jltsiren

AI is the ultimate generalist. You can make it do a lot of things well by asking the right questions. In a generalist job, many people can ask those questions.

I don't use AI that much. When I do, it's often surprisingly competent in the topics I'm a specialist in, and it can do a lot of good work quickly. But other people in other organizations still continue building upon my work instead of asking AI directly. Apparently because they don't know what to ask.

Nobody knows how long this will last. Hopefully long enough that I can afford to retire, because I'm old enough that I would face ageism if I had to find a different job.

And if we get there, we will probably have a serious political debate on how many digits should there be in the wealth tax rate.

It could be a matter of personality. Some people are happy with what they have, while others are fundamentally unhappy. Unusually successful people tend to be of the latter type.

There are often cultural elements in that balance. Many societies had cultural adaptations that lowered fertility under normal circumstances but enabled faster repopulation after a crisis. But if there was an outlet for excess people, the base reproduction rate could be higher.

For example, the Roman Republic had adapted to constant warfare and the steady stream of casualties caused by it. And then the Late Republic got into trouble, because Rome had become too good at war, and the required casualties didn't happen.

Academic research is free in the same sense as running your own business. You can try whatever you want if you can find the funding, but you still have to deal with people and regulations.

Universities are mostly just administrative organizations. They have little control over your research, they rarely fund it, and they are usually not even interested in it.

You just have to drop the assumption that sci-fi stories take place in the future, even if they explicitly say so. They happen in fictional universes that are similar to ours in some ways and different in others.

The umbrella term is speculative fiction. The author starts by assuming that the world works in certain ways, and then tries to figure out the consequences.

Finland only has limited hydro capacity that is needed for load-following due to the prevalence of wind power. It makes no sense to waste it for baseload generation. Additionally, the last major hydro power plant was built in 1976. All subsequent attempts have been massively controversial.

A recent law also gave data centers the last priority for grid access. The idea was to prioritize productive industry over less productive uses of electricity. Even something with as little added value as steel production tends to employ ~10 people (directly or as subcontractors) and produce ~€10 million/year of exports for every MW of average power consumption.

Calling it a psyop is a non-explanation. Water is wet and your opponents will oppose you. That much is given. The interesting question is why the side supporting data centers failed to get their message through.

Did they not know how to argue for their case convincingly? Were they unwilling to do what was needed to get people on their side? Were their ideas against the interests of most people? Or was the issue mostly about the people in charge?

Republics have historically fared well against more authoritarian societies. In no small part because they are not stuck with the leaders they happen to have. If a leader becomes a liability, a republic can easily replace them. Companies can also do that, except when the leader also happens to be a major shareholder.

I've seen a modest increase in productivity in bioinformatics. While the field is computational, it's ultimately about analyzing physical processes. The biggest bottlenecks have always been figuring out what makes sense to do and getting the data you need.

You can of course try new ideas and make software tools much faster now, but software is much like meetings. They can be productive if properly motivated, but they can also be a way to pretend you are working without contributing anything of real value.

Theoretical computer science and mathematics have changed. I'm not sure if they will remain active fields of research in the future. If they will, I would guess that theorems and proofs will eventually become things you include as supplementary data rather than in the main paper. Outside some rare exceptions, people may not consider them publishable results anymore.

High intelligence is overrated. Medieval knights didn't dominate the battlefield because they had the potential to become the best fighters. They dominated because they had access to weapons, armor, and horses, and because their social status and wealth let them focus on combat training.

And virility literally means manliness or manhood, and by extension physical qualities ideally associated with men. Romans had another concept, virtue, for manly mental qualities. Ancient Greek "andreia" covered both aspects of manliness.

Andrea as a female name is similar to Carla or Caroline. Take a name that means something related to men (but no longer obviously so) and adjust it a bit to make it a female name. As a male name it just reflects changes in pronunciation over time.

Playing chicken is always risky.

Declaring a no fly zone would have achieved nothing. Sending air forces to enforce it would have done something. But what happens if American fighter jets engage Russians over Ukraine, while Russian air defenses support their air forces from their side of the border? Would Americans let Russians launch SAMs with impunity, or would they invade Russia, showing the world that Putin's justification for the war was in fact correct?

Maybe Putin would have chickened out when American jets show up, but you can't know that for sure. Which means you should probably decide in advance you far you are willing to escalate before you chicken out yourself.

The lack of economic dynamism is a consequence of demographics. When the population grows older, the society naturally shifts resources from building the future to sustaining the present. Which obviously sucks if you are part of the generation that would prefer building the future.

Everyone saw this coming decades ago. Immigration has been the only serious solution that has been proposed so far. Unfortunately many European countries are not very attractive to those immigrants who can afford to choose.

She didn't get the suffix until her 20s. And it was not used to distinguish her from her mother (who was also a Queen Elizabeth) but from yet another Elizabeth who lived centuries earlier.

Once you start solving problems in practice, you are probably no longer interested in the simple clean versions of the problem theoreticians think about. For example, instead of trying to find the shortest common superstring, you may be doing phased genome assembly. The problem is no longer unambiguously defined. The constraints and assumptions evolve over time, as the problem space becomes better understood and the nature of the data changes. While algorithmic ideas often transfer from one problem subtype to another, everything needs to be tailored for the specific problem.

Breaking public key cryptosystems would be a better counterexample. Most NP-hard optimization problems can be solved in practice. While there are always some degenerate instances nobody knows how to handle, realistic instances tend to be easy enough to solve or at least approximate accurately.

