herodotus

Better source: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260

The actual journal article

Below are their least profitable routes, according to AI. Be interesting to see if that is what they shutdown first. Alternatively, it may be a matter of placing the planes in the least expensive hangers while they wit out the strike.

Key least profitable or discontinued routes include: Toronto-(YYZ) to Vancouver (YVR) Montreal to Detroit (DTW), Minneapolis (MSP) Toronto to Indianapolis (IND) Vancouver to Nashville (BNA), Tampa (TPA) Several Western Canada routes from Calgary to smaller cities

It might be informative to compare this with what happened when retailers introduced automated checkout machines. It seems that the net effect on staff sizes was not that dramatic. These stores need more anti-theft security people and some oversight. Not to mention the people they need for technical support. I wonder if there will develop a new category of skills for checking that AI produced code is correct, effective and optimal?

Grete Hermann's 1926 this is the foundational paper for modern computer algebra.

I wish articles like this would cite their sources. Here are two possible sources:

https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.241596 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38940402/

Bill showed up at one of the WWDCs (2011?). I sat next to him during a lunch, not knowing who he was! He told me his name, and then showed me some photos he had taken. He seemed to me to be a gentle and kind soul. So sad to read this news.

Actually, you were not alone: https://www.patentlyapple.com/2010/12/apple-wins-patent-for-...

Steve Jobs was one of the inventors listed on this patent. As it happens, I and another Apple colleague filed an almost identical patent at around the same time. So, for a while, Apple owned two patents for simulating a rotary dial on a touch wheel. (My patent was eventually allowed to lapse. Steve's has been renewed).

I have to say that I had had a bit too much to drink at a dinner in SF when I suggested this idea to my colleague. I was thinking of the old pinball game that had really good physics making it feel amazingly real. I thought that the crucial part was doing the dialing physics in such a way that users could quickly dial any digit with the right gesture.

I was not disclosed on the iPhone when I came up with this idea, but my colleague sent the idea off to the patent committee and they agreed to it! They must have laughed when they saw the similarities to Steve's patent (which was still in progress too). We did have some big differences with Steve's, so it wasn't a duplicate. That being said, I think they wanted to boost the number of patents related to the iPhone as part of the initial marketing. (Steve said that there were already "over 200 patents" for it when he introduced it.)

This is mostly what I worked on for many years at Apple with reasonable success. The main secret was to accept that everything was geometry, and use cluster analysis to try to distinguish between word gaps and letter gaps. On many PDF documents, it works really well, but there are so many different kinds of PDF documents that there are always cases were the results are not that great. If I were to do it today, I would stick with geometry, avoid OCR completely, but use machine learning. One big advantage for machine learning is that I could use existing tools to generate PDFs from known text, so that the training phase could be completly automatic. (Here is Bertrand Serlet announcing the feature at WWDC in 2009: https://youtu.be/FTfChHwGFf0?si=wNCfI9wZj1aj9rY7&t=308)

Interesting that it includes patents. (Found at least one of mine).

My Master's supervisor, at Wits university in Johannesburg, worked on the architecture of the 360 after graduating from the PhD program at Harvard. I remember him telling us how they went about deciding whether or not 32 bits would be a sufficient size for "most" floating point numbers. They were very systematic about it, scouring journals, talking with physicists and mathematicians and so on.

Snow Leopard was released while Steve Jobs was on medical leave. It was driven (as far as I can recall) by Bertrand Serlet. Rumour has it that Steve was furious about the "no new features" marketing when he returned from his medical leave.

Hmmm... is there any way to impeach Elon Musk?

Incredible conflict of interest here.

Genuine question because I know almost nothing about crypto: who actually lost money in this attack? Lots of individuals?

Gee, I wonder if this will maybe benefit Space X in some way?

In British Columbia there used to be the mining exploration companies that would list on the Vancouver Stock Exchange (which no longer exists). As far as I could tell, they would send one or two people into the boonies in BC somewhere. They would then write an hyperbole filled prospectus to persuade people to buy shares in this company. I once emailed the owner of one these companies to ask what the exit was: in other words, what would the payout be if I held out until the end, assuming they had actually obtained rights to a viable gold or other valuable mineral deposit. Instead of an email reply, I got a phone call from the owner. He never answered the question, just lots of BS about why I should buy more shares. But at least in the case of these scams, there was the small (vanishngly small?) possibility of a good payout. But what is the exit for memecoins? As far as I can tell, the idea is you buy them on issue, hope the hype drives them up to ridiculous values within hours, and then dump them. Please correct me if I'm am missing something.

