gjm11

12 ms·

91.
by gjm11 7mo ago
I think there may be a bit less to that one than meets the eye. In Swiss law there's some kind of right-of-reply thing where if someone puts something about you in print and you think it's wrong you may be entitled to have some so
92.
by gjm11 7mo ago
One thing in the article that strikes me as very strange is this: " I suppose that, on a practical level, a take-home for the practicing mathematician is that if you use ChatGPT, don’t trust it to generate valid proofs, and even when i
93.
by gjm11 7mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw8SSQHQitg is Lindsay Graham in 2016 defending the Republicans' refusal to consider a nomination to the Supreme Court in the last year of Obama's presidency, and saying "you c
94.
by gjm11 7mo ago
What is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. (The form in which Christopher Hitchens actually stated "Hitchens' Razor" is more symmetrical but unfortunately wrong : "What can be asserted without
95.
by gjm11 7mo ago
It was worse than you remember. You could have 640x256 in monochrome , or 320x256 with 4 colours, or 160x256 with 16 colours (which IIRC was actually 8 distinct colours plus 8 flashing versions of them). The game Elite did something extr
96.
by gjm11 7mo ago
Most of that complication is there because times and dates are actually complicated . You can have a nice simple API that doesn't expose the complication only if you're happy for it to encourage false assumptions and wrong behavi
97.
by gjm11 7mo ago
You've probably tried this already, but just in case: If you can find a copy of his PhD thesis it's likely (or at least would be likely without the information that you've had trouble tracking down his advisor) to have some m
98.
by gjm11 8mo ago
It's a standard way of proving that transcendental numbers exist , because it's easy to construct very well-approximable numbers, but so far as I know it isn't a common way to prove that a number you were already interest
99.
by gjm11 8mo ago
You can console yourself with the fact that your laptop, unlike one of the new ones if you'd bought that instead, can run macOS Sequoia (without "Liquid Glass") rather than Tahoe.
100.
by gjm11 8mo ago
If you take thousands of photographs of human faces and average them out (even if you do it just by roughly aligning them, overlaying, and averaging the pixels) then what you get is a (perhaps blurry but) notably more attractive than avera
101.
by gjm11 8mo ago
Yup, it's common. (I'm fairly sure this or something very similar was the first way I ever saw it done.)
102.
by gjm11 8mo ago
My goal was to help other people not make the same mistake as I initially did, of thinking that Peter Woit had made some criticism of the latest claim of GPT-5.2 making a new discovery in theoretical physics, which in fact he appears not to
103.
by gjm11 8mo ago
For the sake of clarity: Woit's post is not about the same alleged instance of GPT producing new work in theoretical physics, but about an earlier one from November 2025. Different author, different area of theoretical physics.
104.
by gjm11 8mo ago
It seems possible that people in the Philippines providing advice to Waymo vehicles in the US get some training on US road signage, traffic regulations, etc. (I can't see how it would make any sense for Waymo to pay people to do this a
105.
by gjm11 9mo ago
This is wrong, although something quite like it is right. Imagine that there are only 10 Waymo journeys per year, and every year one of them hits a child near an elementary school, while there are 1000000 non-Waymo journeys per year, and ev
106.
by gjm11 9mo ago
> they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions That seems wrong to me. Generally when a new edition of something is put out it's (at least nominally) because they've made improvements . ("At least nominal
107.
by gjm11 9mo ago
Well, the Nordic countries are already pretty well prepared for the alternative of ice.
108.
by gjm11 9mo ago
Same purpose, different grammatical structure. Heaney's famous translation begins "So. The Spear-Danes ..." with that "So" being an interjection, a thing that could in principle stand on its own. (You might say &quo
109.
by gjm11 9mo ago
I'm having trouble finding any evidence for that. E.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20030808111721/https://edition.c... -- here's a thing from February of that year that (if I'm understand
110.
by gjm11 9mo ago
When was he at the head of the Reform party?
111.
by gjm11 9mo ago
I agree that we should be reading books with our eyes and that feeding a book into an LLM doesn't constitute reading it and confers few of the same benefits. But this thing isn't (so far as I can tell) even slightly proposing that
112.
by gjm11 9mo ago
It looks like the figure they're attacking is meant to be St Anthony, rather than God.
113.
by gjm11 9mo ago
What does "challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly" mean? (My impression is that Grokipedia was announced, everyone looked it and laughed because it was so obviously basically taking content from Wikipedia and making it worse, and sinc
114.
by gjm11 9mo ago
There's another HN thread specifically asking people for links to their personal websites. I suspect an accidental typing-in-the-wrong-reply-box issue.
115.
by gjm11 9mo ago
The person you're replying to is obviously and explicitly aware that that is another scenario, and the whole point of their comment was to argue against it and explain why they think something else is more likely. Merely restating the
116.
by gjm11 9mo ago
> there's zero reason The comment you are replying to articulated, I think rather clearly, one reason why maybe we should. I think what you actually mean is that the reasons not to ("sex work is unsavory") outweigh the rea
117.
by gjm11 9mo ago
FWIW, if you did that to my house I'd be upset and angry and not much inclined to use the word "just" about it, but no, I wouldn't say you'd been violent to me. (I would say you'd been violent to me if you&#x27
118.
by gjm11 9mo ago
It feels to me like there's a distinction between "on one occasion, one person in group X did Y" and "group X does Y", and it's the second of those that (for some choices of Y, including "attacking police
119.
by gjm11 9mo ago
There's rather a lot in the Bible that no one would regard as suitable reading for children if it were from any other book.
120.
by gjm11 9mo ago
I don't think you should be posting the answer to the current question unobfuscated, especially when there's no way for curious readers to get any other question after having that one spoiled (other than waiting for, at the mome

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