jessriedel

7 ms·

61.
by jessriedel 2y ago
No. That’s not what wikipedia says, and I feel confident asserting that an Earth-mass object forming on its own would not be considered a brown dwarf by the vast majority of astronomers. (Maybe it would also not be considered a “planet”,
62.
by jessriedel 2y ago
shrug I have a degree in physics and have always heard people define brown dwarfs by size (and occasionally composition) rather than formation mechanism.
63.
by jessriedel 2y ago
> My understanding is that smaller rouge plants do not form in isolation and are always the product of ejection. Wikipedia says "Rogue planets may originate from planetary systems in which they are formed and later ejected, or they
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by jessriedel 2y ago
> The definition is that a brown dwarf forms like a star through gravitational collapse within a protostellar nebula Do you have a cite on that? (It conflicts with Wikipedia, for example.) In particular, I suspect that many people read s
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by jessriedel 2y ago
I am questioning whether the article is accurately describing the scientific nomenclature. The author of course wants to say things are being “upended”, but I suspect the author just didn’t understand, or is inaccurately describing, the pre
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by jessriedel 2y ago
> But distinguishing between smaller brown dwarfs and planets requires looking at how they form. Even though they can end up about as massive as 10 Jupiters, planets always arise around a star, from its surrounding disk of gas and dust.
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by jessriedel 2y ago
My point is that it’s largely a semantics dispute, not a scientific one.
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by jessriedel 2y ago
My point isn’t that these can’t be interpreted correctly, it’s that these framings teach us nothing new because they have been repeated a thousand million times and this article does not attempt to go beyond the superficial cliche.
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by jessriedel 2y ago
This article managed to hit two classic science journalism cliches in just the first few paragraphs. (1) “Someone hypothesizing a very dramatic theory with weak evidence was considered wrong by most colleagues but later vindicated when stro
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by jessriedel 2y ago
Ok. Personally, I dispute that the designers don’t care about efficiency. I think it’s just expensive.
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by jessriedel 2y ago
The hypothetical is only interesting if we draw a distinction between easy and hard tasks. (“AI can do anything a human can do behind a keyboard” is AGI complete.) For this hypothetical I asserted that performance optimization and porting w
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by jessriedel 2y ago
The assumption of the hypothetical is not that they can deliver any feature, which I consider (maybe you disagree) more open-ended and less automatable than porting and optimization. If you think that’s an unrealistic assumption, please fee
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by jessriedel 2y ago
Because features require more human overhead to understand and manage than porting/optimizing does, by assumption of this hypothetical. Product managers and high-level architects aren’t free.
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by jessriedel 2y ago
Microsoft would hire a ton more engineers and look very different if engineer price went to ~zero. So what does that look like? If you can make an app snappy with $100 in GPU time, why wouldn’t they?
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by jessriedel 2y ago
This is often explained as “cycles are cheap, programmers are expensive”. For the sake of argument, suppose LLMs are able to replace programmers for “laborious but straightforward work” like writing native versions of your app for every pla
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by jessriedel 2y ago
There are tons of effective QFTs that can be used very accurately to predict experiments below a certain (high) energy threshold, but which are not renormalizable. This is well understood. It means that the theory needs to be augmented to u
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by jessriedel 2y ago
That's not an explanation. You could say that about a thousand things in McDonald's business. They are all a relatively small part, but in fact McDonald's has an army of people optimizing them all, and they are overall very s
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by jessriedel 2y ago
I don't understand the last sentence. If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes. And if the franchisee's are paying unnecessary costs, making a Macdonald's fran
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by jessriedel 2y ago
Shouldn’t we have a non-negligible prior on possible cancer risks at all timescales? That doesn’t mean we don’t approve drugs without 80-year clinical trials, but I think it’s a non-negligible risk that has to be accepted. For instance, my
80.
by jessriedel 2y ago
Rules degenerating into infinite whack-a-mole is a strong (though inconclusive) signal a mistake is being made. "Let's ban rent increases". "Whoops, now all the landlords are slacking on property maintenance; let's
81.
by jessriedel 2y ago
I think it’s just a personal quirk
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by jessriedel 2y ago
Also, ~every physics paper since 1993 is on the arXiv. The same is true for math and CS with later cutoffs.
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by jessriedel 2y ago
I think studying this stuff is always going to seem mysterious unless you account for the concept of fashion in science. Specifically what I mean is that two papers (or ideas or approaches) X and Y can have equal “objective scientific merit
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by jessriedel 2y ago
I’m responding to the suggestion that being on the non-engineering side explains his opinion.
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by jessriedel 2y ago
>> Almost everybody I know uses ChatGPT at least semi-regularly for all kinds of things. > Ed's perspective is from a nonengineering side, not the typical Hacker News user or LLM API consumer. ChatGPT has 200M weekly active us
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by jessriedel 2y ago
The booster does not travel more than ~50 miles.
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by jessriedel 2y ago
A major difference is that F9 (landing on a wide flat pad) had a quite wide acceptable horizontal error, 10 meters or more, whereas I think this (landing between two chopsticks) needs like ~1 meter accuracy in the radial direction.
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by jessriedel 2y ago
The booster is always returning to the general vicinity of the launch tower (either the tower itself or a barge). It isn’t used anywhere unimproved, and in particular is not used on Mars. So what scenario would it be helpful to be able to l
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by jessriedel 2y ago
Thx!
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by jessriedel 2y ago
What's the highest resolution image of the moon taken from Earth? Presumably some stitched together image from one of the large telescopes?

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