Well to extend the analogy, I close my eyes when I'm listening to music. Even more so when I'm playing an instrument. And when I'm reading I can't be listening to music, at least not actively and nothing too interesting.
I think we move back and forth to improve our understanding. The other day I read an article about Handel's messiah. I then went and listened to it.
I recently found a family of tilings of the sphere by drawing pictures. To convince myself that the tilings really exist and I wasn't just tricking myself, I calculated the angles at the vertices (I used a computer for this). That in turn told me something about the relative size of the tiles. And so it goes.
Your first paragraph is spot on. Your second has no follow up analysis. It's interesting that you say greed (i.e. self interest) has made the world a better place and then tacitly admit that what you mean by that is a better place for you. I don't think any of the truly important advances of the last hundred years came about by harnessing greed, quite the opposite in fact.
Also, this is very minor but phrases like "get on a call" or worse, references to jumping or hopping, really irritate me. What's wrong with that good old English verb "to have"? Or better yet, call is (believe it or not) a verb! Can I call you? Maybe. Can we hop on a quick call? Absolutely not.
No you would only have to ban things with no nutritional benefit. The comment you replied to specified the case in question: it only lends the food a color.
I got rid of all novels and pop science books. They are fine to read on a kindle and rarely re-read. My physical books are textbooks and reference books (dictionaries, atlases).
I am a mathematician and I used to get a ton of mileage out of Google for research. I got really good at working out likely phrases other researchers would use for concepts that I encountered, and using Boolean operators to filter out pages with similar keywords. I think those days are over sadly. I think we will see a resurgence of personal libraries.
I have a stepson. We had a balance bike for him; one of his weekends with his dad, his dad got him a bike and he pretty much just started cycling immediately. We bought a bike and he barely needed help. It was pretty remarkable.
I noticed that almost none of the kids around me, mine included, have training wheels. They all learn on push bikes with no pedals and then straight to bikes.
I had training wheels but I live in the Czech republic and grew up in England.
Well the IOC makes an enormous amount of money that has to come from somewhere. That is a reflection of the demand. Tickets are extremely expensive and the deals for live broadcast also involve huge amounts of money, which broadcasters wouldn't pay if they didn't think many would watch. The point of this article is simply that a bigger fraction of that money should go to the athletes. They are prevented in various ways from bargaining collectively.
Funny you should say that because I just read his Wikipedia page and a couple of articles about him. He and Gates are successful salesmen and managers who dabbled in coding when they were young. I don't expect any insight from them about the effect of technologies on society or anything like that. The idea that they are intellectuals or scholars is laughable.
"dark Google" seems like the title of a blog post I would find on HN! This is intended as a compliment, in case not clear... Add some important facts and figures (what is the revenue of dark Google, who and how many are they employing) and write it up!
The mathematicians of the future will still have to figure out the right questions, even if llms can give them the answers. And "prompt engineering" will require mathematical skills, at the very least.
Evaluating the output of llms will also require mathematical skills.
But I'd go further, if your son enjoys mathematics and has some ability in the area, it's wonderful for your inner life. Anyone who becomes sufficiently interested in anything will rediscover mathematics lurking at the bottom.
Everything apart from the look of the iPhone is value created by publicly funded organisations, with the exception of the transistor which was developed by at&t. And at&t were effectively a government sponsored monopoly at the time. So apple extracted value, I would argue.
I'm late to reply but for the record I think you're way wrong about music. You (and I) are just old. I'm a musician and I do think there is a sense in which the most popular songs are "worse" - they contain fewer, simpler musical ideas. But there are plenty of good song writers doing interesting stuff. I'm not totally on the ball as I do prefer music from the past. But I would point to Billy Eilish as a particularly young example, there's also Jacob Collier for instance. Both very unusual, very popular.
In some areas probably you're right. Pictures of men in certain eras all wearing identical hats spring to mind. On the other hand the film industry is a stark example where it really did used to be more varied. The article mentions it, before 2000 3 in 4 big films were original. Now it's getting close to zero.
Just a quick well, actually. It's common at least in my corner of mathematics to put something on arxiv simultaneously with submission to a journal or conference. If I wanted feedback on a paper before submitting I would definitely do that privately. But everyone is different.
Just my guess as a mathematician. But if LLMs are good for anything it will be for finding surprising connections and applying our existing tools in ways beyond human search. There's a huge space of tools and problems, and human intuition and brute force searching can only go so far. I can imagine that LLMs might start to find combinatorial proofs of topological theorems, maybe even novel theorems. Or vice versa. But I find it difficult to imagine them inventing new tools and objects that are really useful.
Unless you are an extremely astute observer of every human endeavour, relying on primary sources like this is a way to bake in your biases. Of course relying on a small number of specific commentators is as well. But don't pretend you are being more rational here.
I'm glad op rethought it. But how the hell do you go into the casino business and not realise you're doing something that is a social net negative. Have you not heard of the film Casino. Or how do you not realise you're going into the casino business, I guess?
A priori, a quantum network could efficiently solve e.g. leadership election or shortest path type problems. I don't think there's any evidence that they can, but any problem you might want to solve for a wide area network is potentially a use case for quantum. By the way, as I said I'm more or less a QC skeptic in the sense that I don't think we will have scalable QC doing really useful work in our lifetimes. Happy to be wrong though.
Well I don't really agree that quantum computers are useful! Not yet anyway.
But in (most) distributed models of computing, networks of computers share bits back and forth. The quantum distributed models have computers sharing qubits. So this seems to be a practical implementation of a system that could solve certain problems (specifically some graph labelling problems) more efficiently (specifically, in fewer message-passing rounds).
Perhaps you're confusing "internet" (a network of computers) with "world wide web" (a set of linked documents)
This article gets the colours wrong. Do the red figure example for yourself. If you do it correctly you will clearly see cyan, which is the opposite of red in RGB . It has nothing to do with the "primary colours" of blue and yellow mixing. Basic science facepalm from Smithsonian it seems.
I don't know about use case but in various distributed computing models there are problems that are provably easier for quantum computers. Unlike the classical setting where the best we have is factoring where we don't know an efficient deterministic algorithm and various problems which experimentally seem to be faster for QC (and those results often don't last long as we get better at simulating quantum algorithms classically)