Applied mathematics is funded because of its practical use. Pure mathematics, like other theoretical fields, is funded to explore ideas practically oriented people ignore. Most of the time such exploration produces nothing of practical value. But occasionally theoreticians stumble upon ideas that turn out to be fundamental to understanding something practically oriented people discover much later.

The question was what OpenAI could have done differently, so that their results would have been received better. Whether they owe anything to anyone is an unrelated discussion.

I've heard claims that OpenAI has spent hundreds of millions in pure mathematics research this year. It's difficult to understand what they are trying to achieve. They can't possibly expect results with sufficient practival value in the timescale the company cares about. And it doesn't work as a marketing campaign, as they failed the marketing part, either due to ignorance or arrogance.

Have people who are genuinely interested in the research they are doing. And let them polish the manuscripts to the level of clarity generally expected from publishable results.

The vast majority of the results they have released so far have no practical value beyond marketing. And that marketing aspect didn't work too well, because they didn't understand the target audience.

The argument is ultimately constitutional. If pensions based on past contribitions are private property, the government can't avoid paying them when it's no longer economically sustainable. The obligation remains even if the government is no longer capable of honoring it. Political choices and ordinary laws can't change that. The only way out is amending the constitution and socializing the private property.

It's a bit more complicated than that. It can be argued that if there is a clear link between contributions and pensions, promised pensions based on past contributions are private property, with the usual protections. I don't know the situation in Spain, but Finland at least has made that choice.

If you choose that (or if your legal system determines that), you need to be proactive with keeping the pension system in balance. While you can change what you promise in exchange for future contributions, substantial changes to what you have already promised can easily require constitutional amendments.

I recently chose a Studio Display over the alternatives, because I wanted something with an integrated camera to use as the primary display. There are already too many devices on my desk, so anything that needs an extra cable or comes with a battery that must be charged feels like a poor choice.

And I don't really see much value in high refresh rates outside gaming. The difference between 60 Hz and 144 Hz is minimal in most uses. Given what displays were in the 90s and 2000s, I would have chosen a different career if I was too picky about display quality.

The challenge is the initial reduction from an arbitrary problem in NP to the problem you want to prove NP-complete.

In the usual approach, you assume a nondeterministic Turing machine (or equivalent) that solves the problem and a time bound (which can be an arbitrarily large polynomial). You then create a boolean expression that can be satisfied if and only if the Turing machine accepts the original problem instance. Unfortunately all constructions so far have included the time bound as a factor of the size of the expression.

It's been a long time since I seriously thought about complexity theory, but I'd say no. For similar reasons to why complexity class E is not closed under polynomial-time reductions.

The most important component in the time bound is of the form 2^{n / polylog(n)}, which is subexponential. But if you have reduction from another problem that increases instance size quadratically, the algorithm for the other problem is no longer subexponential. Which means we are still essentially in the same neighborhood as before.

It's a huge result if true, and probably the first major AI result that affects the papers I read. But since the boundary in the hypothesis was kind of arbitrary, breaching it should not significantly change our intuition on complexity classes.

He says he is a Protestant, and he probably identifies as one. He may believe he believes in Jesus Christ, but does he actually believe, or is he just fooling himself? Can you even know if you genuinely believe in something, because you are always the easiest person you can fool?

There are many doctrinal differences between different branches of Protestantism. Lutheranism teaches that while good works do not imply faith, faith does imply good works. The absence of good works can therefore seen as evidence for the absence of faith, from that perspective.

The entire republican tradition (with a small r) rests on the assumption that leadership is a common skill. The society is supposed to give ambitious young people opportunities to demonstrate their skills, and then select the most capable ones and give them increasingly challenging roles. At any given time, there should be an order of magnitude more potential leaders (with the necessary skills and experience) than what the society actually needs. And the leaders should be replaced often enough, to avoid giving them the idea that they are somehow special.

It seems to me that you are comparing two kinds of business-minded people. Some want to sell tailored products to individual customers, while others want to sell one-size-fits-all products to many customers.

You could also focus on problems. What are the actual problems you want to solve? Can you use software to solve them? Do you still need to buy that software from other companies, or is it now feasible to have sufficient in-house expertise to develop it yourself?

This project has repeatedly appeared in the national news since 2024, when Google first acquired the land. It's the largest investment ever made in Finland (at least by some metrics), so people are obviously paying attention.

And now it's probably going to be delayed by months or even years. Whatever Google was trying to accomplish, this wasn't a smart way to do it.

There is usually a standard language people learn at school. It's mostly used as a written language or when you want to sound formal. In more casual situations, people tend to use their favorite dialects. Or maybe an intermediate form between the standard language and the dialect, if that feels more appropriate.

European pension systems have multiple components. There is usually a minimum guaranteed pension based on residency alone, which is paid if you don't have enough income from other sources. That can be supplemented by a separate housing benefit.

The main component is usually something similar to US Social Security, except that contribution rates are higher (16% in Sweden). Benefit rate (at any given retirement age) is usually close to a linear function of total contributions, adjusted for inflation. Most people expect to get most of their retirement income from that component.

Then there are supplementary components, such as voluntary or union negotiated private pensions. Some of them are a bit weird, such as the Swedish defined contribution plan with a mandatory 2.5% contribution.

The more famous the problem, the more reputation matters. There is no shortage of papers claiming to prove P vs. NP in either direction. Nobody is taking them seriously, as everyone has a strong prior that people trying to publish such results are cranks.

Mathematicians need to rethink what is the purpose and value of doing pure mathematical research in the future. Until know, they have mostly valued the creation and systematization of human knowledge. From that perspective, Lean proofs mostly increase confidence in the human knowledge. But they don't contribute directly to it, as a formal proof is unlikely to contain insights that are not present in the human proof.