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CaptainNegative

606 karma · joined May 2, 2021

https://yonatan.us
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CaptainNegative··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
I think it would have to if you're honest with yourself. Any proof of a novel implication of P=NP, such as !ETH, should increase your belief in the two sets' equality. Just as any novel implication of P≠NP should adjust your belief the other way.

My thesis was around showing implications of few different hardness conjectures. So grounded was ETH that I introduced it in a side note as Conjecture 0 after Conjectures 1 and 2. I don't think it's easy to express how substantial of a Bayesian update this is all around.

CaptainNegative··on Integer multiplication below n log n
Are time and distance, and consequently velocity, even well defined enough at that level of precision on any physical scale?
CaptainNegative··on Sharing AI progress in mathematics
Yes and no. It's pretty normal for students to get scooped, sometimes even multiple times (ask me how I know...).

It's much less common for students to have their entire thesis direction removed from under them, as might be the case for someone working in fine-grained complexity assuming 3SUM has no subquadratic algorithms, or working assuming ~UGC. Both of which (publicly) seemed like perfectly valid research directions until a couple hours ago.

There might be stuff to salvage from their conditional results anyway, but this is not your average scooping.

CaptainNegative··on Jev Can't Be Calibrated
I asked Jev and it said 41% yes 59% no.
CaptainNegative··on What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
That is the cash purchaser paying the retailer more than they need to. There's no conservation law stating that store revenue is a constant and missed revenue from one customer must be made up for by another, nor that every additional operating cost must be directly pushed onto customers.

Similarly, we do not say that October shoppers transfer wealth to Black Friday shoppers, even though the only tangible difference from your scenario is an irrelevant temporal one.

CaptainNegative··on True Rate of Unemployment
> I guess I've been living outside of the US for way too long

If you're the kind of person to invent new definitions to fit statistics and then cry about the fabrication's implications then perhaps it's better for Americans if you keep living abroad.

> Food insecure—At times during the year, these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

CaptainNegative··on Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers
They don't count the additions or shifts because they're both linear time operations, and thus provably at least as fast as multiplication (both in an asymptotic and exact sense). In any case where multiplication is super-linear, this means that addition and shifting are are not the temporal bottleneck at any stage in the algorithm where you have a constant number of those operations surrounding at least one multiplicative recursive call (on numbers of similar magnitudes).

If additions were truly free, an even easier optimal algorithm would just be repeated addition involving zero multiplications.

CaptainNegative··on TikTok disproportionately served anti-Democratic videos during the 2024 election
Does he also run a time machine? He bought TikTok only earlier this year.
CaptainNegative··on New arXiv policy: 1-year ban for hallucinated references
why is the standard response when someone comes down with a serious illness to bring them into a facility where serious illnesses spread readily?

sometimes the presently available solutions are subpar. people go with what's available. it's not ideal, but it is practical.

CaptainNegative··on GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values
I don't know why someone with a cousin named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is that much of a better hire than someone named Jón Bergþóruson, 王小明, Sukarno (with no surname), גִּדְעוֹן בֶּן־גּוּרְיוֹן , or Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. None of whom would classically qualify as diversity hires.

Hiring someone in the off chance that their ethnicity gives them some unique critical unknown unknown that will pop up half a decade down the line resides in the same mental space as a programmer writing `if (5 == i)` in case a future programmer accidentally deletes an =. It's just speculative defensiveness whose efficacy is simply not well established by actual research. And, in my view, just works to confound actual signals that, evidently, gitlab and other employers feel get unfairly overshadowed when emphasizing explicitly pro-diversity hiring policies.

CaptainNegative··on Bets on US-Iran ceasefire show signs of insider knowledge, say experts
There could also be some degree of "(5) bandwagon effect" players, who pump money into an outcome specifically to get people talking about its possibility, thereby increasing its probability of coming into fruition.
CaptainNegative··on Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise
> but at some point a state based cyber attack that just wipes wikipedia off the net is deeply damaging to our modern society’s ability to agree on common facts

Haven't we hit that point already with bad faith (and potentially government-run) coordinated editing and voting campaigns, as both Wales and Sanger have been pointing out for a while now?

See, for example,

* Sanger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses

* Wales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide/Archive_22#...

* PirateWires: https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-is-becoming-a-ma...

CaptainNegative··on Faster Than Dijkstra?
> You can generally reduce the problem to a finite alphabet by taking the finite subset that actually appears in the input.

You can generally sort any array in constant time by taking that constant to be the time it takes to sort the array using bubble sort.

