dimask

> They both use the same mental processes

There is not some evidence or argument in the article to actually support this claim. If anything, assuming the more plausible hypothesis that programming and mathematical thought are akin to each other, and the fact that research supports that there brain networks related to mathematical reasoning unrelated to other language activities [1], I would think it is much more plausible that writing code is fundamentally different from writing prose (even if they do share some similarities as language goes).

There is a close connection between mathematical thinking, including all between basic arithmetic up to calculus, algebra and advanced research mathematics, and specific spatial abilities and skills (specifically mental rotation/transformation, but not other spatial/navigation skills [2]). Programming is also imo a mode of mathematical thinking, and in this one needs to construct and manipulate logical relations between objects and processes. This makes it different than prose, where the relations are of different natures. I think this is what is missing from this: math and programming alike involve a certain understanding and manipulation of relations, which uses our preexisting toolbox of spatial reasoning (which may or may not take the form of explicit mental visualisation; people with aphantasia can also be good in mental rotation tasks).

[1] Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1603205113

[2] Reimagining Mathematics: The Role of Mental Imagery in Explaining Mathematical Calculation Skills in Childhood https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mbe.12281

"Interoperability" was cool and all 20 years ago or so, but I do not understand how nowadays anybody really considers it a good idea tbh. It has pretty much obvious security risks (it need not have in theory, but in practice it certainly does). And it is not that we lack decent multiplatform, secure solutions that people can use independent of platform.

I am all against monopolies, I loved pidgin (and just saw that actually it still exists!), but the beeper-mini case was quite weird.

> The user will create an account so IMO if I have an Apple account (I own an old Apple laptop) then WTF would Apple care I send the bytes from a differrent application.

Actually, the initial version of beeper mini did not require an apple ID. And actually this was one feature they seemed to advertised a lot. Only the phone number was used: "No Apple ID is required" [1].

I guess the idea was that they could provide an upgrade to the current, unencrypted communication between iMessage and android (that does not require an apple id either). But I guess the issue here, was that people who used it did not necessarily have an apple ID, and thus not consented to apple's ToS, which as I understand makes it different than pidgin etc. And they actually say that this is a problem they are trying to fix: "Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now sign in with an AppleID. Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently working on a fix for this." [2]

Unless I misunderstand something, beeper mini stopped working because apple somehow disabled this "feature".

I mean I do not have any invested interest in this, I do not own an iphone and even if I did all people I know use other chatting apps, I do not own apple stocks or anything, I am all for piracy and whatnot, but I would not consider blocking access to their service when there is no ToS agreement "anti-competitive behaviour".

[1] https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works (initial announcement) [2] https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-mini-is-back

Good and bad itself depends on the perspective. Good for Hasbro? Can be argued I guess, depends also on its current economic situation and a lot of things other people may indeed not have the best knowledge about. Good for the players and fans of DnD? Good for those who actually work in the company and got laid off, or the remaining staff there? Almost surely not. This decision is not taken on their behalf and does not serve them in any way. And considering the popularity of DnD there is no surprise that the issue is going to be approached from an employee or player perspective rather than an investor or manager one.

I use this firefox extension that converts `OpenAI` to `"Open"AI` as part of my sanity-preserving toolkit.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/openai-is-not...

> the free market can reward good development

ha ha

No way, especially because all the people taking most market-business-related decisions (eg which software to buy) are not tech-oriented. If we had more power on these decisions, that would mean that development, and even advertising of products, would be closer to what the parent comment suggest. But alas.

You do not have to activate the "crypto wallet", even less use it.

> The 2% isn't going to do much.

2% of what? If you mean alcohol, that is not how fermentation works for preserving food/drinks.

Using beneficial/harmless cultures to outcompete harmful microorganisms, which is how fermentation is used to preserve food/drinks, has been the main way of preserving food across cultures. Especially before fridge, canning and and other modern industrial techniques have been possible. Yeah I do not get the "beer instead of water" thing, but I can imagine there could be a lot of situations that beer could be important to have as a water source, like traveling distances.

Yes I do feel. I have no invested interest in the online advertising industry as to not be.

Phones are an end-consumer product. AI is not only an end-consumer product (and probably not even mostly an end-consumer one). It is a tool to be used in many different steps in production. AI is not chatbots.

Stuff like alphafold has and will have huge impact in our lives, even if I am not into spending time folding proteins myself. It is absurd to make this sort of comparisons.

I don't disagree, as in that if we achieve school math in a way that is not mere overfitting over a language-based training set, going to more advanced mathematics is definitely conceivable. My problem is that people are talking about solving unsolved conjectures while we are not even in a point where we know how to tackle math at all.

Imo we are not currently in the beginning of an exponential curve re solving math with AI, and def not on the path of AGI. I understand that if one believes that we are on the path to AGI soon then we shall have these math-AI advancements quite soon, but I disagree with the premise.

