snarkconjecture

> The standard cosmological model affords no such explanation

Einstein GR → Friedmann eqns → universe can be expanding or contracting

Rest of this amounts to "what about initial conditions? things become divergent at t→0"

Yes, this is called the Big Bang singularity, GR breaks down there. You are not the first person to notice this. It is considered one of the biggest open problems in the field.

The stuff about accelerating expansion is confused (AI?) slop which eventually gets around to admitting that there's no problem at t>0 and no change to the existing problem at t=0, so I don't know why you didn't just cut it.

This is some real "unsolicited snail mail to physics departments"-tier content, even for HN I think it's embarrassing to have this on the front page.

I guess because every code monkey in Silicon Valley has wet dreams about overthrowing the hidebound physics establishment for some reason

On the one hand it's much more realistic and detailed than an after-image; if I picture a red apple, and someone asks what kind of apple it was, I can retroactively say "oh, like a Red Delicious, really dark and shiny and with that concave part, not at all like a Macintosh or whatever. But it was a bit rounder than a normal Red Delicious probably because I was averaging towards a kind of typical 'red apple'."

(FWIW I think I'm near the upper end of detailed visualizing.)

But on the other hand it isn't located in my visual field, it's kind of in its own separate visual field. It doesn't have a spatial relationship to the objects in front of me and doesn't occlude them (although when I'm visualizing something carefully I lose a lot of my awareness of what I'm actually looking at because I'm not attending to it, even if my eyes are wide open).

I think the most important question here is whether Huggingface was "in on it" – whether they knew in advance that this was going to happen and agreed to it. Second most important is whether OAI caused this to happen on purpose, with HF as an unwilling target.

Three options:

(1) Both companies are lying through their teeth and the entire thing is bullshit

(2) OpenAI hacked another company's servers and deliberately gambled on felony charges for the sake of PR

(3) OpenAI is telling the truth and a rogue AI agent hacked another company, opening them up to legal liability accidentally

All three of these are a lot more interesting than the "skeptical" story that this is just OAI doing business-as-usual PR hype, nothing to see here, move along.

(FWIW, I strongly doubt HF was in on it.)

It's absolutely not a trivial combination of prior work, or mathematicians would've found it already. This was not an obscure conjecture.

Checking the counterexample is a Calc II problem. Finding it was beyond the efforts of the best algebraic geometers for almost a century.

Current LLMs can absolutely multiply floats without a tool call. In fact, that's a much more rote symbol-manipulation task than doing original math research.

No, it's ^J because `J` is 0x4A in ASCII and `\n` is 0x0A, just as `I` is 0x49 and `\t` (tab, ^I) is 0x09.

In the stone age, pressing CTRL flipped that bit, so ^J is literally "ctrl-J".

Unless I'm mistaken, this uses "standard deviation" to refer to standard error throughout. They differ by a factor of sqrt(num_samples).

This is actually much more commonly useful than the t distribution, in my experience. You can squint at a histogram (or some summary stats), eyeball the stdev, approximate the stderr in your head, and get a pretty good sense of confidence.

I most often find myself doing this for the Bernoulli distribution, where it's also handy to know that the stdev is sqrt(p(1-p)), or "about 1/2 if p is middling, or sqrt(p) when it's small" (and you can flip the polarity to handle p→1).

The map contains a bunch of references to America, the West Indies, Guiana, and Mexico. (Often with a connotation of "faraway exotic place" or "exciting new international development".)

He may not have written about the British colonies but the New World was clearly at least somewhat present in his mind and his audience's minds.

> These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.

This was about the Fukushima reactors that were completely destroyed? In response to a discussion of Belgian reactors that are completely different?

> the underlying working principles are the same as GPT-2

I don't think anyone was claiming otherwise. Sonnet is still better at writing code than GPT-2, and worse than Opus. Workflows that work with Opus won't always work with Sonnet, just as you can't use GPT-2 in place of Sonnet to do code autocomplete.

I am much more likely to fault them for omitting important information specifically to hide a weak point of the product rather than out of laziness.

Write a Python quine with three or four hands tied behind your back

Computer screens have three-dimensional color spaces. Tetrachromacy doesn't change that.