pdonis

3 ms·

1.
by pdonis 7d ago
Holdovers from showing the case (function in the sentence) of pronouns with inflection, which has mostly vanished from English, but not completely. The "mostly" just means we get extra confusion from different cases having ended u
2.
by pdonis 8d ago
If this is a genuine use case, I wonder why the language can't just introduce a built-in function for it. For example, std::get_stuck_here(). Then the compiler would know not to optimize this away. The implementation under the hood cou
3.
by pdonis 8d ago
During the years when Newton made his great discoveries, of calculus and universal gravitation, he had a scholarship from the University of Cambridge. (Note that it was not until a couple of decades later that Newton published this work.)
4.
by pdonis 9d ago
> I think there's an equal or greater potential for harm happening by accident without intention. The WMD analogy doesn't quite cover this, yes. Maybe a better analogy here would be toxic waste. Yes, someone might not have i
5.
by pdonis 9d ago
I don't think nobody building AI is an option, since we can't control what China and Russia do. I personally am not concerned about that as far as an existential threat goes, because I don't think AI, in itself, poses one; I
6.
by pdonis 9d ago
I think the point is not so much that we can just ignore the possibility of AI doing harm, but that if AI really is the existential threat that these people claim, then they are the last people we should want as stewards of the technolo
7.
by pdonis 9d ago
> this is also a stunning example of survivorship bias. No, it's an example of why you have to allow people to pursue what at the time look like "curiosities", even though most of them don't go anywhere--because t
8.
by pdonis 9d ago
If you look on arxiv.org you will see all kinds of speculations by physicists that go outside our best current models. AFAIK a paper doesn't even have to be submitted for publication in a journal to be posted as a preprint there. Also,
9.
by pdonis 9d ago
I would say the appeal to authority was in the post I responded to: "the author is a physicist". I was simply pointing out that "physicist" is a broad term, and the fact that he has that job title doesn't automatica
10.
by pdonis 10d ago
> The author is a physicist While this is true, it's also true that out of all of his published work in physics (which you can find at the "Google Scholar" link on the Author page of his log), none of it, as far as I
11.
by pdonis 10d ago
> this is called the Big Bang singularity, GR breaks down there. Only in models that actually have such an initial singularity. Not all models do. Eternal inflation models, for example, do not.
12.
by pdonis 10d ago
One red flag that jumped out at me was, not a single link to a published paper, or even an arxiv preprint. Just other blog posts. Actual physics isn't done in blog posts. What has actually been published about all this for other phys
13.
by pdonis 10d ago
What the Wikipedia article calls "evidence" is not actually evidence. It's not things we actually observe that are predicted by this model. It's just stuff that can be made to sound plausible in the model, if you ass
14.
by pdonis 10d ago
> Why is that even relevant? Because breaking the stranglehold that the tech megacorps currently have over devices is not going to be cheap. In the end, if users won't pay for it to happen, it won't happen. > the actual t
15.
by pdonis 12d ago
> Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company. Note that I was talking about my county's government, not a company. My sense is that whatever level of technical competence
16.
by pdonis 12d ago
> It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.). What's really crazy about all
17.
by pdonis 12d ago
> Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible. Depends on what you mean by "capitalism". The current definition, at least among the big-time capitalists, seems indeed to be "do whatever it takes to get me mo
18.
by pdonis 12d ago
> valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result. And then it turned out that all that was a long con by the companies, who started reneging on all the
19.
by pdonis 12d ago
> How does one not engage with the corporate product at all? By not using it. Which is exactly why I don't use X or Facebook, and minimize my use of Google (I use DuckDuckGo for search, and as Maps continues to suck more I use it
20.
by pdonis 12d ago
> That's the same definition as the one where developers have control over their devices, because that's necessary for those apps to exist and be used even if you're not the author of them. Developers need full control o
21.
by pdonis 13d ago
My take on this is the same as when an article by Doc Searls that references this speech by Doctorow came up on HN in 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19862580
22.
by pdonis 15d ago
If they're not being held legally liable, then I would not agree that "no one is confused about the liability". Sure, I agree with your analogy with a machine cutting off a finger, but you and I are just two people gabbing on
23.
by pdonis 15d ago
> I'm pretty sure everyone knows that OpenAI is liable for the software they create and run. Are they? What legal consequences have they suffered?
24.
by pdonis 15d ago
> This is tortured logic that would argue the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to most police departments in the country Not at all. The Fourth Amendment does not specify any specific level of government. It gives general requiremen
25.
by pdonis 15d ago
> The Supreme Court has applied the Fourteenth Amendment to municipal action since at least Yick Wo That case was about a city ordinance (true, a city ordinance, not a State law that the city was enforcing, so that much is a fair point
26.
by pdonis 17d ago
Running a proxy server and running a botnet, at least.
27.
by pdonis 17d ago
AFAIK most people's contract with their ISP includes fine print that forbids a lot of the nasty things these IoT and "smart" devices do.
28.
by pdonis 18d ago
All of it. The theoretical work that showed this was done in the 1960s and early 1970s by Feynman, Deser, and others. One of the key insights was figuring out how to reformulate the theory so that it did not require an infinite series of te
29.
by pdonis 18d ago
> One of the key challenges with quantizing gravity is in how the terms in the expressions resulting from analyzing the Feynman diagram interactions behave [4] which prevent them being renormalized. Not being renormalizable actually is
30.
by pdonis 18d ago
> SR doesn't consider acceleration As I said, this is not correct. Early on, in the first years after Einstein published his papers, there were physicists who believed this (and IIRC Einstein was initially one of them), but that w

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