Proving that the first player has a winning strategy, or the optimal strategy for both players leads to draw.

Their current ambition is to be able to solve school math, which is quite far away from solving unsolved conjectures or math olympiads. I really doubt that any of this is within LLM/transformer scope, except maybe in some auxiliary sense to other, much different architectures.

Also FF long time user. Ime FF is pretty much fine nowadays. It used to have problems, but it got a huge leap in performance around 2017 when they improved multithreading support. Since then it is pretty much fine, aside from the occasional awkward unsupporting webpage.

What I do not understand is not why people do not use FF, it is why people use Chrome instead of Chromium, Brave or some other chromium-based browser that is not google or MS. Surely it is not that much more effort to install one of these than chrome.

If we are talking about a paid service (like slack), not supporting firefox imo means it is a bad product. A service for which one pays for should not force them use a specific browser. This is essentially an argument of not using slack, not firefox.

> Ads do work excellently for their intended purpose.

But this is the problem, because their intended purpose is not the user experience. A lot of people block the ads because they find them distracting, and actually part of the intended purpose of ads is to distract your attention to them.

There is no "users of Ad blockers" vs "technical users", using an ad blocker is not some sort of purpose of why I use a browser.

The boundedness of the data is also the main argument here https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.8401...

I would call this type of argument a case of regression to the mean rather than "autocorrelation". That, of course, in principle requires independence between performance and assessment of performance. In many cases, it would make little sense to assume that the performance and assessment of performance are independent. But even then, one can simulate random data with some correlation, and still get a DK effect merely as statistical artifact. An overview of similar critiques, and a similar argument in https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.8401... .

I think you are exaggerating a bit, but tbh I had a very similar attitude towards macs before, because at work we were forced to use some mac computers which I found insufferable at the time. Hardware-wise we had some pretty much ridiculous iMacs with HDD bought in like 2019 - internal HDDs as main drives should have been banned at that point. Software-wise, issues with OS updates, library versions, and too bloated interface.

It was only once I got my M1 air that I realised that macos was not the problem, but rather how the computers were configured, shared between people and used. Eg I just share my shell configurations and tools with my linux systems, iterm is great, homebrew is pretty fine for me, tools like rectangle making the window interface much more usable. There are occasional issues, annoying security restrictions that you have to manually waive all the time, OS updates that break things, but at least it does not force you to update in the middle of you having to run something important like windows do. And the default macos office apps are lightweight, and decent enough that I do not need to some bloated office software. Work-wise, all the computational software I use runs fine, and only if I need to use intense and long parallelised computations I may use my desktop (or cloud). I am pretty sure an ipad or an iphone would run a lot of stuff pretty ok, if they were not limited by their OS and peripheral support.

In any case, the main reason I got into macs anyway was the lack of fan noise. I do not think I can go back to any other laptop that makes so much noise again. I share my office with others and get constant reminder how it sounds like. Heck I am playing BG3 on my M1 macbook air. I can't do that on a chromebook, and neither anywhere else without a fan. My friend has a laptop with rtx 3070 and it sounds like a jet engine when we play together.

If you sell your 3yo computer you are gonna get a decent price, so upgrading a 4k computer every 3 years is not the same as spending 4k every 3 years. Though, it highly depends on the initial configuration, and the additional premiums you pay to apple for ram etc do not seem to scale so well in the second hand market.

That said, I do not find much appeal to upgrade unless there is a specific reason myself. But there seems to be something in apple customer culture where people upgrade for the mere sake of stuff like new design or colour.

Imho M1 airs are the best bang for buck as mid-whatever-range laptops. Especially if one finds a 16gb one. Crazy if you think that before, the base macbook air you could get at the same original price would be a mere i3 one, while m1 actually competes well in raw performance with i7. Unless somebody wants something specific that M2/3 have that M1 does not, M1's price/performance ratio is hard to beat.

Rosetta, plus the fact that M-series was so much better than intel macs, made the transition period relatively painless until native ARM support became standard (almost). Also, the tight control of its ecosystem allows Apple to do things like that more easily. Plus that, basically, they had enough experience already with iPhones' SoCs and OS (the macs' SoC were based on the iPhones' ones).

or

    sudo open -a Activity\ Monitor

It is not about different set of information, but different stakes/interests. They act firstmost as investors rather than as employees on this.

He will most likely join M$ if the board does not resign, because there is no better move to him then. But he leaves time to the board to see it, adding pressure together with the empoyees. It does not mean he is bluffing (what would be a better move in this case instead?)

Imagine if Jobs had gone to M$.

No, but it also shows that those who supposedly care about AI alignment and whatnot, care more about money. Which is why AI alignment is becoming an oxymoron.

They probably care more about the people they may bring with them.

They do not want to exterminate humanity or the ecosystem, but rather profit from the controlled destruction of life, as they try to do out of everything.