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andrepd

19,976 karma · joined June 19, 2013

MSc in Physics PhD Researcher in Logic and Automated Reasoning
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andrepd··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
I'm an AI skeptic, but I don't see how this squares with what the organisers of the event actually say. "It previously suggested that math researchers already have no place in mathematics"? I don't see this.
andrepd··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
> As a parallel example, can we prove the phase of the moon had no impact on the NS solution? No, not without a bunch experiments run at different phases of the moon.

The _gall_ to say something like this. Do you perhaps think we are all stupid?? This very blogpost claims not to know if their work was used as input for this model. I don't even understand how that is possible, surely you can know if something is part of the training data, even if you are in the dark about what impact it actually made, qualitatively. The moon....

> Knowing most of the recipes we use, there's really no reason to think such contamination happened.

Yeah sorry but I don't trust you. I don't trust people or companies that have shown themselves to be dishonest before. Especially when the previous paragraph is comparing plagiarism and training data contamination with, _the phases of the moon_.

Might even be you're actually telling the truth, but the boy that cried wolf and all that.

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As an aside, I would bet very good money at how most (all?) these companies are flouting their ZDR.

andrepd··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Lmao my friend, the whole "drama" is that there are allegations of plagiarism.
andrepd··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
> "I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey."

The AI-isms are seeping into their speech :)

andrepd··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Holy late capitalism. Everything revolves around line-go-up, and sociopaths rule the show. These people cannot even collaborate like civilised scientists on one of the most famous open problems in mathematics?

“It would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” I cannot believe this shit.

andrepd··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
1. Interaction with Meta is virtually mandatory in many places in the world. Try opting out of Meta when your kid's daycare or your building's group chat is on whatsapp.

2. It doesn't really matter if you opt out, because _other people around you don't_: they take pictures in which you show, they tag you, they talk about you, they send you links, etc. Which means they (Meta) build a shadow profile of you anyway.

The "personal responsibility angle" is pure fiction.

andrepd··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
Pardon my French but bull-fucking-shit! A CEO _should_ take responsibility for what their subordinates do. It's preposterous to simple throw up our arms and say "oh well, some employees were sloppy so we lost some 100 million user IDs and other sensitive information that we promised not to store but we lied. Oopsie, silly me, pardon my wee incompetence tee-hee". No no no NO NO!

At some level, and certainly at the level where you get paychecks of 10 million a year for the "huge responsibility you are bearing", then incompetence IS malice!

andrepd··on bzip3
As I understand there is no advantage in using a custom dictionary to compress 1 file. It benefits compressing _several_ (small) files.
andrepd··on GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard
There are excellent FOSS gallery apps already, like the Fossify suite. Why not use them I wonder?
andrepd··on GPT-6 Astra
> I've been at the point personally where I am reasonably confident that there's essentially nothing that I am better than Fable

What a sad thing to say. These models are not even better than me at _writing code_, which is as well-suited a task for LLM agents as can possibly be, what with the structured environment and the exabytes of free annotated training data.

Of course, they are also not better than humans at writing, let alone at talking to my daughter, running a pathfinder campaign, decorating a room, being a therapist, etc.

andrepd··on Audacity 4.0
His video about reality TV music, and the one about the newest musescore default font, are some of my favourite yt videos of all time. Great communicator.
andrepd··on Fastpotify
Slop code is already hard to tolerate, but any hint of slop in text will immediately make me chuck it into the bin / close the tab, no exceptions. My lifetime is finite, I'm sure as fuck not gonna spend time reading something that a person could not even be arsed to write themselves. I'm only annoyed that it takes sometimes a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes, to detect that I'm actually not reading a person's thoughts but only a machine simulacrum of such.

I highly recommend anybody to take up a similar rule, in any context. Slop in a website? Close. Slop in an email? Bin. Slop in a code comment? Skip.

andrepd··on 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
WoW needed a purchase, an expensive subscription, and a good PC. Runescape ran on a potato, was F2P, the P2P was 5$ a month, and you could get started in 2 minutes from Miniclip.
andrepd··on 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
Ultima Online is one of very few games (probably Star Wars Galaxies and that's it) that actually merit the label MMORPG. It's kind of insane when you think about it, that the MMO that most closely came to fulfilling the promise of a "shared, persistent, virtual world" was also the ~first one.
andrepd··on EVE Online moves to Python 3
> I enjoyed it way too much

Well if you enjoyed it it's was not a waste of time! Much human endeavour (and _all_ hobbies!) are ultimately pointless.

