given any S, one may define an abstract machine with a single instruction that prints S, plus other instructions to make M Turing complete. That is, for any string S, there is an M_S such that complexity(S, M_S) = 1 bit. Alternatively, it would be possible to define an abstract machine M_FS that supports filesystem operations. Then the complexity using Patrick’s solution could be made well-defined by measuring the length of the concatenation of the decompressor P with a string describing the initial filesystem state.

2. Even without adversarial examples, and with a particular M specified, uniform random strings’ K complexity is only _tightly concentrated around_ the strings’ length plus a machine-dependent constant. As Patrick points out, for any given string length, some individual string exemplars may have much smaller K complexity; for instance, due to repetition.

I think you’re putting the right spin on this.

I love the drama of how the abstract is written, but TBH I don't think this is a surprise. I believe it's well-known among color theorists that large perceptual distances are inconsistent with sums of small differences. So maybe the most generous thing to say here is, good on them for bringing awareness of this subtlety to a broader audience.

I don’t see how the author’s arguments about impossibility results pertaining to “distributed sub-symbolic architectures” apply any more strongly to LLMs or DNNs than they do to human brains. Human programmers aren’t magically capable of solving the halting problem either, but we muddle through somehow.

Book golems

Wiki says they're incorporated in Netherlands.

So many footguns in this proposal! From the misleadingly symmetric symbols <= => >=, to the unintuitive behavior (for non-mathematicians) in the case of negative left argument, to the similarity to operators in other languages. Short-circuiting is already possible with the well-understood (!A || B) notation, which has the added bonus of allowing (B || !A) as an alternative with the same truth table but opposite short-circuiting. This proposal saves one “!” character at a very high cost. Just… why?