I'm a bit of an LLM skeptic but chatgpt could probably explain this kind of thing pretty well and a) it's interactive so you can ask if you don't understand a step b) there will be no filler to pad the content for ads (well not at the moment anyway)
I skimmed the paper so might have missed something, but iiuc there is no algorithm used for comparison. They did not run some well defined algorithm on some benchmark instances, they estimated the cost of simulating the circuits "through tensor network contraction" - I quote here not to scare but because this is where my expertise runs out.
You are right I think. I lived in Finland and rarely used cash. Even people selling their clothes at pop up second hand markets seemed to be able to take card. It has nothing to do with criminality, just culture. Germans use cash a lot and it's harder for me now I live outside the eurozone to go there.
Rankings are just meaningless. And this isn't the evidence for it! Actually in the past they've more or less admitted that they play around with the weighting and discard if the outcome is unexpected, meaning that even by its own standards it's circular. But the fact is that rankings are one dimensional and universities are very obviously multidimensional. You can't get anything meaningful out of such compression. The researchers and students at oxbridge are higher quality, that's more or less undisputed. Other than that though, it's so subjective and personal.
A nugget of advice distilled from Bill Hader: when people tell you what you're doing isn't working, they're right. When they tell you what you should do instead, they're wrong.
I get a really bad vibe from this guy. I first came across him from a viral video where he was making claims about millennials in the workplace. In my opinion they were a mixture of obvious and wrong. And it was framed like he was some expert. But it later became obvious that it was basically an ad for a book he had out, and really he has no expertise or real world experience whatsoever. He's a grifter imo.
As a mathematician I'd like to draw your attention to the magic square on the Passion facade of the Sagrada Familia, with magic constant 33, the final age of Jesus. It has repeated numbers so it is considered trivial or not a magic square at all by some definitions (after all you could always set every cell equal to 1 to satisfy the other conditions). There are non trivial magic squares with constant 33. Nevertheless, this example is noteworthy.
I'm glad it's not just anecdotal. I had an American colleague whose husband praised her amazing guacamole recipe. The recipe turned out to be a jar of guacamole and a jar of salsa mixed together. I may have forgotten the details but a jar of guacamole was certainly listed as an ingredient. I thought it was a joke!
Subscribe to a periodical. I got a bit too busy recently but for two years I subscribed to Private Eye (if you're not from the UK you might need to find an alternative) it's fortnightly and they don't put much on their website. They follow up on stories sometimes going back to the 80s or more.
My partner uses Windows and I occasionally provide my amateurish tech support. One thing not mentioned in this article is the right click situation. I can't really describe what's wrong because I've not used Windows regularly in ten years. All I know is it is very confusing and basic tasks are hidden behind an extra click. I'm sure this is another mcrib situation but I wanted to mention it. There's probably a way to change it. But there are so many things like this and they usually come up when I'm trying to solve some other problem and don't have time to get distracted finding the setting. Is it so hard to make basic functionality the default and let users add on some of these features if they want to.
I agree with your broader point. But I used to get a free beer on British Airways flights and no longer do. It's been many years since I flew on a plane with even a compartment for my stuff in front of me let alone a screen. Admittedly I fly less than I used to but that's at least partly because the relative experience vs cost of trains has got better and I have no reason to fly across the ocean.
I recently did a short stint teaching English to university students. This is English as a second language (possibly unnecessary context) but the level is fairly high. The course was hastily rearranged to prevent the students using llms. They had to hand write their essays under supervision, which made them a real pain to grade btw.
Then I was asked to review the questions for the final exam and I noticed some pretty weird constructions in the sample texts and sentences. Nothing completely grammatically wrong just unusual or semantically off. The example I recall was "... disproportionately affects men and women" but there were other worse examples. You can guess where this is going. But I knew that another native speaker had written the listening texts so I didn't want to directly criticise these, and I thought they might have been pulled from magazines or some corpus. But, of course, the course leader had generated them with chatgpt.
Yeah I came to make the same comment. But Messi and Ronaldo didnt play each other that many times in the grand scheme of their careers. A big part of the comparison is statistical. Trophies, records and so on. Tennis might be a better comparison because to win a grand slam, Sampras really had to beat Agassi.
It's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know what the right metaphor is. Throwing the scrap of edible meat out with the ton of rotten flesh? YouTube has got really bad in recent years. There are channels deliberately trying to get through to kids with horrific content. And of course the tobacco, gambling and sugar industries trying to turn our kids into addicts. They are often only one or two clicks away from extremely inappropriate content.
I never sent a sample to any of these companies and I'm glad I didn't. The next best thing would be to delete your data if there's an option (although of course you only have their word for it). It has nothing to do with panicking.
Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.
I know what you mean but I live close to the border of another country. Can it really be unethical to stay in a hotel in a city two hours west but not two hours northeast because of a border? Maybe you're just talking about the American experience.
There are certainly places where it is clearer cut. Hawaii and Barcelona come to mind.
Hi I'm a mathematician with a background in graph theory and algorithms. I'm trying to find a job outside academia. Can you elaborate on the kind of work you were doing? Sounds like I could fruitfully apply my skills to something like that. Cheers!
I am sympathetic to the kind of claims made by your paper. I like impossibility results and I could believe that for some definition of AGI there is at least a plausible argument that entropy is a problem. Scalable quantum computing is a good point of comparison.
But your paper is throwing up crank red flags left and right. If you have a strong argument for such a bold claim, you should put it front and centre: give your definition of AGI, give your proof, let it stand on its own. Some discussion of the definition is useful. Discussion of your personal life and Kant is really not.
Skimming through your paper, your argument seems to boil down to "there must be some questions AGI gets wrong". Well since the definition includes that AGI is algorithmic, this is already clear thanks to the halting problem.