jmount

I like this sort of study- but it really misses the point to not give more credit for some of the observations and designs to Codd and others.

I encourage Dyson sphere enthusiasts to listen to the interesting argument that Dyson spheres they may be deliberately designed as an "sounds neat but is impossible" filter joke, ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM .

Telling it to "challenge your beliefs" prompting for text that imitates challenging your beliefs. That may not be as re-centering as one would hope.

A rich person engineering their own RNA modifications for their dog? Yeah, I don't want that and bureaucracy is how we voice that.

It is "to survive floods" not to "survive drowning."

Really worth watching. This is something one can complain about, and therefore maybe something one can try to fix.

So many tech companies have the "high values" screed that it really just seems like a standard step in the money plan.

That is a neat variation.

This is an important point. Thank you.

Games like backgammon (that have betting and the doubling cube to continue), Go (which is calculated in stones), and bridge (again having points) have more natural intermediate scoring systems than chess.

In my opinion the "winner takes all" aspect of chess is similar to what makes analyzing voting systems difficult. In a non game context: Aspnes, Beigel, Furst, and Rudich had some amazing work on how all or nothing calculation really changes things: https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/papers/stoc91voting.pdf .

The GNU stuff becomes more and more relevant. Thanks for posting that.

Just so I know that I took the time to say it.

The "singularity is going to be exponential" fantasy is based on assuming change simply becoming proportional to recent advances. Hence the exponential shape. Even conceding "chartism" one would need to at least propose some imaginary mechanism that goes reciprocal to pretend that sort of curve is coming.

I wonder off and on if in good fiction of "when we meet aliens and start communicating using math"- should the aliens be okay with complex residue theorems? I used to feel the same about "would they have analytic functions as a separate class" until I realized how many properties of polynomials analytic functions imitate (such as no nontrivial bounded ones).

I just updated the article. I did use Python's insufficient material detection, in addition to the ability to call for a draw (3-fold repetition, and 50 move rule). I think the "75 move rule" that doesn't require a player to call is one of the more recent rule changes.

Nice stuff, thanks for sharing that.

I remember from a lot of combinatorial problems (like cutting up space with hyper-planes or calculating VC dimension) that one sees what looks like exponential growth until you have a number of items equal to the effective dimension of the system and then things start to look polynomial.

BTW: I was going through some of your lambda calculus write-ups a while ago. Really great stuff that I very much enjoyed.

Hence Plato's hatred of the rhetoricians.

I fit a Bass product lifetime model on earlier related StackOverflow data, it looked bad at the time. https://win-vector.com/2025/03/02/best-before-dates-by-bass/

They are no longer HOV lanes. They are toll lanes with a minor HOV discount beard.

I think that is the problem. LLMs for mental health are going to very bad, but for most people that is all that will be available.

That is a key point: they are fabrications, not hallucinations.

You would need a mechanism to extract that value- i.e. the ability to strip the company apart for parts. Buying a non-controlling portion of shares doesn't give you that ability.

The original Agrawal, Kayal, Saxena "Primes is in P" paper is actually an amazing effort in clarity https://annals.math.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/annals-... .

Tons of companies survived the dot com bubble pop. Corrections are when the market does some sorting.

In my opinion, BPP (one of the major topics of the book) is such a weird complexity class. It seems both an easy and hard class.

Roughly it accepts inputs that have at least 2/3rds of witnesses accepting and rejects inputs that have no more than 1/3 of witnesses accepting. Witness means additional input (usually considered random input). The super nicety is the huge gap between 1/3 and 2/3.

One can simulate a BPP recognizer to a high degree of fidelity. Just try a bunch of random witnesses.

However, we don't yet know how to efficiently perfectly implement a perfect recognizer. Until we have sampled a lot of witnesses we really don't know what fraction the of overall population we are drawing from is accepting.

However (as the book points out) we know the strategy for perfect solution. We can decide BPP perfectly and efficiently if and only if certain very strong efficient pseudo random number generators exist. And the existence of such is very much tied to if certain problems are hard (require large circuits to solve) or not.

That is the point. Much clearer than I was. Thank you.

Effective Altruism and Utilitarianism are just a couple of the presentations authoritarians sometimes make for convenience. To me the code simply as "if I had everything now, that would eventually be good for everybody."

The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor, as it allowed him to build libraries." Yes it is good what Carnegie did later, but it doesn't completely paper over what he did earlier.

For a introspective view of "aha" I really recommend the enjoyable Hadamard "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field."

Very few objections to Jupyter that are not addressed by `nbconvert`.

This if the case where you introduce the test after the failure.

Is this trying to deal with that git history can be replaced?

Hopefully I am not too naive, but I think aircraft safety redundancy remains above retail car standards. Also, in aircraft they "have time to solve some problems", versus freeway bumper cars.