roystgnr
10hr ago
I'm not a frequent enough LLM user to say how much of this was solid improvement vs luck, but my experience with free ChatGPT 5 (or any current free model, for that matter) versus paid GPT-5-Thinking was night vs day. In response to a somewhat obscure topology question, the free models all quickly spat out a false example (I'm guessing it was in the dataset as a true example for a different but similar-sounding question), and in the free tier the only difference between the better models and the worse models was that, when I pointed out the error in the example, the better models acknowledged it and gave me a different (but still false) example instead, while the worse models tried to gaslight me. GPT-5-Thinking took minutes to come back with an answer, but when it did the answer was actually correct, and accompanied by a link to a PDF of a paper from the 1980s that proved the answer on like page 6 out of 20.
I followed up with a harder question, and GPT-5-Thinking did something even more surprising to me: after a few minutes, it admitted it didn't know. It offered several suggestions for followup steps to try to figure out the answer, but it didn't hallucinate anything, didn't try to gaslight me about anything, didn't at all waste my time the way I'm used to my time being wasted when an LLM is wrong.
I've gotten used to using LLMs when their output is something that I can't answer quickly myself (else I'd answer it myself) but can verify quickly myself (else I can't trust their answer), but they seem to be on the cusp of being much more powerful than that. In an eschatological sense, maybe there's still some major architectural improvement that's necessary for AGI but still eluding us. But in an economic sense, the hassle I've always had with LLMs is their somewhat low signal-to-noise ratio, and yet there's already so much signal there that all they really have to do to have a winning product is get rid of most of the noise.
roystgnr
2d ago
$/hour, I'd guess.
(But yeah, normally when someone says "N-figure salary" they're talking about $/year)
"But where is a social network for the people who aren't sewage?"
"The what now?"
roystgnr
3d ago
If I google "nitromethane" I get two sales links among the results; apparently reputable racing and model racing leagues think it's too dangerous to allow, but it's not banned for private use? Well, either that or the two shops were Fuel Booster Inc and All Top Fuels and either would be happy to rush a team of "salesmen" to my house after I placed an order.
Thermite is basically powered aluminum mixed with powdered rust, isn't it? I once considered a demo for my kids, and at that time IIRC the only obstacle to getting everything off Amazon was that the smallest sizes for sale would make for a lot of demos. I'm not sure how it would be useful for a would-be murderer, though, unless the target can be convinced to stand in a specific spot under a prepared mixture and then not look up when they hear sparks flying above their head.
Proper detonators I've heard are difficult to make, but any crazy person can make something they think is a detonator, if it never ends up getting tested.
roystgnr
4d ago
$16 billion on research through 2019. Their conclusion was that the whole enterprise was a money pit and that they'd never be able to climb out of. Car and Driver put this in perspective by noting that they could have given every licensed driver in America two brand new Ford-F150s and still have cash to spare.
Got a source for that?
$16B divided by 230M is under $70. That is more than enough for two sets of F150 wiper blades for every licensed driver in America, but only if we don't splurge on Rain-X.
roystgnr
5d ago
Are we not arresting people? There have been a few stories lately (the first to come to mind: Decarlos Brown Jr.'s 14 prior arrests) that suggest that the problem is later in the pipeline.
roystgnr
5d ago
People were noticing the problem a decade before 9/11 too:
Homer: "That little Timmy is a real hero."
Lisa: "What makes him a hero, Dad?"
"Well, he fell down the well and... can't get out."
"How does that make him a hero?"
"Well, it's more than you did!"
