gjm11

7 ms·

31.
by gjm11 2mo ago
> Stating that a blog post with an argument is sensible normally indicates you feel the argument itself is sensible. Yup. I feel that the argument in the blogpost is sensible. That is not the same thing as thinking that a particular poli
32.
by gjm11 2mo ago
I explained in some detail why "I think the blogpost is sensible" is not the same thing as "I think this particular thing that the blogpost argues might be a good idea is a sensible thing". Your response is to ignore all
33.
by gjm11 2mo ago
> Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible? Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said. I'll come back to that later. Anyway: As I said in an earlier comment, not everythi
34.
by gjm11 2mo ago
You are (and perhaps the other person also is) mixing up three questions. 1. Does doing X have costs? 2. If so, and if X is done, who should pay those costs? 3. Should we make X illegal? In the present case, first-cousin marriage does have
35.
by gjm11 2mo ago
> Nobody said they were. No. But what the NHS blog thing said was that this particular thing shouldn't be illegal , and you appear to be arguing that that's bad because it's unwise and can increase pressure on the communi
36.
by gjm11 2mo ago
I don't think I understand; would you care to be more explicit?
37.
by gjm11 2mo ago
It's a guess rather than an assumption -- I wouldn't be astonished if it turned out to be a wrong guess -- but there was a reason for it: some of the comment seemed to require "bottom" to be about wealth, and other bits
38.
by gjm11 2mo ago
Here is the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press): https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genom... Readers may judge f
39.
by gjm11 2mo ago
My impression was that OP was using it rather fuzzily, conflating "poor" and "bad" and "unpleasant to be around" and whatever other notions of "bottom" might be floating in the air, in the service of
40.
by gjm11 2mo ago
Pretty much all of that is false. The rules I'm expected to follow based on the bottom quintile are generally rules that are no trouble for me to follow. The taxes I pay support way more than just the bottom quintile. I'm actually
41.
by gjm11 2mo ago
A couple of other remarks. 1. In the first of those cases, with the biased coin, suppose that in the second phase you flip it _thousands_ of times and it comes up with N+1 heads and N tails. Then the statistical significance of the overall
42.
by gjm11 2mo ago
It is not true that another finding in the same direction should always increase the statistical significance. Suppose you've got a coin; null hypothesis is that it comes up heads and tails equally often. I flip the coin 5 times and ge
43.
by gjm11 2mo ago
I don't think anyone is, or plans to be, watermarking AI-generated code as opposed to text . [EDITED to add:] As pointed out by a helpful comment below, I was misremembering: Anthropic do apply their watermarking to code, they jus
44.
by gjm11 2mo ago
> I got downvoted to -4 points > You burned me at the stake like a witch for heresy. I think you should try to get a better sense of proportion. Also: > my simple point that although the Principia Mathematica tried to do the imposs
45.
by gjm11 2mo ago
The version of this story I heard is in Littlewood's "A Mathematician's Miscellany"[1] and it's a sigma rather than an x. But he tells it as something that happened specifically to him -- he wrote a memo that ende
46.
by gjm11 2mo ago
I agree that "tell me the man" feels weird. I still don't see what's wrong with "of many turnings". To me, "driven far journeys" is a bit worse than "tell me the man" (and quite similar in k
47.
by gjm11 2mo ago
You're making two separable criticisms: (1) that Fable's translation is a mere "mishmash of Lattimore and Fagles" and (2) that it's a crappy one. I'm not seeing, from what you quote, how this is more "mish
48.
by gjm11 2mo ago
No. (I would try to explain how my meaning differs from what you thought I meant, but I am quite unable to figure out what you thought I meant.)
49.
by gjm11 2mo ago
There are and have been lots of people doing great work without generating large investment returns, because they aren't doing the kind of work that generates large investment returns at all. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Newton, Gauss, E
50.
by gjm11 2mo ago
Unfortunately the prompt may have been something like "investigate this bug and file an issue when you think you understand what's going on". The "better just to share the prompt" heuristic falls down when the actua
51.
by gjm11 2mo ago
I'm not sure whether your "adversary determined to reclaim its own lands" is Europe's adversary (Russia, wanting to take Ukraine) or Canada's adversary (the United States, wanting to take Canada) but in neither case
52.
by gjm11 2mo ago
I'm not sure that's right. The conjecture is (claimed to be, by the people who explicitly made it) simply a reformulation of a claim made by Maxwell in his "Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" of 1873.
53.
by gjm11 3mo ago
This seems very closely related to this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20075 which describes how you can use LLMs to hide a piece of text in another text of (typically approximately) the same length. Here's what that
54.
by gjm11 3mo ago
Most of Wolfram's discussion of "bugs" is not about the following situation: You want a program that does X. So you think about what a program that does X should look like, and write a program that does what you think should
55.
by gjm11 3mo ago
> This is not really worse on purpose. They made a product so good no one ever bought it again and they couldn't afford to keep making immortal products. I don't understand how "their first product was too good, so they ha
56.
by gjm11 3mo ago
On the other hand, see https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i... where Freddie deBoer shows some instances where Pangram is definitely giving wrong or misleading results. (Somewhat-plausible-to-me
57.
by gjm11 3mo ago
Apologies if I am simply missing a joke (which I think is true with p~=0.3), but: At least some of these are definitely real things. For instance: "BGP" is the Boundary Gateway Protocol. "Lamport OTS" is a one-time digit
58.
by gjm11 3mo ago
I think I might have trouble with that approach for "harder/denser non-fiction" because for such reading I might well want to stop and think from time to time -- maybe there's an argument I'm not convinced by and wa
59.
by gjm11 3mo ago
Oh, come on. Some things require skill to use most effectively. It's fair enough to consider this a failure if the thing in question is "making a phone call", but when it's something like "getting an AI system to do
60.
by gjm11 3mo ago
Some thoughts about the timer, since it's what everyone wants to talk about :-) -- I find that with things like this my distribution of times is extremely uneven: I get most words in a few seconds, but every now and then one comes alon

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