gjm11

46 ms·

511.
by gjm11 3y ago
Your second thing-that-looks-like-a-quotation does not appear to be quoted from anywhere. I don't think you should do that. (I am not sure whether your last line is your actual opinion or sarcastic, given the "no true ..." ph
512.
by gjm11 3y ago
Traffic flows more smoothly when everyone is going at about the same speed. To achieve this without communication between vehicles, you need some "obvious" speed for everyone to try to drive at. In many contexts the speed limit fi
513.
by gjm11 3y ago
For what it's worth, the Oxford English Dictionary gives two citations for the phrase, one from January 1996 and one from May 2005. It's not obvious to me from the quoted text whether the 1996 citation actually has quite the same
514.
by gjm11 3y ago
Could you be a bit more explicit here? I mean, pick a specific reasonably long period of time over which you consider real economic growth not to have been as much as say 2% per year, and explain a bit about what you think actually happened
515.
by gjm11 3y ago
The argument isn't "economic growth has to be growth in number of atoms". It's "if the economy grows at say 2% for say 10k years, without anything happening that today's physics says is downright impossible, th
516.
by gjm11 3y ago
I think the claims in the piece are fairly robust to changes in the definition of economic growth. That is: for any reasonable definition of terms like "economy", "wealth", etc., it seems (1) fairly clear that "th
517.
by gjm11 3y ago
Er, no, not in the least. Where do you get that from? Maybe something along the following lines: 1. Everyone hates either rich people or poor people. 2. I didn't get outraged at one particular thing some rich people are alleged to have
518.
by gjm11 3y ago
I assume most people aren't wealthy enough to do that, so the measure still reduces the number of cars on the road and the amount of petrol consumed. And the net effect is to transfer wealth from rich people to all the people involved
519.
by gjm11 3y ago
"Personally identifying information".
520.
by gjm11 3y ago
What's the legal status of this? I'm fairly confidently betting "illegal" since the Princeton University Press's own page about the book offers an ebook version for sale at a nontrivial price, which I doubt they wou
521.
by gjm11 3y ago
I would imagine it's a bit like doing science on human beings, who are also non-deterministic, expensive to train, and subjective. Perhaps there's scope for a scientific discipline corresponding to psychology but concerned with AI
522.
by gjm11 3y ago
I'd like to see some evidence that he was ultimately driven insane by trying to reconcile too many incompatible beliefs; I have never heard that before and am not convinced it's true. (He certainly seems to have been something of
523.
by gjm11 3y ago
Unless the matrices are rather small, this is much more efficient than Laplace expansion. To compute the determinant of an n-by-n matrix with Laplace expansion, you compute n determinants of matrices one size smaller. So if we write D(n) fo
524.
by gjm11 3y ago
That isn't only more cryptic, it's also potentially a lot more efficient -- strlen takes time proportional to the length of the string, which of course you don't need to do if you only care whether or not the length is zero
525.
by gjm11 3y ago
I'd be interested to see the evidence for that.
526.
by gjm11 3y ago
You forgot arguably the best one: "Spotted dick". (It's a sort of steamed pudding.)
527.
by gjm11 3y ago
There are plenty of other equal-area map projections. Several of them are less shape-distorting than the Peters projection. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_projection . Peters did a great job of public
528.
by gjm11 3y ago
How are you determining what is "virtue signalling" as opposed to, say, virtue? It's not clear to me whether you mean (1) the companies are virtue-signalling or (2) the purpose of their products is so that their customers
529.
by gjm11 3y ago
I had a look at the comments on this post. I don't see any saying anything at all about gender, pronouns, trans-ness, etc. (Other than in this little discussion right here about what is allegedly wrong with HN.) I have showdead on, i
530.
by gjm11 3y ago
A couple of more drastic examples to ram home the point that pronouns refer to things (or maybe ideas of things ) rather than to words as such. You and I walk into the office and I point at one of the people sitting at a computer. "He
531.
by gjm11 3y ago
This seems like an odd use of language to me -- the pronoun refers back to a particular thing , not a particular word , and the thing that's needed for clarity and definiteness is that there should be one thing , not one word . Con
532.
by gjm11 3y ago
Am I misunderstanding "one-word" here? So far as I can see there's nothing wrong with the pronoun use in these, all of which have more-than-one-word antecedents: "The last-but-one president of the United States met today
533.
by gjm11 3y ago
You've made two complaints that I can't reconcile with one another. (1) That it was discovered that the data from ground weather stations were a mess. (2) That it's terribly suspicious that between 1999 and 2019 NASA's
534.
by gjm11 3y ago
1. Noted. (I don't think this is a strong effect and think it is outweighed by the fact that the full-time researchers know and understand more.) 2. I said "funded by" rather than "employed by". For instance, consid
535.
by gjm11 3y ago
Well, obviously what I say must be wrong if you guessed that someone might say it. Indeed, someone might say "95%" because they want to make the same sort of impression as if they said "100%" but to be able to hide behin
536.
by gjm11 3y ago
I don't think "generally being right" is the same thing as "literally never getting anything wrong". Not every specific claim in "An Inconvenient Truth" was correct. That doesn't tell us much about wh
537.
by gjm11 3y ago
I agree that the Othello paper isn't, and couldn't be, strong evidence about what sort of model of the world (if any) something like GPT-4 has. However, I think it is (importantly) pretty much a refutation of all claims along th
538.
by gjm11 3y ago
Fair comment. The other thing that feels weird to me about the "argument from Slavic pessimism" is that it seems like an argument whose target is fundamentally different from that of everything else you're saying. You begin b
539.
by gjm11 3y ago
It's a bit odd to describe this as addressing the likes of Yudkowsky when, so far as I can tell, Yudkowsky agrees with you and does not think we have any realistic prospect of figuring out how to make AI systems that are provably safe,
540.
by gjm11 3y ago
Not quite. Moore's law, strictly , is about the growth of transistor density. Koomey's law, strictly , is about the improvement in computation per unit energy. Those are both interesting, but frequently people care about somethi

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