sarker
competency crisis actor
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
Pelicot was front page on e.g. The Guardian, FT, etc. where the Cornell 7 were not. She also got a NYT magazine cover story.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
I think part of the reason the Pelicot gang-rape case didn't get as much attention as it perhaps should have
Huh? How much more attention could something have gotten?
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
A model can trivially be trained on every math publication published in the last hundred years, while a human can see only the tiniest fraction of them.
The models already are trained on them, and probably have been since 2022.
All of these discussions cause people to reflect on the process of doing math. They’re like, “Oh, this thing can do this impressive stuff. What does that mean for us?” One of the people in that video highlights this quote: “good mathematicians prove theorems, great mathematicians come up with conjectures, and the greatest mathematicians come up with definitions.” That’s more or less exactly your framing here. We need the conjecture generator and then the definition generator. That’s the premium-tier mathematician.
What is it that causes current models to be great theorem provers and poor conjecture and definition makers? It's unclear, and perhaps this comment will look foolish in six months, but it's not as simple as "train on all the math papers bro".
It's cool but this is a flying car in the same way chickens can fly (please don't "well ackshuakly" me on this point). The "you could have cured cancer" crowd is also dumb. It's a parlor trick, though I don't begrudge Elon his parlor tricks. What would I actually have found impressive in a car demo? Probably not something easily demoed. How about a Bluetooth connection that has three nines of reliability?
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
If you decide to undereat (without chemical assistance*), your body will reduce your metabolic rate and make you hungrier
Do you believe that this process continues without bound? The more you cut, the more your metabolic rate drops in lock step?
sarker
competency crisis actor
11d ago
Man emerged from a process of continual speciation, not from a sudden creation. At which point did a mere animal become ensouled? Who was the animal mother that bore a human child?
It's better not to think about this question, it might lead you to accord moral weight to animals, which would be inconvenient.
sarker
competency crisis actor
12d ago
You can use a free model. Or pay a few dollars (is that really all your money?) and use a better model.
I don't understand your perspective. Either LLMs are useless, in which case, what are we even talking about in this thread, or they aren't, in which case putting your head in the sand is not an effective long term strategy. "LLMs are eating my field and they're a racket" does not seem like a coherent position.
sarker
competency crisis actor
12d ago
seems extremely-similar to the proof case of why the halting problem's not always solvable
And yet it's trivially true that there are programs that can be proven to halt and entire programming languages with which you can write code that's proven to halt. Solving the halting problem is simply a question of choosing your tools; why not alignment?
sarker
competency crisis actor
12d ago
As for running on some cloud host, my napkin math + Googling shows on the order of $1000/mo.
So $1.40 an hour? Doesn't seem that bad.
But the thing is it's not just the cost: nobody that uses Lean knows anything about cloud hosting or how to set Lean up that way, because that's not the way anyone ever uses Lean.
It's 2026, grandpa. There's no more excuses for not knowing how to open a PDF. You can just ask an LLM.
sarker
competency crisis actor
12d ago
and that people can't even check in Lean because the "proofs" are so big they can't even be checked on consumer hardware.
Did this retracted paper have a Lean formalization (IIUC not every paper in the repo does)? How much would it cost to run Lean on AWS to verify one of these proofs?
sarker
competency crisis actor
12d ago
The problem itself is so convoluted there is no agreement if even the formulation of the problem itself is correct
Who doubts this? The formulation has been part of mathlib for some time already AFAIK.
sarker
competency crisis actor
20d ago
So short term price changes in gold don't mean anything, but long term ones do.
Long term changes like 1980-2000 perhaps?
sarker
competency crisis actor
20d ago
it takes time for inflation to work its way through the economy, and prices are sticky.
Difficult to square your worldview with sharp swings in the price of gold. The gold is always the same, so when the value of gold changes it's an indicator of the value of the dollar changing. If it takes time for inflation to "work its way through the economy", why does the price of gold change so rapidly with inflation?
Or perhaps it's the case that not every change in the price of gold is due to inflation?
Interesting. I'm seeing a drop from $4310 to $4135 over the weekend. I guess we had 4% deflation in three days and I didn't even notice!
sarker
competency crisis actor
21d ago
One obvious argument is that self-driving cars are safer than manual cars. Okay, but how much safer? Remember, they have to take on approximately triple of what is currently paid out in insurance and lawsuit settlements for accidents based in the US. Reduce that number by 50%, or 80%, and it's still huge. And it underestimates how safe cars actually are. The 6 million+ reportable accidents a year sounds like a lot. But that's in a country that drives over 3.3 trillion miles annually. It's one accident for more than a half a million miles driven. If you drive 15,000 miles per year every year between ages 18 and 85, you can expect to be involved in two reportable accidents in your lifetime. Any assumptions about the relative safety of Tesla's current offerings versus normal cars is based on a woefully inadequate sample size. I'm sure the thing is impressive, but how many miles have you driven it so far? 10,000? 20,000? I'm guessing fewer than even that, but even if you drove it 50,000 you'd still have to drive it more than 10 times as far before we'd expect even one accident.
You don't have to speculate. You can just look at the numbers. 82% fewer crashes. Hundreds of millions of miles driven. Sure, a few hundred million is a lot less than a trillion, but this isn't untested technology and we have some idea of what kind of safety improvements are possible. Now, keep in mind:
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Not all of the remaining 18% crashes are Waymo's fault.
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Tripling the payout per accident and then reducing the rate of payouts by 82% means total payouts are 50% lower even assuming all those crashes are Waymo's fault.
I am seeing no collapse in rents unless you mean a collapse in the rate of increase of rents.
People have become absolutely untethered from reality on inflation. They'll say stupid shit "like, actually inflation is 10%" and point to eggs, gas, or whatever. Then when the price collapses they just ignore that.
Relatable. Actual conversation:
This specific peanut butter just doubled in price. Are we supposed to believe inflation is less than that?
Inflation is about a basket of goods over a period of tome. Why would you just look at a single price change for a single peanut butter?
crickets
Years pass.
That specific peanut butter just got 20% cheaper. I guess we are now having 20% deflation?
It's still not back to the original price so it doesn't count.
But you looked at a single instantaneous price change and concluded yearly inflation must be way more than 4%. Why can't we look at this single instantaneous price change and conclude that it must actually be way less than 3%?
Well we're still not back to the original price so inflation must still be way higher than 3%.
sarker
competency crisis actor
22d ago
I mercifully did the short quiz only because I just got a blank page at the end.
Waymo wait times are IME very high during peak hours despite the prices they charge being not much different than Uber/Lyft. It's quite clear Waymo has a car shortage.
sarker
competency crisis actor
23d ago
Do you believe that Greek students and non-Greek students differ only in whether or not they undergo stressful experiences?
The peak popularity is only somewhat greater than "gisele pelicot" though. I think there's a pretty simple explanation of the remaining gap.
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