okintheory

9 ms·

31.
by okintheory 3y ago
One funny thing about MA is how happily he broadcasts his white supremacist tendencies on Twitter (by following lots of creepy ones). Makes me hope he won't be in charge of changing my world. EDIT: e.g. @FistedFoucault, @empathyhaver,
32.
by okintheory 4y ago
Batteries are not really considered at realistic option for airplanes, AFAIK. The best hope is that they can use synthetic fuel, at a cost of, say, x7 the current price. Regulation could definitely help make that happen -- and those who fly
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by okintheory 4y ago
Ah, the days when this was a well-known quote...
34.
by okintheory 4y ago
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
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by okintheory 4y ago
I agree it's rather sad to see such an over-the-top presentation in Quanta. Staying more grounded would definitely serve their longer term credibility. Perhaps surprisingly, NYTimes did better this time: https://www.nytimes.
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by okintheory 4y ago
Earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33512338 This isn't work directly on RH, but something in that direction.
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by okintheory 4y ago
People might be reading too much into the 'demon' stuff: At least in Denmark, all medieval churches had devils painted on the ceiling. Could be the guy just thought it fit well in this Norwegian church too?
38.
by okintheory 4y ago
Suppose you're broke and then some rich guy walks up to you on the street and loudly proclaims "throwing plastic in this river next to us would be terrible! I would never do it! But, would you mind taking this plastic cup for me?
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by okintheory 4y ago
If any expected value matters, it's utility, not wealth. If you think utility is linear in wealth, you need to check Jeff Bezos' instagram more.
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by okintheory 4y ago
Writing 'state' is arguably inaccurate if you read it as 'nation state', but taxation in gold by city states goes way back to early city states and more generally gold has a very long history of being accepted as payment
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by okintheory 4y ago
The point was that Lagarde is a complete idiot for saying that Bitcoin has no (future) value? But, a fairly sound argument can be made that this is a plausible prediction, in part on the basis that Bitcoin is likely fail as 'money&#x27
42.
by okintheory 4y ago
Actually, the explanations for why bitcoin has value coming from different supporters is quite different, e.g. some argue it is useful as a means of payment, some argue it isn't but it will be, some argue it is only useful as a store o
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by okintheory 4y ago
It seems a bit off to assert that "people feel it is a price worth paying" when almost all purchases online are made with credit cards which have some protections against fraud, and almost none are made with blockchains in compari
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by okintheory 4y ago
It's little-oh, not Big-Oh (o(1) is not O(1)). Instead $f(n) = o(1)$ means $\lim_{n \to infty f(n)} = 0$. So $m^{1+o(1)}$ is smaller than $m^1.00001$ for large enough m.
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by okintheory 5y ago
I don't know about this significance of something like this, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. I know in Denmark, academics have fought to convince regional administrations to contract companies to build open source software,
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by okintheory 5y ago
The parent comment was saying that when you fix the number of heads to be k in advance, the set of head positions you get is random. That sounds correct.
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Spectral and Algebraic Graph Theory(cs-www.cs.yale.edu)
99 points by okintheory 5y ago|4 comments
48.
by okintheory 5y ago
I saw a link posted to a rather short note on graphs and linear algebra. I thought I'd better do some advertising for the real deal!
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by okintheory 5y ago
That's what I meant, but I see the phrasing is ambiguous...
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by okintheory 5y ago
Good point, or it would be, if only the world had not shoehorned misogyny into almost every little bit of our history.
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by okintheory 5y ago
I don't understand the downvotes. Whenever you find out that an institution you interact with was used to enable a child prostitution scheme, it should cause a moment of reflection, not a reflexive downvote.
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by okintheory 5y ago
This is my current understanding: Basically, once you're this rich, you can take hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of loans to cover anything you'd like to spend. Now, you can make sure that you're actually &q
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by okintheory 5y ago
"The price for doing an urban installation was padded; it was padded - padded with the money that stopped the fibres coming out of the pavement and getting ripped up." If you think this is true, then you haven't been to almo
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by okintheory 5y ago
Imagine you could make people give 30 % of their income... almost like a tax... but that would be political, not effective.
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by okintheory 6y ago
Political change has done pretty well at helping the poor in Scandinavia.
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by okintheory 6y ago
I'm not aware of any important contributions made by Stephen Wolfram to theoretical computer science. What are some examples?
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by okintheory 6y ago
The graphic in this Guardian article [1] suggests that for age 40+ the number of covid-related ICU admissions prevented vs. no. blood clots has a factor 10 gap. Of course, clots might be more severe than ICU admission. But still, it looks t
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by okintheory 6y ago
This is a pretty common omission to make, even though it's strictly speaking wrong. But suppose for a moment that the algorithm was always fast. In that case, it would not need randomness anymore, as you could just pick a fixed string
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by okintheory 6y ago
Not really. This algorithm is only fast with high probability, and getting a linear equation solver to be always-correct is just a matter of checking the output at the end and trying again if you're (too) wrong. So always-correct and f
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by okintheory 6y ago
Clearly overall AI research at Google is not imploding, so I thought it was more interesting to talk about Ethical AI.

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