If it negatively affects other aspects of your life it's a different story though.

andrepd··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
Countries have wildly different needs regarding monetary policy. Those interests are sometimes in conflict. When push comes to shove, unsurprisingly the powerful dictate the rules: see the 2010s Eurozone crises.
andrepd··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
A maneauvor whereupon a foreign power allows as many people into a small enclave as already live there (literally 60k into a territory of 80k) cannot be called anything other than "invasion". When did Mexico conspire to help 60k people breach into Texas? Let me know and we can have that conversation, maybe I missed it.

As a side-note it was the "dangerous communist leftist" Sanchez which swiftly took control of the situation and defended what was in effect an external EU border, while Melloni et al rubbed their hands and tried to score some cheap points while doing fuck all to help. Food for thought if you ask me...

andrepd··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
> profligate Greece being "thrown out" of the euro zone. In this dark scenario Greek civil servants would get their pay rises in worthless drachma, but Greek homeowners would be left with unpayable euro mortgages

That was indeed the "mainstream media" (I so hate that expression but it does apply) opinion. The reality is more prosaic: German (and French, but mostly German) banks would be screwed if those debts were defaulted upon.

Look at the GDP per capita of Greece since 2010. Looks like staying in the Eurozone didn't do them much good either...

andrepd··on Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account
The problem is not governments or people posting there. The problem is platforms/utilities not being treated as such.
andrepd··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
People _2000 years_ ago were writing books about why this is not true, but in the year 2026 there's still people saying "just give them the death penalty bro"....
andrepd··on Zig’s Io.Threaded is neat
Weird thing to say when early Rust had sigils everywhere.
andrepd··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
> Guys who work in bike shops like to joke about bicycle-shaped objects—sure, that mass-produced hunk of metal and plastic has a seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bike. When the materials are so cheap and the construction is so slapdash, it deserves another name entirely.

> This terminology comes in handy, because it turns out there are also movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects, art-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects. Just because a series of pictures flickered across the screen and the credits followed, that doesn’t mean it was a movie. Just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard, that doesn’t mean it’s a book. There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing, and the difference between having and lacking that essence is the difference between a corpse and a person.

There's nothing more to be said. This right here is what slop enthusiasts will never get, because they equate thought with a thought-shaped object.

andrepd··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
How in god's name is openrouter worth $7,000,000,000? Can somebody explain to me, or is everything to do with AI just astronomically overvalued these days.
andrepd··on Turns are Better than Radians (2022)
Posit arithmetic requires not only sin(x), but also sin(2πx), correctly rounded that is. I wish IEEE floats had that as well.

https://posithub.org/docs/posit_standard-2.pdf

andrepd··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
In what possible conceivable way is single-payer healthcare in any way related to any of that tripe? Seriously, what an atrocious post. You may begin by observing that countries in e.g. Europe with such systems are not totalitarian hellholes where "the gobmint" tells you how to eat with "devastating long-term effects".....
andrepd··on Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
> I now have btop permanently running in a Terminal and I habitually Alt-Tab to it to watch my swap. As soon as my free memory gets less than 1 Gb I kill any Firefox tabs (the memory black hole).

This is what nohang [0] does. There is no reason to do that by hand. Obscure configuration files to edit?

Yeah it's kind of annoying that it's not built in to most desktop distros, but... literally `apt install nohang; systemctl enable --now nohang.service`. Hardly that difficult.

[0]: https://github.com/hakavlad/nohang

andrepd··on How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)
The only reason to buy a pixel (new or refurbished) is to run Graphene or Lineage anyway :)
andrepd··on How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)
I mean, is it that much of a hassle to carry a debit card with you?
andrepd··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
Hard not to argue in what metric? The US has Flock cameras spreading like the plague, if we're going purely based on vibes. And the Snowden disclosures about how they spy on their own citizens on a massive scale is over a decade old at this point.

Plus, a city covered in CCTV could theoretically be freer than one with much less coverage, if those cameras are recording to encrypted storage and accessible only with a judicial warrant, and the others are a lawless free for all with private and public operators hoovering up all the data.

andrepd··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
breadth, depth and nuance

If ever there were three adjectives which do NOT apply to generative AI...

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