JuettnerDistrib

I find it ironic that so many OSS projects are or are considering banning LLM usage. After all, without OSS, LLMs would never have been this good at coding.

Shouldn't OSS be the first to benefit? Or should OSS be a bedrock of carefully curated code untouched by AI slop?

A big part of open source is about reciprocity: you taketh, you giveth.

Do LLM companies give back to the community?

I kinda feel this way about variable names in physics. You could call the (x,y,z) components of the magnetic field (L,M,N), see [0]. There are so many people who call that utterly wrong, but really it's totally fine and merely a source of confusion.

[0] page 907: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/andp.190532...

I'd be curious to know if this helps on supercomputers, which are notorious for frequently hanging for a few seconds on an ls -l.

I'm sure many researchers have English as a second language, and rely on LLM to fix their grammar and vocabulary.

How would this work for a personal blog? Would I need to be careful not to endorse or even talk about companies and products? And if I didn't have to, wouldn't that open the door for advertising masquerading as news or opinion? Genuinely interested in this.

I've had the bad luck that my first prescription was quite wrong: incorrect axis for astigmatism, and incorrect spherical (I basically have only astigmatism, no spherical). So for years I was suffering through the days. Optometrists flat out refuse to correct such mistakes (I've been to many!), preferring only minor changes. I finally started ordering a bunch of glasses cheaply online, and eventually found a prescription that works for me. Cannot trust optometrists anymore.

> encode laws into some sort of machine code

Don't need to encode it in some sort of machine code. Just need a git repo with the law so we can submit a PR to the CA assembly and get this fixed.

> With books, movies, series and music I like to own physically only my personal favorites that I know will use many times.

I don't own many DVDs, but when I see them in my bookshelf they remind of the story the tell, the context when I watched them, and my theories about society, sci-fi, and utopias that those movies inspired.

With books it's even more extreme. I get the physical copy sometimes more to have a physical representation of an idea than to read the book.

> There are countries running on 95%+ renewable electricity right now[1].

That list ignores that countries trade electricity. If, say, Germany produces a lot of electricity by renewables it can sell the excess to France (which has lots of nuclear). If Germany is low on electricity, it can buy from is neighbors. The system as a whole is nowhere near 90%.

The one exception are probably countries that have all hydro and biomass.

Great article. I have two comments:

1. Procrastination seems to be a type of early stopping. I knew I had a good strategy in school!

2. Something that seems to be sorely missing in machine learning (I'm not a ML expert) are error bars. If you take the example of the figure at the end, as you increase the number of parameters in the model, your error bars become larger (at least in the overfitting regime), and they are infinite when you have more parameters than data points. Indeed, chi^2 tests are usually used in physics/astro to test for this. Of course, you need error bars on the data points to do this. So perhaps the difficulty is really in assigning meaningful uncertainties to your pictures/test scores/politicians.

Other purpose than being a psychological trick, what purpose could pointing out the lack of evidence at the time have? Instead they could have written something like "We found the problem in 2021 and promptly fixed it. We first learned that it has been exploited in 2022."

If passenger rail increases, then goods rail must decrease and go onto trucks. Or, one could let goods rail go at night, but Germany is noise -sensitive, so that's unlikely to happen. In the long run building more tracks are probably the only real solution.

Same for me, except my prescription is stable. The first doctor I went to got it wrong, and every doctor since was too hesitant to change it. One even got it right, but said nothing had changed... They missed that the axis was significantly different, and that had been the problem all along.

> we only learned that older people pick all-H or all-T more.

I think we learn that older people are less willing to put up with silly instructions.

Yes, exactly!

It's pretty obvious if you ignore the great leap backwards... I mean forward, coming down from ~40 births/1000 in the 1950s and 1960s to ~20 in the late 70s and after.

> There have been 3 times in the past month where I got an order of magnitude speed up because SciPy implements a very complex but highly efficient algorithm which I would never have had time to deploy.

