gjm11

5 ms·

1.
by gjm11 5d ago
> It is just an algorithm, we know how it works, We know what calculations it does. We have some hazy idea of some bits of how those calculations lead to something that at least somewhat resembles intelligent behaviour. But that's a
2.
by gjm11 5d ago
> How many human-years were invested in solving the same problem, before they were overtaken in the last few days by an AI? 90? Not even: that's just the time since Jeal Leray's statement of the problem in 1934. 26, if you want
3.
by gjm11 5d ago
Can a human? (Evidently not, since humans hadn't managed to do it even with the entirety of human knowledge available to them.)
4.
by gjm11 5d ago
I am a mathematician, though I haven't been in academia for many years, and I would indeed be surprised if there were a lot of mathematicians who "just memorize proofs". Do you really mean that, and if so what's your evi
5.
by gjm11 8d ago
Oops, that was an oversight: indeed you don't get all the rationals I need for what I wrote until "one day later" (in Knuth's terminology). Regrettably I'm too late to edit what I wrote above.
6.
by gjm11 8d ago
Not only is the basic idea simple, it's a sort of generalization of two other things that were already well known but before Conway were thought of as completely independent. First: the construction of the real numbers from (traditiona
7.
by gjm11 8d ago
I don't think this is your fault; the description isn't very explicit. Let me try to do a bit better. (I'll also try to go somewhat further , and you should not be discouraged if at some point it stops making sense.) You can
8.
by gjm11 12d ago
This seems pretty bullshitty to me. The article says "A single firm, Irregular, is responsible for hacking done by all three companies" but I can't see anything in the article that actually justifies this claim. The nearest t
9.
by gjm11 12d ago
I suspect EdwardDiego is referring to the brouhaha about whether OpenAI's training for the model that produced the alleged solution to the Millennium Problem about the Navier-Stokes equations was trained on material that included conve
10.
by gjm11 14d ago
British plugs are worse to step on, not because the pins are any worse to have jammed into your foot but because the design of the plugs means that if you leave one unplugged on the floor there's an excellent chance that it ends up in
11.
by gjm11 14d ago
> Most supermarket "sourdough type" bread, even some quite expensive stuff, is a modified Chorleywood process. Most ciabatta are. I assume this is one reason why most supermarket "sourdough type" bread is, well, not g
12.
by gjm11 14d ago
There are British companies that sell (among other things) flour made from Canadian wheat. The specific one whose flours I use for my (very amateur) bread baking is Shipton Mill. I tend to make my bread using some of their very strong Canad
13.
by gjm11 16d ago
The previous discussion shows no obvious signs to me of being flagged, but perhaps it did at some earlier point. What is your evidence that they flagged it, please? (And by "they" do you mean Anthropic ? How would they have the
14.
by gjm11 16d ago
My understanding of what Anthropic are saying about this is that the labs in question aren't forwarding things to Claude to make money nor even to look better to the customers whose queries they forward to Claude but to get access
15.
by gjm11 16d ago
Hyperactive attention-detection. It's a reference to the idea that the origin of religious beliefs might be an inbuilt propensity to think of other bits of the world as conscious agents paying attention to us, because it's much mo
16.
by gjm11 20d ago
If you aren't an excellent speller and you are asked to count the number of some letter occurring in a passage of text, you will look at its written/printed form and go through the letters one by one. This is, indeed, a pretty eas
17.
by gjm11 22d ago
It is. And human beings are bags of chemicals. But for many purposes you will not find it helpful to think of human beings as bags of chemicals, and for many purposes you will not find it helpful to think of LLMs as next-token predictors.
18.
by gjm11 22d ago
This is a bit of a digression, but: It's an interesting question what (if anything) that larger dynamic range means . One thing you'll hear people say sometimes -- I've said it myself -- is that this shows that in some sense
19.
by gjm11 22d ago
That particular one may be no longer a thing, but there are definitely still plenty of puzzle hunts going on. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzzle_hunt which has a list.
20.
by gjm11 22d ago
I am not enthusiastic about criteria for human-like intelligence that imply that dyslexic people don't have human-like intelligence. [EDITED to add:] I actually don't know whether dyslexic people find it difficult to count letters
21.
by gjm11 23d ago
Well, they could have written something like "The 2.0 release itself will be in the next few weeks" or "It will be a few weeks before the actual 2.0 release". (But I agree that "land" is fine here, and the rest
22.
by gjm11 27d ago
Obviously majorness is a matter of degree. And, yes, different people can weight things differently when deciding what's major. But you can't escape having to decide that sort of thing -- after all, you can't hold referenda o
23.
by gjm11 27d ago
I think the reason is probably that the relevant maintainer doesn't see DHH as someone it's embarrassing to be citing with approval, not because politics and technology are separable but because he shares the views a lot of peop
24.
by gjm11 27d ago
> A leave voter would argue for exactly the same thing - a clear majority need to vote to remain. But that's exactly what I'm saying is importantly not symmetrical. Making major changes has extra costs beyond the advantages a
25.
by gjm11 27d ago
What, as precisely as you can say, is the difference between an illusion of reasoning and reasoning ? (I am not claiming that there is none. But I personally would define "reasoning" in terms of its structure and its results, a
26.
by gjm11 27d ago
Plurality ("first past the post") voting systems always converge to a two-party system. There's even a theorem saying so, though of course the real world isn't always so polite as to behave the way the mathematics tells
27.
by gjm11 27d ago
In my more cynical moments I think that was the whole point of Brexit. An awful lot of the big names in the pro-Brexit movement were in one sort of investment-management business or another, and I'd love to see what positions they an
28.
by gjm11 27d ago
You can flip any argument, but there isn't real symmetry here. If a change would be large and far-reaching and painful to undo, then it should be more difficult to make. Not impossible, of course: sometimes you need to make large far
29.
by gjm11 28d ago
Very unlike Obamacare, which so far as I can make out was mostly a name given to the thing by its (and Obama's) opponents .
30.
by gjm11 28d ago
> You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal, I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such

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