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bnegreve

2,040 karma · joined January 4, 2011

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bnegreve··on No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
In both cases, one person is outraged by some comment made by someone undetermined on the internet.
bnegreve··on Stolen Renoir paintings found hidden, and damaged, behind cinder block wall
It was most likely downvoted because comparing people from Paris Commune with Adolf Hitler is a ridiculous comparison.
bnegreve··on Barcodes are about to go extinct
Not if you include the cost of the employee scanning the bar codes.

Even if the customers does it, it still takes a lot more time and space than scanning a basket full of RFIDs labels. It literally takes seconds.

bnegreve··on The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy
Errors are fine when they are due to a random process. When the press pick up claims because they are likely to attract readers it's a different story. Errors are not random, they are the result of an optimization process and are very unlikely to happen on the other side of the claim. (For example consider the overwhelming number of articles that have been published with the title "Scientist may have found life on mars" over the past 30 years)

For this reason, "may" in a press article, doesn't carry the same meaning regarding uncertainty than "may" in common language. Which is why I disagree with your comment:

> I've never understood the value of simply repeating the definition of uncertainty words like "may."

In the contrary, I think it is worth reminding people what may actually means here.

Now, I agree with what you and others have said about the usefulness of discussing uncertain claims, and I don't think there is a real disagreement here.

bnegreve··on The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy
I'm saying the incentive to publish articles that make strong claims with little evidence may be problematic.
bnegreve··on The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy
Not every correlation deserves to be published in the press. If you think about it, it is weird that they even make articles out of statements that only "may" be true.
bnegreve··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
Some people may not agree. The more options the better.
bnegreve··on Backups Aren't Simple
I keep the previous backup for one month and then delete it. So eventually the file is lost yes, but this is inevitable if you assume finite amount of storage.
bnegreve··on Backups Aren't Simple
> rsync can delete remote files with --delete or --delete-after

Yes but I don't use it precisely because that lets me recover files that I have accidentally deleted. I assume it's the intended default behavior of rsync.

bnegreve··on Backups Aren't Simple
I have a cron script that rsync my entire home directory every day with a remote server. Since rsync doesn't remove remote files, I re-create a backup from scratch the first day of each month and store a copy of the previous one.

Using old standardized open source tools means it survives system updates without having to fix anything for years. I got my laptop stolen/lost 3 times over the past 15 years, and I have always been able to restore everything the next day on a new laptop, in the time it takes to transfer the files over the network.

I haven't given much thought, I'm sure there is a realistic scenario where this strategy would fails but I haven't found it yet.

bnegreve··on People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination
> They are struggling with what they're drawing looking wrong to them, until they're fairly far along and the shapes are fairly complete.

In general I agree, but I have a counter example. I have a friend that has always been very good at drawing, and when he draws, it's immediately obvious that he has a very precise idea of what is going to happen. People often gather around him because it is entertaining to look at the drawing and suddenly understand what it represents. It's a similar experience to uncovering a photo frame covered with dust.

I assume that this ability is not uncommon among professional drawers.

bnegreve··on Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research
> all it should take is a system of valves,

That would work, but it's not how to works apparently. According to this veritasium video, it's because of "negative pressure" aka tension.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BickMFHAZR0

I recommend watching, I think it's one of the best veritasium Dereck has ever produced.

bnegreve··on Germany: Amazon is not allowed to force customers to watch ads on Prime Video
> Blame the consumers.

The consumer is not a single person, and until we (the consumers) all coordinate, our individual incentive is to not pay (Classical prisoner dilemma).

So "voting with your wallet" doesn't maximize your personal interest.

bnegreve··on Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable
> There's no "True" to an LLM, just how probable tokens are given previous context.

It may be enough: tool assisted LLMs already know when to use tools such as calculators or question answering systems when hallucinating an answer is likely to impact next token prediction error.

So next-token prediction error incentivize them to seek for true answers.