-- The Simpsons, "Radio Bart", 1992
It's silly to claim that victims of natural tragedies are all heroes, but it's no worse than silly. I think the psychology here is a much more concerning problem in contexts like due process and free speech rights, though. Most people really don't like "defending scoundrels", as the old quote goes. For someone who can't get past that, the only ways to resolve the cognitive dissonance are to either abandon the defense or pretend the defendant isn't a scoundrel, both options that can have awful consequences if they become popular enough.
the various minor offences they committed as juveniles
Nah. Either they were guilty of what they confessed to, or they were guilty of implicating each other with false confessions. Even supposing the cops bullied them, and the other half dozen witnesses, including in front of their parents, that would just make the false-accusation offences excusable, not minor.
roystgnr
5d ago
If you go to his Google Scholar page and look at the list by citation count it's topped by fiction ("I, Robot": 2670 citations), then adds popular science writing ("Asimov's biographical encyclopedia of science and technology", 663) and other non-fiction, then eventually gets down to science textbooks ("Biochemistry and human metabolism", 54) and science research ("Acid‐phosphatase activity of normal and neoplastic human tissues", 48).
IIRC it could have been even worse. He went into biochemistry, so was relatively immune to the quantum chemistry revolution sweeping upward through the field, but I recall him describing the horror with which experienced chemists discovered that they would have to practically get a second degree in physics just to keep their own chemistry research relevant.
It's kind of a shame that he's now much better-known for his science fiction writing than his science writing, though. He jokingly had the "Clarke-Asimov treaty", acknowledging Asimov to be the second-best SF writer and Clarke the second-best science writer, but IMHO with SF Asimov was (among their contemporaries) second-best to Heinlein, whereas with pop science he really was the best around.
roystgnr
6d ago
He wrote some giant two-volume biography first, and then cut it down to that one (and added more recent material) a decade later. It's easier to avoid being boring if you have to force yourself to cut most of what you've written.
IIRC he did leave in my favorite part, the bit about becoming the most popular teacher at Boston University and having his writing career take off but being belittled for not doing enough research:
I finally felt angry enough to say, “…as a science writer, I am extraordinary. I plan to be the best science writer in the world and I will shed luster on the medical school. As a researcher, I am simply mediocre and…if there’s one thing this school does not need, it is one more merely mediocre researcher.”
Of course he got ... not fired, since he had tenure by then, but effectively "constructive dismissal" from the administration? Still he disclaimed coworkers' admiration for the incident:
I shrugged, “There’s no bravery about it. I have academic freedom and I can give it to you in two words:
“What’s that?” He said.
“Outside income,” I said.
roystgnr
6d ago
I think the phrase he was looking for was "wether vein", the metaphor about how you can tell a sheep is getting ready to follow the flock when its heart starts pumping harder.
roystgnr
6d ago
It seems that people are interpreting "someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation" to mean "nothing-but-condemnation of the violence", in which case your request was a reasonable one, but it has been answered. But it seems to me that you meant "nothing but condemnation-of-the-violence", in which case your request might not be answered, but it was an unreasonable one.
Recently I brought up Obama as an example of a very high-profile Blue Triber who was neither cheering nor minimizing the murder of Charlie Kirk ... but should I have been criticizing him instead? He was quick to point out that he thought some of Kirk's ideas were wrong, and to bring up left-wing victims too; he definitely failed the "nothing but condemnation-of-the-violence" standard despite passing "nothing-but-condemnation of the violence".
So, which standard are we looking for here? If "The point wasn't whether he was technically correct when he implied that all sides engage in political violence." then we have no choice but to criticize Obama too!
For that matter, could you clarify what standard Trump was failing with his slippery slope argument? The slope was indeed slippery, including with regards to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in particular. The only "league" in those statements is the class of people whose statues were in jeopardy, and it turned out that he was correct that they were all in that same class. I mostly like your reasoning better, personally! The idea that the Founding Fathers should have been in a league of their own beyond anachronistic condemnation was defensible, until we discovered it was wrong. It's only the part where you get upset at him for being right in foresight where you were wrong despite hindsight that you went off the rails.
