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If someone wants to throw enough money at doing that. Solving the Navier-Stokes problem cost a few million dollars. I don't know how much the other problems cost but I suspect they're all above $100.000.

Reminds me of https://www.thedoghousediaries.com/1406

If indeterminism gives us free will, it's like making a decision by rolling dice. I wouldn't call that free will.

One explanation that I heard of free will is that it depends on the complexity of a system. A simpler being might think it had free will while it is predictable to us because we see how it works. A much more complex being might be able to predict what we will do.

I didn't read David Byrne's book but I heard about it on the radio. Doesn't it also mention that drummers started playing with less tempo variation since drum computers are used?

I agree, but I prefer old jazz from before I was born. Modern jazz doesn't appeal to me, it sounds too clean and unoriginal to me (maybe gridification, I don't know, I'm not a musician), with some exceptions. But maybe I didn't find the good modern jazz.

I only see the graph in the paragraph titled "Where an Amazon sale goes", which tells what the fees are now, not which fees have increased since 2014.

I prefer online retailers because there is a lot more choice there. I can't find an inflatable knee pillow in local stores. The supermarket close to me even stopped selling batteries.

Interesting article. But I wish it explained which fees made the share that Amazon takes go from 19% to 46%. The fulfilment fee is evidently necessary, it takes people to do that, and doing it yourself may cost more. The advertisement is also evidently necessary, but could have risen. The referral fee alone can't explain the increase.

And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.

I suspect the first ANN researchers called them neurons to get more funding.

In essence an ANN is just a complicated mathematical function that you can tweak to fit the training set. Originally the activation function of a neuron in an ANN resembled real neurons, but later it was found that other, very different, functions are much better, like RLE.

I used it for a few hobby projects in VSCode. It's not 100% smooth, e.g. I couldn't compile and run my code with a single shortcut. It's supposed to be possible to show graphs in VSCode but I couldn't make that work.

Debugging worked quite good. I didn't look for static analysis.

But I find programming in any language in VSCode less polished, compared to e.g. programming C++ with Visual Studio, which works out of the box.

Strange, I walked in different regions of Tokyo, and I found it to be very clean. This is in part because in Japan it is not done to eat while walking in the street.

I remember that in Osaka on Saturday night there were young people kicking trash around, that was the only time I found Japan dirty.

IME, when words like this become common, it allows people to identify them more easily, so it's a good thing to introduce such words.

If you're allowed to change the speed of light, you can also change the gravitational constant G to compensate since the Schwarzschild radius is r = 2GM/c^2, where M is the mass of the object.

I think that light coming from different parts of the lamp arrives at different times. So if the lamp turns off, you see the part closest to you go black first.

I think you're confusing DNA sequencing with DNA synthesis. DNA synthesis is much more expensive, around $0.07 per base pair [1], and bacteria have more than a million, so it's over $70.000. Then you just have the DNA, turning that into the bacteria is very complex, I'm not even sure whether it can be done.

Using CRISPR to modify existing bacteria is probably cheaper, but still complex.

[1] https://briefglance.com/articles/elegen-slashes-dna-synthesi...

Good point about the AI that might find ways that humans didn't think of. But that would mean that Moore's law of Mad Science only now becomes true, and the drop would be steeper.

Still I think that even a super smart AI can't find a way to destroy the world without physical resources that are not easy to get, unless it can hack many systems (like in the movie Eagle Eye), maybe then yes. So let's use AI now to tighten security :-).

I wonder why C and C++ are usually regarded as equally insecure. In C you need to carefully check that you free allocated memory, and that you don't use it after you free it. In C++ this is automated by using classes like std::string and std::vector, once they go out of scope their memory is freed and you can't use it anymore. It is still possible, e.g. by using a for loop that iterates over a vector, and removing or adding stuff to that same vector in that loop. But my rough estimate is that such errors are at least ten times less likely in C++.

I develop in C++ for a job, and when I need to use a library written in C I always have a bad feeling about it.

That law is not based on thorough data. Even a person with a sky high IQ can't destroy the world easily. You need access to stuff that is not easy to get. My guess is that developing a new lethal virus or bacteria that is very infectious, is the easiest way, but even that requires a lot of high tech out of reach of most people. Or hacking into systems that control nuclear missiles, but I think these have "air gaps".

Another proof of how much our data is worth. But I think they make a loss on me, I can remember only a handful occasions that I bought something based on an ad I saw, which were more informative than seductive, like a monthly bike rental service.

But I guess they still sell my data. I wish they would flag the data of rational people like me as "worthless", and not sell my data.

The reals can be ordered, just use x < y. I think you mean that if ZFC is true, we could enumerate unnameable reals (choose one with the axiom of choice, remove it, choose another one, etc.), but you could not enumerate them all. But it is true that you could get a "first" unnameable real.

The title says that the US government /intervened/. As the article explains that happened, but also that that intervention wasn't the only reason why TRON didn't succeed.

The title should have been "Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened although it quickly changed its mind, but a Japanese Windows PC seller used that intervention to boycott it". Or maybe just "Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, here's why it failed".

Amazing! I was proud that my OnePlus smartwatch needs recharging only once every 5 days, but 2 years is unbelievable. The difference is partly due to the LED screen of my smartwatch, LCD is much more energy efficient.

On AliExpress I see things like 64 TB (no, not GB!) USB flash drives for less than 10 euro, obviously a scam. I also see less spectacular products but still good looking deals, but without a brand name so you can't search the web for reviews.

On Amazon I never see products like that. That's why I prefer Amazon (and Coolblue and bol.com in Belgium).

There are people advocating for a new social network that is distributed and not owned by a single company. Turns out it already existed before the modern social networks!

True. But the article mentions that the amplitude of their circadian rhythm is higher (which tells you how much a relevant measure like the amount of melatonin or body temperature varies in a 24 hour cycle), so that is an indication of better sleep. A low amplitude means less difference between sleeping and being awake.

But the article discussed here also points in that direction when it mentions the importance of people on the lookout at night. The article also mentions primitive tribes partying all night, so that is yet another direction.

> Most importantly, when we measured their circadian function directly, small-scale communities had much higher amplitude circadian rhythms than global north populations, which I think is why they report being happy with their sleep even though it’s more fragmented.

This could explain why I feel more rested when I wake up if I take glycine before going to bed, even though I don't sleep more.

Indeed: https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-announces-energy-...

> “A big problem is AI is being used a lot by people who aren’t mathematicians, who don’t have a huge mathematical background and are not capable of verifying the output,” Bloom said. “They like to move fast, ask their AI to check it, it grows and grows. We’re seeing a lot more of these 100- to 200-page papers that people are posting. ‘I solved this theorem; I got AI to generate the proof and check the proof and write the paper.’ But no human has read it, and no human is going to read it. It’s a huge challenge now.”

Mathematics has the same problem as open source projects that are overwhelmed with AI slop!

Over compression is horrible, but unrelated to this.

I grew up with cassettes, but was happy to switch to CDs when I was around 18. The better the recording and playback, the closer it is to what the artist intended, and to how it would sound if the artist was playing right in front of you (if they don't use autotune or compression).

It's a fact that people get accustomed to the distortions in music playback, in the old days it was the noise of vinyl, which got better later, then cassettes, then heavily compressed MP3s. People should aim for the best possible audio quality and get rid of their preference for distortion.