jhrmnn

3 ms·

1.
by jhrmnn 9d ago
Take the tax system and the state out of the picture. How does a mathematician convince his fellow citizens that they should fund their work? Newton didn’t have to do that, he had income from other sources and did most of his mathematical r
2.
by jhrmnn 9d ago
It seems only natural for nature to have it like this. It’d be hard for evolution to optimize things if the genotype to phenotype mapping was sharp, with phase transitions and such
3.
by jhrmnn 14d ago
It’s written from a perspective of decades, not years
4.
by jhrmnn 14d ago
It’s actually a fairly precise use of the word, just not in the very specific and narrow sense in which it has been used for AI.
5.
by jhrmnn 17d ago
Working with AI on science (not LLMs though), couldn't agree more.
6.
by jhrmnn 17d ago
I think it’s more likely that that’s because no one tried to solve such problems with them before (OpenAI apparently started working in Navier-Stokes after a rumour that someone seriously advanced the problem with AI) plus improvements in o
7.
by jhrmnn 1mo ago
I can almost see two branches of mathematics developing. One which is human-understandable, the other formally verified. I assume the latter is a strict superset of the former?
8.
by jhrmnn 2mo ago
The halting problem on steroids?
9.
by jhrmnn 2mo ago
This starts to feel like chess engines. It’s obvious their play is superior but it’s impossible for humans to understand the moves.
10.
by jhrmnn 3mo ago
Reliability is one property of a product. And it’s quantitative, not qualitative, so it all comes down to trade-offs
11.
by jhrmnn 3mo ago
The Dutch auction vs lottery are two ways to solve scalping. They differ in what one considers fair.
12.
by jhrmnn 5mo ago
When no work is safe from mechanization, surely the value of labor wrt capital must fall, and the societal pressure on redistribution will rise. The ultimate outcome of technological progress is either extreme inequality or massive redistri
13.
by jhrmnn 5mo ago
This can’t be sustainable, there must be a limit in human biology as to how complex jobs we can handle. More and more people will fall under that threshold.
14.
by jhrmnn 5mo ago
Is this a different route to the universal basic income scenario?
15.
by jhrmnn 5mo ago
Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for whi
16.
by jhrmnn 6mo ago
So most training data would be grey and a little bit coloured? Ok, that sounds plausible. But then maybe they tried and the current models get it already right 99.99% of the time, so observing any improvement is very hard.
17.
by jhrmnn 6mo ago
Because then the training data would have to be coloured
18.
by jhrmnn 6mo ago
Interesting. The debate about whether the artist matters in perceiving a piece of art is very old. You don’t seem to consider the possibility that the artist’s intent matters when listening to music. For me it absolutely does. As the AI has
19.
by jhrmnn 6mo ago
Forget the government, what about your fellow humans? Is defending your country an obligation towards your government or towards your neighbor?
20.
by jhrmnn 6mo ago
It’s interesting to read the discussion here through the lens of obligations vs rights. It would seem the rights are definitely winning.
21.
by jhrmnn 6mo ago
The cooperative and competitive sides of our soul fighting it out in a single situation
22.
by jhrmnn 6mo ago
I find it sad that while technological progress is seen almost as a given by virtually everyone, moral progress is often not even an aspiration
23.
by jhrmnn 6mo ago
Think of a woodworking project. Compare doing everything old-school by hand vs using modern tools to go faster. Think about the end product being just an item with a function vs it having some design value or even craftsmanship value. Does
24.
by jhrmnn 8mo ago
But individual behavior is not about preventing climate change, it’s about doing what’s right. It’s wrong to pollute the environment, one way or another. A single person not stealing won’t reduce the crime rate in a country yet it is the ri
25.
by jhrmnn 8mo ago
This depends very much on what "practical purposes" are. For almost all conceivable technology, relativistic quantum mechanics for electrons and light, ie QED, is sufficient fundamental theory. This is unlike before quantum mechan
26.
by jhrmnn 8mo ago
Europe was a bit customer for Russia energy, and Russia invaded an EU neighbor nonetheless. After which it stopped being the customer. So it seems like that incentive didn't really work.
27.
by jhrmnn 8mo ago
Now, let's aim at total energy consumption, not just electricity generation.
28.
by jhrmnn 9mo ago
Is it perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismogenesis ?
29.
by jhrmnn 10mo ago
It certainly engages the brain in a similar way. I agree that the forums of old were proto-social media.
30.
by jhrmnn 10mo ago
Same here. And while I may be on HN for a long time, I would fall asleep within minutes of a (good) book. Which tells me something about these two modes of entertainment

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