Some of these may be "stopped clock is correct twice a day" situations for Trump, but then just stick with the incorrect things to criticize instead! The trick to criticizing people for merely being "technically correct" is that you have to remember that our goal is to be morally correct in addition to being technically correct; you can't be morally correct instead. I get that it's infuriating to have to hold yourself to a higher standard than the President of the United States, but in a virtue and deontological sense that's the right thing to do for its own sake; and in a consequentialist sense, the worse the target of your argument is, the more important it is to not just throw mud at the wall to see what sticks.
roystgnr
6d ago
I'll agree with that in theory. In practice, note that "in appropriate conditions" requires "when the highway designers kept sight lines clear enough for that speed, including to any intersections or on ramps where someone might be trying to enter the highway after checking for traffic expected to be near the speed limit". Since highway designers never actually design for 115mph on purpose, you're pretty much stuck with places where it happened by accident, where the land was so flat and empty that you can't not see the road ahead of you for miles. I've had friends who enjoyed stretches of road like that in New Mexico, but I don't think any of them exist in Virginia.
My friends mostly enjoyed those stretches, I mean. One of them totaled his first car when a deer ran out into the road in front of him. In my experience most people who love driving that fast give other cars roughly the same consideration that he gave that deer, an implicit unexamined assumption that the highway ahead will be either clear or occupied by drivers doing the speed limit, that nobody will suddenly appear in front of them at surprisingly low or no speed. That assumption is usually correct, but it only has to be incorrect once.
roystgnr
7d ago
Those are pretty good. Really good for being off the top of your head. I could argue about the other two, but Medicare For All at least would be a perfect fit for that sense of self-righteousness in a grand cause thwarted by betrayal. It distills left-pleasing anti-capitalism down to its most popular core in the same way anti-illegal-immigration does for right-pleasing anti-immigration. It might have even worked well a decade ago, and it'd be hard to mount any principled opposition to it today. Trump has really undermined the free marketeer wing of the Republicans, and I don't think I've heard from the fiscal-prudence wing of either party since the Great Recession.
roystgnr
7d ago
It was mostly immigration; at least in his first campaign "Build The Wall" took priority and "Drain The Swamp" was behind that and "unfair trade deals" were mentioned but definitely a bronze medal campaign issue at best. As late as this spring there was still a vocal contingent of the right wing arguing that his tariffs were really just for negotiating leverage so that we could end up with free trade unencumbered by other countries' restrictions.
But that's just an aside. More critically, and I hate to say this: I think the norm-breaking and the vulgarity were an inseparable part of the immigration issue for Trump. The Republican M.O. at the time was to talk an anti-illegal-immigration game, look for bipartisan support once in office, and then let Lucy yank away the football again. The only way to convince Republican voters that a candidate (especially one with a fairly non-partisan history) wasn't just in the "talk an anti-illegal-immigration game" phase preceding the "the Democrats convinced us to trade yet another amnesty for getting Really Serious This Time" phase was to be so boorish towards Democrats and illegal immigrants that nobody could picture him ever negotiating with the former on behalf of the latter.
There's no shortage of Democrats competing to show that they can "stand up to Trump" by being assholes too, but I'm not sure what it accomplishes from their side. They seem to perceive it as an aesthetic signal of strength they need to adopt too, but for Trump his attitude actually was meaningful as a signal of intransigence. For a Democrat to get the same benefit in a primary election they'd have to also tie it to some issue (anti-capitalism? pro-gun-bans?) where their base is afraid of them selling out, and for that not to backfire in the general election it would have to also be an issue that wouldn't necessarily backfire with independents or backfire too badly across the aisle.
I can't think of any issues like that currently, but perhaps one could be whipped up. The median American wasn't a fan of illegal immigration, but also didn't think of it as a huge issue until Trump himself increased its salience. On the other hand, maybe polarizing the country is a trick that can only be pulled off once. In 2016 it might have been plausible to think that America had too much bipartisan cooperation and not enough bridge-burning heated rhetoric, but in 2028 that will probably be a tougher sell.
roystgnr
7d ago
Jones also dealt with a ludicrous speeding ticket
A reckless driving charge, specifically. 116mph isn't the level at which you get a fine; it's jail time.
roystgnr
7d ago
it's absence from these screenshots is weird if he did in fact say that.
"Coyner’s alarm at her former colleague’s violent rhetoric toward Gilbert prompted Jones to call her and explain his reasoning over the phone, a source familiar with the exchange told NR.