That doesn't guaranty anything of course, but if we were only interested in provably correct answers we would be working on theorem provers, not on LLMs

bnegreve··on Finland Bans Smartphones in Schools
Surely reading/writing are useful skills that most people did not have before school was mandatory.
bnegreve··on Pixel is a unit of length and area
> in "pixels wide" the word "wide" acts as a square root operator on the area and means "pixels^(-2)"

Did you meant "pixels^(1/2)"? I'm not sure what kind of units pixels^(-2) would be.

bnegreve··on 418 I’m a teapot
So many things in the IT world started as non-professional things by non-professional engineers. If you're a professional who lives off one of these things you should be glad that someone wanted to have fun at some point.

Let this HTTP code be a reminder of that.

bnegreve··on Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Machine Learning and Neural Networks
Most disciplines in CS have done that one way or another.
bnegreve··on Forage conservation is a neglected nitrous oxide source
It is probably good news, but to be fair land use and GHG emissions are not the same thing, especially given that fertilizers are involved.
bnegreve··on FFT-based ocean-wave rendering, implemented in Godot
It is very impressive, and better than anything I've seen before but think something is bit off with the swell. If I had to explain I would say that high frequency waves don't travel on top of low frequency waves the way they do in the video.
bnegreve··on Majority of sites and apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscriptions
> but then set up a website where that button keeps jumping away from your mouse for 20 minutes, while it's showing you uplifting messages why in fact, you should continue with the subscription. Still, only one click

Most laws can be misinterpreted, it doesn't necessarily mean they are useless.

bnegreve··on Wireless power transfer system achieves 270-kilowatt charge
> over an 4.75-inch gap
bnegreve··on Group chats rule the world
> every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you.

There are more like 2^n - 1 subgroups, i.e. as many subgroups as the there can be. If you think you're safe because you're already part of one subgroup that complain about the people not included in this particular subgroup, I also have some bad news for you.

bnegreve··on Remember When You Named Your Girlfriend as a Beneficiary? He Didn't Either
I don't know. If the case is not discussed in court, we will never know. This is why we should not blindly follow a will out of respect of the dead person, because there may be evidence this is just a mistake.
bnegreve··on Remember When You Named Your Girlfriend as a Beneficiary? He Didn't Either
> In respect for the dead person, we absolutely have to carry out their will.

We trust judges when they decide to send people to prison for decades, so I don't see why we shouldn't trust them if they decide that this will is probably a mistake.

bnegreve··on The danger of the mediocre success when testing startup hypotheses (2023)
I agree and I don't think it is specific to the world of entrepreneurs and/or social science experiments. If your target variable depends on a large number of correlated variables you are very unlikely to formulate the correct hypothesis by accident. This is why you need intuition or good judgement in science, just as much as in every thing else.
bnegreve··on European Space Agency to measure Earth at millimeter scale
- The satellite will accomplish this [precision] by having the usual main Earth-measuring techniques co-located on board [satelite navigation, interferometry, laser ..] When used together, the ESA expects to be able to correct for biases inherent in each technique.

- An updated International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) will have immediate benefits on satellite-based systems, impacting Galileo-enabled applications in fields like aviation, traffic management, autonomous vehicles, positioning and navigation

- The space agency added that meteorology, natural hazard prediction, monitoring climate change effects, land management and surveying – as well as the study of gravitational and non-gravitational forces as fields – would also see benefits.

- ...

bnegreve··on Europe's deepest mine to become giant gravity battery
Soon we will be hearing of the global flattening.
bnegreve··on There's More Proof That Return to Office Is Pointless
The title is rather ambiguous: evidence that RTO mandates do not increase firm performance is not evidence that returning to office is useless.

> we do not find significant changes in firm performance in terms of profitability and stock market valuation after the RTO mandates.

bnegreve··on Researchers have found a faster way to do integer linear programming
> Implementing them in large industrial (or open source) code bases in a maintainable way -- and then actually maintaining that code -- is a different skillset, a different set of interestes,

You're making a very general point on how algorithm research and software development are two different things, which is of course true. However OP's question is genuine: a lot of research in OR is very practical, and researchers often hack solvers to demonstrate that whatever idea offers a benefit over existing solving techniques. There are no reason to believe that a good new idea like this one couldn't be demonstrated and incorporated into new solvers quickly (especially given the competition).

So the quoted sentence is indeed a bit mysterious. I think it just meant to avoid comment such as "if it's so good why isn't it used in cplex?".

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