Many years ago, the university I worked at offered a very generous early retirement benefit. The objective was to "get rid of the dead-wood" to make way for "new blood". The trouble was the 55 year olds most likely to accept the offer were the best faculty members; the ones who knew they would have no trouble getting appointments at a different university. The people who knew they were not very productive stayed, of course.

Better. Thanks.

Nice idea, but watching the spinning coins made me a bit nauseous. I had to go away from the page.

Another win for China. While the US guts its research capacity, China already dominates scientific research (according to Perplexity, 29% of the most highly cited peer reviewed articles are authored by Chinese scientists). Of course all those people who voted for this regime don't believe that there is any benefit to funding science. After all, what did science ever do for them? (OK, except for the science of pick-up trucks - I'll give you that. Oh yes, and the transistor: I think I may have one in my phone. But otherwise: name one thing, bro). Maybe those hats should replace the "A" with a "C".

Pseudoscience: see https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-telepathy-tapes-...

Now that's a browser extension I would pay for!

Thanks for providing that link. What an amazing artist!

When I was a prof (many years ago), I was working on a database for a political campaign. The code was a mess. I asked a couple of my colleagues (successful comp. sci. profs) to help out. It became clear very quickly that there are two kinds of comp. sci. profs: those who can program and those who cannot.

Delta is in Canada (in the province of British Columbia). There is a border crossing between Delta and Point Roberts. This credit union is close to Point Roberts, but it is not in Point Roberts. I asked the question because I wanted to go to a US bank, not a Canadian one.

I am seriously worried about AI being merged into search. Below you will see a very simple query I made to ChatGPT. Spoiler alert: the answer is wrong. There is a branch of Umpqua bank in Point Roberts. And there is no credit union. So instead of the correct answer, I get the sort of answer I would get from a friendly uncle who was determined to hide some ugly truth from me.

The worst part is that I see no evidence that this kind of wrongness will ever get better.

ChatGPT: You said: are there any banks in Point Roberts? ChatGPT said:

Point Roberts, Washington, is a unique community because it's located on a small peninsula that is part of the United States but accessible only by land through Canada. Due to its small size and unique geography, Point Roberts doesn't have many large-scale businesses, including full-service banks.

However, there are some options for banking in the area:

ATM Services: There are ATMs available in Point Roberts, which can be used for withdrawing cash, but they might not offer a wide range of services like in-person banking or loan assistance. Local Credit Union: There is a branch of the Point Roberts Credit Union. It's a smaller, community-oriented institution that offers some financial services, including savings accounts, loans, and other basic banking services. Nearby Banks in Blaine: For more extensive banking services (like branch access, larger ATM networks, etc.), many Point Roberts residents and visitors go across the border to Blaine, Washington, which is just a short drive away. Blaine has branches of major banks such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank. If you are looking for specific services, it might be best to contact the credit union or check with larger banks in nearby Blaine.

Dorothy Parker died in 1967. In 1972, my university presented its first ever computer science course: a second year course, teaching both IBM 360 assembly language and Fortran. The driving force behind this was Derek Henderson, one of the first people to receive a PhD in Computer Science. And a member of the team that designed the IBM 360.

What did this have to do with Dorothy Parker? Well the year I took my first Computer Science course from Prof. Henderson (as he was known to me), I discovered two passions in my life - programming, and the very cool women on campus who all seemed to be carrying the book "The Portable Dorothy Parker" with them everywhere.

This might be too weird to be true, but when I heard that Geoff Hinton got the Nobel prize for Physics, I wondered if the prize committee was having trouble finding "real" physicists who had made fundamental advances....

This is not meant to knock Prof Hinton. These are his own words:

“I’m not a physicist, I have very high respect for physics,” Hinton said. “I dropped out of physics after my first year at university because I couldn’t do the complicated math. So, getting an award in physics was very surprising to me. I’m very pleased that the Nobel committee recognised that there’s been huge progress in the area of artificial neural networks.”

Lovely. In about 1974 I was paid to write a function, in IBM 360 assembly language, to compute square roots. I was asked to make it as efficient as possible. I was in my last year as an undergraduate student. I used a Chebyshev approximation for the initial guess (after scaling the input to lie between 0 and 1), and then used two (or was it three) unrolled iterations of Newton's method to get the solution. First money I ever received for writing code!

Not a topic that I am particularly interested in, but I watched it all because the presenter is really good at explaining things. If I was still in the game of giving talks (I am retired now), I would gain some good presentation thoughts from this.