According to the source, the Democratic former legislator doubled down on the call, saying the only way public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves, like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence. He asked her to provide counterexamples to disprove his claim.
Then at one point, the source said, he suggested he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views, prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust."
roystgnr
7d ago
"You were talking about hopping jennifer Gilbert's children would die"
"Yes, I've told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy."
But to be fair, not only do we don't know why Jay Jones thought their 5 year old and 2 year old were "little fascists", we also don't know why their policies were bad enough that the children should die, and we don't know how he thinks the children's deaths should transpire. He should definitely publish every bit of missing context for his pro-dead-children stance so that we judge it as fairly as possible.
roystgnr
11d ago
Safety because some guy is going to try to get you to run an infinite loop
In the most general technical sense, sure, the Halting Problem is unsolvable: no matter how long you let some arbitrary algorithm run you can't always be sure of whether it's going to keep going forever or whether it's actually just about to finish.
In slightly less general technical sense, here, you don't need some arbitrary algorithm just to do a better version of an ordered search, so you can restrict your users to a non-Turing-Complete language on which the Halting Problem is solvable.
Practically speaking, you just do what any automated test suite does: you define "infinite" to be 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or however much you expect you can spare per run at most, and if the algorithm isn't done by then it gets killed anyway.
or virus.
This, on the other hand, has been solved even in the technical sense. Even if you're going Turing-Complete you don't have to let your users specify a program in C or binary or something, or run it unsandboxed in the same address space or with the same kernel privileges. Your browser has probably run a hundred little arbitrary Javascript programs so far today, and the worst they could have done would have been to churn your CPU until you closed a tab, because anything more serious is sufficiently restricted. Crooks sending you links to rnicrosoft.com still depend on you typing in your credentials or downloading and running something heinous afterward, even though the second you click a link like that they get to send your computer arbitrary programs that it will immediately run.
roystgnr
12d ago
Thanks! If you haven't already read Flatland, you might enjoy it. It lacks some of the mathematical sophistication (when it was written, general curved manifolds were still a cutting-edge idea) and brevity (though it is only 100 pages, and a fast read) of my ripoff here, but it does retain some attributes I had to drop like "social satire" and "literary quality".
roystgnr
13d ago
I don't think I understood any of this.
My apologies. I'll back up, if you're still curious.
Think of the function sin(x).
We can take a number, like x=π/3, and plug it into the function, and we get another number, in this case sin(π/3)=√3/2. (here π/3 is in radians, which when we start doing calculus turns out to be more natural than 60°) We can imagine doing that with every real number, and plotting every (x,y) on a plane, and we get a "sine wave" picture like this. That "plane" gets called ℝ×ℝ, or ℝ², because it's defined with 2 real number (ℝ) lines that form a cross intersecting at one point. It's a great picture! I can think about the function inputs as being the length of lines in one direction, outputs as the lengths of lines in another, derivatives as slopes of angled lines, etc.
But ... how about sin(i), where i=√-1? On the one hand, who cares, because it seems like √-1 shouldn't exist: there's no real number whose square is negative, and even when we found such numbers to be useful intermediate results in algebra problems we still decided to call them "imaginary" as opposed to the newly-named "real" numbers; you'd still expect to have a real number in the end. On the other hand, we soon found "complex numbers" (ℂ, all the numbers x+yi you can make by adding a real number x to an imaginary number yi) to also be useful in engineering problems (they represent oscillation a way similar to how positive numbers can represent growth and negative ones decay), and then we found them to be useful in physics problems (where a "quantum wave function" takes complex values), and at some point it's hard to ignore something as not "real" when it's at the foundation of our understanding of reality.
We can plot a collection of complex numbers on the "complex plane": for every complex number z=x+yi you just plot it as (x,y). One complex number can be described with two reals.