Yes. I feel like the author conflates the language with the package ecosystem. Pure Python is pretty horrible for scientific computing (3*[3]=[3,3,3] is about as counterproductive to scientific computations as it gets), but Numpy changes the semantics of those operations.

In other words, Python has an absolutely stellar package ecosystem. There have been attempts to bring a package ecosystem to C, but it never took off. However, I do wonder how C would fare if it had.

If you know German, there is an entire book written in this style, introducing a simplifying spelling and grammar each chapter [1]. It is called "fom winde ferfeelt", a pun on "Gone with the wind" turned into "Missed by the wind". Highly recommend.

[1] http://www.zedorock.net/winde.html

> I wouldn't want anything to be added by default

This line of reasoning works really well for those who understand (and want to understand) how git works. I know plenty of people who don't care about their development tools (e.g. scientists), and for them the index is a chore in the way of more important problems.

> is there really any practical value in this sort of research

In many ways it is too early to do this research, so it is a kind of art (as is a lot of research, imho). As long as only a few people do it, it's cool and useful so we can be aware of our potential future.

On the other hand, since we have no credible evidence of extraterrestrials, it would be surprising to find a civilisation so advanced to build a Dyson sphere. If they can build Dyson spheres, wouldn't they already be all over the place?

Ok, I suppose I should actually go read the paper now...

> I'd also go as far as saying if you need to cram crazy hours shortly beforehand to pass any exam or test then you're not really qualified to pass.

I've had a professor who said that the purpose of an exam is to study for it.

The same professor said that if you don't learn something in an exam, then the exam is useless.

One thing this article misses are medical procedures that improve the quality of life, but have no bearing on life expectancy.

For example, if you knock out your front row of teeth, not only do you look weird to people (a pirate), but also you can no longer easily bite into a hamburger, and your speech is impacted. You will have trouble pronouncing words that contain 'v', 'th', or 'f'.

Getting implants is not going to increase your life expectancy, unless you live in a society devoid of knives (our external teeth). But the increase in quality of life is often worth it.

That being said, in the US dentists seem to take way too many X-rays. They take X-rays before the doctor even sees you. Then the doctor tells you what you could have told them.

Source: personal experience.

You mean, the little ant on the floor?

I barfed at 1-based indexing for about a week, but now it is as natural as anything.

I would compare 0-based and 1-based indexing with whether you put semicolons at the end of each line or not. Either way doesn't really change the feel (semantics) of the language.

Also, fortan is 1-based, iirc, and a lot of numerical code is in fortan.

Oh, and many many beginning programmers and scientists have a hard time with 0-based indexing. Not sure why, but such you hear, so the choice is really not that odd.

"our code is fast, flexible, and easily modifiable"

I believe they were collecting samples from nearby bat caves: build your lab where your specimens are?

> mainland Europe

First time I here that phrase! A testament to the rise of China? The proper term is continental Europe.

Digging a bit further, Wikipedia's[0] article is titled "Continental Europe", but says "mainland" is also used.

Time to speculate: for the British speaking English, the "main" land are the British Isles, so they prefer the term "continental".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe

I applaud this change!

In practice, however, I don't think much will change. In astronomy, and my subfield in particular, all papers are free on arXiv, and the publishing and referee process are almost more of an afterthought: the threat that you better produce a high-quality paper to get it officially published and usable in a job application.

But for research, arXiv is king. (There are even reports of some people no longer bothering submitting to a journal once they got tenure...)

If you can't pay the publication charges (usually paid by your grant), then there are other reputable journals in astronomy like MNRAS and Physical Review D. Physical review even let's you submit by importing from arXiv.

Full surface including oceans. I actually got something like 6.6 * 10^17 per mm^2, but who's counting?

Perhaps in more human terms:

On the surface of the Earth, there are 8.4 IPv4 addresses per km^2. Not counting the oceans, that would be 28 IPv4 addresses per km^2 land.

IPv6 gives 10^17 addresses per mm^2 (yes, square millimeter).

In terms of volume, 10^8 IPv6 addresses per mm^3 throughout the Earth.