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qbit42

189 karma · joined May 20, 2022

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qbit42··on Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals
Round brackets are standard in the US but that notation is used in France and some other places.
qbit42··on All elementary functions from a single binary operator
I think there is still an implicit restriction on the complexity of the operator for this to be interesting. Otherwise you could design an operator which accepts a pair x,y and performs one of 2^k elementary binary operations by reading off the first k bits of x and applying the specified operation on the remainder of x and y. (This is kind of like how real-valued computational models become too powerful for complexity theory to work if you allow bitwise operations.)
qbit42··on US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
There are certainly no other causal factors...

I'm not saying that it couldn't be true, but we have no way of concluding that from just comparing such rates. There are many differences in daily life and thresholds for reporting beyond surveillance levels.

qbit42··on 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews
The choice was to review using AI or not, they can just say no? And review like we’ve done for years without AI tools.

Are you objecting to ICML’s reciprocal reviewing policy?

The alternative as I see it would be to charge for submissions and pay reviewers. There are pros but also clear cons when it comes to fairness.

qbit42··on 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews
What? Why is that a false choice? The only way you got caught here is if you literally gave an LLM the PDF and used its response verbatim.

And they didn't give a permanent ban or anything, these authors can just resubmit to another conference, of which there are many.

qbit42··on 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews
Banned for life is a stretch but the actual response is completely fine. They can just resubmit to the next conference.

Words mean something, if you promise to uphold a contract and break it, there are consequences. The reviewers were free to select the policy which allows LLM use.

qbit42··on Prism
Loads of researchers have only used LaTeX via Overleaf and even more primarily edit LaTeX using Overleaf, for better or worse. It really simplifies collaborative editing and the version history is good enough (not git level, but most people weren't using full git functionality). I just find that there are not that many features I need when paper writing - the main bottlenecks are coming up with the content and collaborating, with Overleaf simplifying the latter. It also removes a class of bugs where different collaborators had slightly different TeX setups.

I think I would only switch from Overleaf if I was writing a textbook or something similarly involved.

qbit42··on Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries
Our democracy is clearly disfunctional. I believe corporate money has played a big role to make it worse.
qbit42··on Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash
https://noambrown.github.io/papers/22-Science-Diplomacy-TR.p...
qbit42··on Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout
I see. You seem quite sure that Iran is not doing this - do you have some local source of information? My friends there said the government does shut down the internet at times (but I am not currently in communication with them...)
qbit42··on Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout
They did shut down the Internet. I cannot communicate with some Iranian friends right now.
qbit42··on Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
You think many are built without any assistance for coding? My impression was that people were mostly concerned about game assets like graphics and music
qbit42··on Mathematicians don't care about foundations (2022)
It is nicer to state theorems that hold for all vector spaces, so mathematicians like to invoke AoC. However, in any applications that are practically relevant, you can obtain a basis without invoking AoC.
qbit42··on Paramount launches hostile bid for Warner Bros
Netflix wasn't buying CNN.
qbit42··on Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
I don’t think many researchers take peer review alone as a strong signal, unless it is a venue known for having serious reviewing (e.g. in CS theory, STOC and FOCS have a very high bar). But it acts as a basic filter that gets rid of obvious nonsense, which on its own is valuable. No doubt there are huge issues, but I know my papers would be worse off without reviewer feedback
qbit42··on Wolfram Compute Services
That is a fair assessment. By and large it is used for the former. It is super handy in the exploratory phase of certain kinds of mathematical research.
qbit42··on “Boobs check” – Technique to verify if sites behind CDN are hosted in Iran
I don't want to have to create an account to view the full context.
qbit42··on What is a manifold?
Sometimes statistical rates for empirical risk minimization can be related to the intrinsic dimension of the data manifold (and noise level if present). In such cases, you are running the same algorithm but getting a performance guarantee that depends on the structure of the data, stronger when it is low dimensional.
qbit42··on Meow.camera
Why? They're providing food for stray cats.
qbit42··on Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toys
Is this falsifiable? I would be hesitant to claim that this is unique to humans. I'd probably agree with dogs, but the line is much blurrier with primates, for example.
qbit42··on Privacy Badger is a free browser extension made by EFF to stop spying
I know lots of people annoyed by ads, but I also have family that buy things advertised on Instagram all the time.
qbit42··on Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
Typst seems like an improvement in many respects, but I definitely prefer LaTeX when working with detailed math equations (most of my use of LaTeX). I think there is a lot of inertia for anything to replace LaTeX for mathematical research.
qbit42··on Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks
Is this true on Mac? Usually I am notified when programs request access outside the normal sandboxed or temp folders. Not sure how that works in any detail though.
qbit42··on How we rooted Copilot
Who is interning for free as a software engineer?
qbit42··on Gemini with Deep Think achieves gold-medal standard at the IMO
I think formal systems like Lean are still extremely interesting. And I would imagine that, if these machines get good at standard "informal" proofs, that the overhead of formalization would be a lot less painful for them than humans (it is pretty tedious these days but even for humans the friction is decreasing).

Verified proofs allow you to collaborate with much less trust (for humans or machines), at least in the phase where you are trying to figure out what is true. They don't guarantee that a proof is insightful for "why" a result is true, but that is much easier to put together once you have a valid proof.

qbit42··on The Miyawaki Method of micro-forestry
Why was it disbanded?
qbit42··on Gene therapy restored hearing in deaf patients
I'm all for high quality captions, and turn them on occasionally when dialog is hard to hear (or in another language, usually prefer to dubbing). I also don't doubt that they improve comprehension. But on average I find them distracting from the visuals and prefer to have them off by default.
qbit42··on Gradients Are the New Intervals
Yeah in context I somewhat agree, though the utility for graphics applications probably comes down to some more empirical aspects that I won't conjecture about. I imagine there is some stuff you could do in this setting by incorporating autograd derivatives from many slightly perturbed points in a neighborhood of the input point (which together act as a coarse approximation of the subdifferential set).
qbit42··on Gradients Are the New Intervals
If a function is Lipschitz, then it is differentiable almost everywhere by Radamacher's theorem. Moreover, if you want to prove things about Lipschitz functions, you can often (though not always) prove things about continuously differentiable functions with bounded gradients, and then lift to all Lipschitz functions via an appropriate compactness argument.
qbit42··on Deep Learning Is Applied Topology
Any reasonable statistical explanation of deep learning requires there to be some sort of low dimensional latent structure in the data. Otherwise, we would not have enough training data to learn good models, given how high the ambient dimensions are for most problems.
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