But how do we plot a function that takes complex number inputs and gives complex number outputs? We would need to plot it in ℂ×ℂ, two complex planes that form a cross intersecting at one point. "But two planes meet in a line, not a point", you might object, and that's true, in 3D. ℂ×ℂ only fits in 4D. If I wanted to clearly plot part of a real function y=f(x), I can plot each point as (x,y) in a square, but if I want to clearly plot part of a complex function f(x+yi)=u+vi, I need to be able to plot each point as (x,y,u,v) in a hypercube. I don't have any hypercubes lying around! I can't even visualize a hypercube.
So, we plot garbage like this instead. The xy plane there is the complex plane of inputs x+yi, and for each output u+vi=sin(x+yi), the height z of the red surface is u and the height z of the green surface is v. We plot (x,y,u) and (x,y,w) in the same cube and try to picture the true (x,y,u,w) from the result. Those two 2D surfaces twisting through 3D space are really two aspects of a single 2D surface twisting through 4D space. They're easier to understand if you use that web page to rotate them back and forth and turn them translucent, but still I can't picture the single surface in 4D that they represent. If I could actually visualize 4D then the plot of that single surface would fit in my head as naturally as that first "sine wave" plot did.
If you magically found yourself in a 4D space you might be best off acting a bit like a slime by closing your eyes and feeling your way around. Your eyes will lie, your touch won't.
I think here it depends on what you mean by "in a 4D space".
If my movements were naturally restricted to a 3D manifold (a "surface" is just a 2D manifold) curving through 4D space then you're probably exactly right. Let's back up to 2D. Imagine as an analog a 2D version of me, living on the surface of a globe. Open my eyes, and if light also follows the globe surface then in any unobstructed direction I look I see the back of my own head one globe-circumference away, but if I'm small enough compared to the globe then it feels almost like I'm in good old flat 2D space. Even if the globe is made of taffy and some 3D monster stretches spikes out of it, mushes parts of it together elsewhere to make a torus or worse, whatever. I can still move around any weird surface I'm stuck to so long as it's smooth enough, to any part of it I want to go to so long as it's it's connected. When I'm on the globe, or on any points of "positive curvature" on a more complicated surface, I might feel a little weird (there's more "room" inside a shape than you would expect from its boundary, so it might be like my skin is getting compressed or my innards stretched). Or, on points of "negative curvature" on a more complicated shape, I might feel like my skin was getting stretched or my innards compressed. But either way, if I was small enough compared to the curvature then I'd still be just a slightly squished-around version of me.
Your "bag of holding" example actually is a 3D manifold - locally I can move parts of my body in no more or fewer than the usual 3 dimensions: up/down, left/right, or forward/backward. But those things are only consistent locally - if I stick my arm 10 inches forward into the bag and then reach 10 inches up, it won't be in the same place as if I reach my other arm 10 inches up (outside the bag) and then 10 inches forward. This 3D manifold has geometry that can't exist in 3D space, but only embedded in a space with at least one more dimension.
But with the same one extra dimension, if my movements were unrestricted? Local senses like touch would get weird too. Imagine that 2D me, previously stuck to the globe like a flat sticker (though free to move parallel to the globe surface), suddenly peeled away into the air. I can still wiggle around in my accustomed two directions, but my orientation with respect to that third direction is at the whim of the breeze. On a globe I might be able to look or propel myself north/south vs east/west, but 2D me has no muscles that can turn his limbs up/down. Even if someone took pity and stuck me back on the globe so I could move around its surface again, if they stuck me on backwards then I'd be backwards for the rest of time; clockwise would seem to be counter-clockwise and vice-versa. 3D me in a true 4D space would be in the same boat; my arm has no way to reach hyperup/hyperdown.
roystgnr
13d ago
Inability to perceive 4D spaces just kills me. It turns out that "imaginary" numbers are actually at the root of reality, and most functions we're interested in are rooted in analytic multivalued functions, visualizable in ℂ×ℂ. That's a 2-complex-dimension space, so it's 4-(real)-dimensional, so we're screwed. Best you can usually do is to switch back and forth between plots of output magnitude and phase (or between real and imaginary components of output), or plot magnitude as height along with phase as color. Fortunately we don't have to be able to visualize something to describe and compute with it, but I feel like it could have helped a lot.