CaptainNegative··on The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
I feel like the section on primality testing with Fermat's test should at least make a shout out to Carmichael numbers and that for some inputs the probability you get a false positive result is 1.
CaptainNegative··on P vs. NP and the Difficulty of Computation: A ruliological approach
This is so tangentially related to the P vs NP problem that the title is basically pure clickbait. Remove every sentence relating to polynomial anything and the information content of the write-up doesn't change at all.
CaptainNegative··on Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?
What's a concrete threat model here? If you're sending data to an ssh server, you already need to trust that it's handling your input responsibly. What's the scenario where it's fine that the client doesn't know if the server is using pastebin for backing up session dumps, but it's problematic that the server tells the client that it's not accepting a certain timing obfuscation technique?
CaptainNegative··on State regulators vote to keep utility profits high angering customers across CA
Capping margins at a percentage also directly breeds inefficiencies. If you could spend $10M to fix a problem that costs you $4M/yr, you're effectively paying $10M now to lose $400k in annual profit potential.
CaptainNegative··on Implications of AI to schools
It depends on their test dataset. If the test set was written 80% by AI and 20% by humans, a tool that labels every essay as AI-written would have a reported accuracy of 80%. That's why other metrics such as specificity and sensitivity (among many others) are commonly reported as well.

Just speaking in general here -- I don't know what specific phrasing TurnItIn uses.

CaptainNegative··on Two billion email addresses were exposed
TOTP inside a password manager doesn't make much sense to me. What's the point of two factor auth if both factors are stored together?
CaptainNegative··on Determination of the fifth Busy Beaver value
Only finitely many values of BB can be mathematically determined. Once your Turing Machines become expressive enough to encode your (presumably consistent) proof system, they can begin encoding nonsense of the form "I will halt only after I manage to derive a proof that I won't ever halt", which means that their halting status (and the corresponding Busy Beaver value) fundamentally cannot be proven.
CaptainNegative··on Using information theory to solve Mastermind
I don't understand the point of this article, as it doesn't define an objective function. It just states a strategy that is only practically implementable for small board sizes (given the cited NP-completeness result) and then calls it good sans theorem or even conjecture.

I believe it is provably not the optimal algorithm for solving the problem under the minimax objective, and I have a hunch that (due to rounding issues) it is also not optimal for minimizing the expected number of guesses under even a uniform prior. So what does this actually accomplish?

CaptainNegative··on First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV
Golda Meir was the Prime Minister (head of government) of Israel after having naturalized in the US when she was 19.
CaptainNegative··on What Is Entropy?
The temperature of an object is a macroscopic property basically depending on the kinetic energy of the matter within it, which in a typical cup of water varies substantially from one molecule to the next. If before you could guess a little bit about the kinetic energy of a given water molecule based on whether it is part of the ice or not, after melting and sufficient time to equilibrate the location of a particular molecule gives you no additional information for estimating its velocity.
CaptainNegative··on Long division verified via Hoare logic
Not specific to this article, but it's tragic that computer science curricula, and discussions of these algorithms, virtually never highlight the tight connection between binary search and long division. Long division done in binary is exactly binary search for the correct quotient, with the number written above the line (plus some implicit zeros) being the best lower bound proven thus far. Similarly, division done in decimal is just "ten-ary" search.
CaptainNegative··on How types make hard problems easy
I think the problem is in going for a Computer Science degree when you really meant to study Software Engineering.
CaptainNegative··on A ChatGPT clone, in 3000 bytes of C, backed by GPT-2 (2023)
What counts as a standard formatter? Python one-liners are Turing complete even without semicolons, evals, execs, and with finite stack depth. E.g. some formatters keep this at one line, while others introduce line breaks https://yonatan.us/misc/bf.html .
CaptainNegative··on Accidentally writing a SAT solver
> Since P is a subset of NP, everything in P can be also be turned into an instance of SAT.

This statement is kind of trivial. The same is true for any language (other than the empty language and the language containing all strings). The reduction is (1) hardcode the values of one string, y, that is in the language and another string, z, that is not in the language (2) solve the problem on the given input x in polynomial time poly(x) (3) return y if x is to be accepted and z otherwise.

The total running time is at most poly(x)+O(|y|+|z|) which is still poly(x) since |y| and |z| are hardcoded constant values.

CaptainNegative··on Bitwarden SDK relicensed from proprietary to GPLv3
This isn't an area I know much about, but wouldn't there be a security risk involved with storing the TOTP seeds alongside the passwords? Or is that not a real concern?
CaptainNegative··on ByteDance sacks intern for sabotaging AI project
no need to be colorist
CaptainNegative··on A high-performance, zero-overhead, extensible Python compiler using LLVM
I often find myself mixing Nones into lists containing built-in types when the former would indicate some kind of error. I could wrap them all into a nullable-style type, but why shouldn't the interpreter implicitly handle that for me?
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