radford-neal

Natural selection doesn't work like that. Having two offspring is good. Having three offspring is even better. Having ten offspring is really great. More than than ten is greater still...

There's a common theory that for mice, they're unlikely to survive for many years because of predation, so there's not much benefit to preventing aging in later years. Small benefit means any counterbalancing disadvantages (lower vigour?) could outweigh the anti-aging benefit, or that the force of selection is insufficient to overcome random mutations that degrade the anti-aging mechanism, but "that's good enough, no need for more" is not how evolution works.

Evolution is the unifying concept underlying all of biology. Finding and testing evolutionary explanations may be difficult, but not looking for such explanations is akin to saying to someone speculating about why, say, some wooden structures are stronger than others, that "I find these explanations of physical effects in terms of gravity and electromagnetism very unconvincing". Wood is a complex material, so understanding its properties is difficult. But if your explanation of wood's properties is incompatible with fundamental physics then there's something wrong with it.

Similarly, explanations of aging that amount to "the body just for no reason fails to do something that it easily could even though it's obviously beneficial" are pretty much like explanations of physical processes that violate conservation of mass/energy. There had better be some possible evolutionary explanation, since otherwise it's very likely that the result is due to some experimental error.

Being in wikipedia doesn't make it right. At most it means that several people have made the same mistake.

A "centibillionaire" has 10 million in assets.

I think you meant "hectobillionaire".

If they aren't competent to run the evals safely, then they shouldn't run them.

The huggingface incident seems to have resulted from them partially mirroring a repository, but for no reason I can see not fully mirroring it, after which they could have unplugged the ethernet cable. This is just stupid.

Yes, they're stupid. Maybe also highly intelligent. But stupid.

Also irresponsible.

Not quite. If the statement is provable, an algorithm can find the proof by just looking at all possible proofs, in order of length. (It's assumed that that a valid proof can be algorithmically confirmed to be valid - there's an algorithm that when given a purported proof will eventually output "valid" if it is in fact valid.) The algorithm will find a proof eventually, if there is one. If there is a (provable) counterexample, the algorithm will similarly eventually find that. What Goedel's incompleteness theorem says is that such a search algorithm may never terminate - never finding a proof, and never finding a counterexample.

(The algorithms described above are of course completely impractical, taking time exponential in the length of the proof (of theorem or counterexample).)

If I understand this comment correctly, it's saying that Micron and the others would be better off selling RAM at below the price they could get, in order to keep competitors from deciding to enter the market.

Such collusion might well be a violation of anti-trust law, but in any case, it wouldn't work. If they decide to sell at below-market price, they must (by definition) be preventing some customers from buying by some non-price mechanism (eg, only selling to companies run by other members of the CEO's family). Potential competitors would then see an opportunity to sell to these excluded customers.

Sorry, fumble fingering on my part...

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Public opinion is not a binary. It could certainly move further against Trump, and just as significantly, it could move in the direction of free trade, whose opponents include plenty of people other than Trump.

What's madness is continuing policies that antagonize other countries, and which are bad for Canada, just to make yourself feel better about having "elbows up".

If a bear is rampaging around your campsite do you think you have to "take a stand"?

This isn't some sort of status game. Well, maybe it is for Trump, but not for anyone who's not an idiot. Unfortunately, Carney is an idiot, and is in it for himself and his friends, not Canada.

The way to deal with the bear to the south is to first get rid of all the stupid stuff that is bad for Canadians regardless of Trump, like provincial liquor monopolies and dairy supply management. Don't ask for anything in return - Trump's word is no good anyway - but it may help with public opinion in the US. It will also help with better trade relations with other countries. After getting these other countries to open up as much as they're inclined, unilaterally eliminate tariffs on all countries (including the US). It's what's best for Canadians, apart from a few who profit off the lack of competition from other countries.

For bonus points, get rid of sales taxes, so there is zero friction importing things to Canada. That's great for consumers, and also great for any business that wants to continue or establish itself in Canada.

Yeah. I'm not sure how one would handle that. (Can't remember if Whitehead & Russell had any inherent operator precedence.)

So may be most useful if you don't have inherent precedence, as might be the case if you're not dealing with the standard math operators.

Alternatively, one might say the dots override inherent precedence. So

    a *. b*c+d*e

means

    a * (b*c+d*e)

with the inherent precedence disambiguating the right operand of *.

It's better visually. No dot, ., :, :., ::, ::., :::, etc. have increasing visual weight, which shows which are the more top-level operators without having to match up parentheses.

The notation for avoiding parentheses is interesting, and I've thought that it might be useful in programming languages.

To illustrate, suppose you have a non-associative operator $. Rather than write a$(b$c), you can write a$.b$c - the . makes the $ before it be lower precedence on the right side. More dots make things be even lower precedence.

So, for example,

    a$b .$: x$y .$. p$q

means

    (a$b) $ ((x$y) $ (p$q))

At least, that's my recollection. It's been over fifty years since I read (significant parts of) it...