ttctciyf
Joined 13 years ago
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Jul 25
Recent submissions
Comment · 16 days ago
Comment · 1 month ago
Yeah, the best advice is: Don't. Write it yourself; make judgements; learn.
In general use today, AI primarily functions as a stupidity amplifier: it empowers dumb people to do dumb things more pervasively, with less effort, and at unprecedented scale.
We're moving into an era of artificially enhanced stupidity.
Comment · 2 months ago
Number theorist Manjul Bhargava[0] presents an accessible overview of fascinating recent work on n-dimensional extensions of magic squares, explaining the construction of, and showing in public for the first time, a "most perfect" magic tesseract with the same properties as the Khajuraho magic square[1] at ICM 2026[2]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manjul_Bhargava
Comment · 3 months ago
The only explosive growth we're seeing out of the ongoing tech bonanza is growth in inequality, afaics.
Comment · 3 months ago
Yes! As a frequent user of youtube queues, it feels like they have a dedicated team of one or two junior devs to futz around with it on a weekly basis and zero QA, because it is always breaking in new, unexpected ways.
"Everything is broken" used to mean "all software is insecure because the inherent complexity of a modern software stack ensures it's beyond the abilities of the average developer to eliminate all attack vectors" [1].
Now it just means [2].
1: https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1
Comment · 3 months ago
We're really getting into Computers Don't Argue[0] territory here, eh?
0: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
(available in Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2 at https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ah... , p.133)
Comment · 3 months ago
I've long admired Chaitin for his original thinking and especially his ability to clearly convey his ideas about foundations, complexity and information in concise and digestible short proofs.
I'm a little surprised, however, to see him here proselytizing for a particular side in the constructivism debate. I associate him more with what he has described as a "quasi empirical" approach to mathematics[0] where the adoption of new axioms (such as for example the axiom of choice) is justified by their resulting in new, interesting mathematics.
But here, it seems his goal is to arrive at a somewhat Platonic conclusion, that either the reals are valid numbers or (seemingly he prefers) not.
My lay and naive take would be: if you adopt these rules (this Formal Axiomatic System) then you can have Big Fun in the playground of ever more esoteric and complex infinite cardinals, or if you adopt this other FAS you get to discover which results can and can't be obtained under a strict constructivist regime, and whichever FAS you choose it's just the same process of choosing axioms and applying valid deductive steps to arrive at a result you find interesting, with no more "existence" implied than the thoroughly non-Platonic existence of a solution to a problem, which can be demonstrated by solving it: if you take such-and-such steps then such-and-such result will follow.
I suppose the point being made is that avoiding axioms which imply the "existence" of the reals is more useful for doing physics, but that seems non-obvious in a field which for the last 200 years has seemingly sought to progressively make more and more phenomena intelligible by means of differential equations from infinitesimal calculus!
0: see, for example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0303352, 1.9 Is Mathematics Quasi-Empirical
Comment · 4 months ago
> @ttctciyf you are marked dead. Not sure why.
Beats me too! Thanks for the heads up.
Comment · 4 months ago
Clearly Amazon don't want their code fixed.
Comment · 4 months ago
Reminds me of something I saw on shadertoy a while back:
> wiggly string-like texture from treating a noise field as an angle and sampling the curvature, with some dodgy trig.
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XssGD8
I wonder if the gifs in TFA would translate into the shader animation domain?
Comment · 5 months ago
archive.ph came through on this one:
Comment · 5 months ago
Me too. From duckduck's search result excerpt it seems to be something of a departure from the normal string theory skepticism at Peter Woit's blog:
> The US/Israeli wars and threats to end Iranian civilization with massive bombardment have drawn attention away from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Looking back, the Columbia students with their encampment were very much right about what was going on.
Comment · 5 months ago
Baseline epistemic hygiene would tend to preclude taking llm advice seriously, on any personal matter of consequence, in my view.
However "baseline" epistemic hygiene seems to be a somewhat distant goal for the vast majority now we live in an infosphere essentially comprising a Darwinian nightmare of competing agnotological agendas.
Comment · 5 months ago
Personally, as a gmail user of about 2 decades, this is the first I've heard of this particular issue, probably because for some years I don't even read past the word "smart" before disabling whatever feature du jour is being pushed in my face.
I'm just now migrating away from gmail for a different kind of inanity[1] all the same.
This is already SOP in large companies that seek reductions in support and customer service overheads. It has been for a while.
The only plausible fix is legislation mandating a reasonable level of _human_ support for all customers and clients and accountability for maintaining it.
Plausible until you consider the political obstacles to getting something like that enacted, that is.