The "bag of holding" trick is clever, it gets you the topology of a 3D manifold that can't be embedded in less than ℝ⁴, but to me it "feels" like a very fixed geometry - two parallel 3D spaces, with the "hole" of the bag's opening connecting them.
TVTropes is shockingly empty of 5-D spaces in fiction. There's a Greg Egan book that takes that seriously, there's a Douglas Adams joke, there's a corny Superman villain, and it's sparse and downhill from there.
roystgnr
17d ago
If someone said "the reason why my pants are 36 waist is that I've put on a little weight since college" I wouldn't say "This incorrect. Pant waist size means the number that a hypothetical tape measure would read when measuring around the waistband." Causal graphs are not just sets of ordered pairs, and when one effect has multiple causes sometimes the most proximal cause is not the only or even the most important cause.
But, to abandon brevity for clarity: the reason why the property was worth $2.9M instead of $3.5M is that that is the price that a hypothetical buyer would have paid to buy the properties, and the reason why that price was the former rather than the latter was because:
buying the properties does not include canceling the grocery store's lease early.
If they could have cancelled the lease early, or even if a cancellation after purchase could have been done without penalty, then I would have been incorrect; the existence of the lease would not have notably reduced the price.
The grocery-store company terminated its lease voluntarily in 1999, so nothing is being taken from it in this condemnation action.
Yes; this is what I phrased as "The interest is gone in 2018, sure". I'm just curious about the legal and ethical implications. "Compensation needs to be based on what it would have been in 1994" seems to the intent of the law here; so does that mean that the grocery store would have also been stiffed if the taking had gone through in 1994? If I move to a smaller house and give one of my kids a 30 year rent-free lease on my current house, the market value of my current house afterward might be negative (who else wants to pay property taxes for decades on a house they can't use themselves?); would that mean that if it's eminent domained then my kid is out of luck and I need to pay the taker for the privilege?
but the original 2018 condemnation complaint indicates that the municipal government made an offer of just 0.92 M$, on the basis of an appraisal.
Thanks for this!
roystgnr
17d ago
Was there any suggestion of compensating the grocery store owner? This feels like a "heads we win, tails you lose" scenario - if the reason why the property is worth $2.9M instead of $3.5M (deduced from (4.8M-2.9M)*(4.0-2.0)/(8.5-2.0)+2.9M) is that the grocery store owner has an interest in the property too, isn't that interest worth $600K and in need of compensation? The interest is gone in 2018, sure, but if the rule is "evaluate as if it was 1994" then what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
This reminds me a bit of one of the loopholes for evading the Supreme Court ruling that governments can't keep the excess auction proceeds from property they seize for tax non-payment: the left hand of the government just sells to the right hand for whatever pittance covers the debt and lets the right hand take the auction profits.
On a side note,
The couple argues that the proper valuation date is year 1994
Wow - how bad were their property values in 2018? If it was already "blighted", "old", "in below average condition" in 1994, how much worse did it have to get for the decline to outpace 72% total inflation in the interim?!
roystgnr
18d ago
Was it 50/50 of the Blue Tribe, or 50/50 of the fraction of the Blue Tribe that got promoted to your attention by social media?
In recent polls, 56% of "very liberal" and 73% of liberal respondents say it is "always or usually unacceptable" for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose; 55% and 68% say that "violence is never justified" "in order to achieve political goals". Obama's initial response was to say that "this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy", with 1.1 million likes that probably aren't all from Red Tribe Obama fans, and he didn't soften on that, though he went "both sides" on calling out the Minnesota shootings and right-wing rhetoric too. Bernie Sanders also tried to call out more examples but foremost condemned Kirk's killing in particular as "political cowardice" which "must be condemned".
I'm just glancing at numbers, but it looks like white emigration from South Africa is about 2% per year, as opposed to around 40% per year for the pieds-noirs during 2 years of "suitcase or the coffin". South African white emigration has been slow enough that fertility has kept their population pretty steady over the past few decades in spite of it.
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