tsimionescu

Contradicting highly ingrained precedence rules for the common operations (+, -, ×) is a huge flaw for strict left to right parsing.

And for ?:, only the part between the ? and the : is implicitly paranthesized. In "a && b ? c : d || e", you need operator precedence to decide if this is "a && (b ? c : d) || e" or "(a && b)? c : (d || e)" or any other combination. So you have to define the precedence of ? and : in relation to other operators in order to define the syntax of your language, so I think it's normal to consider it an operator as well (and I'd say the same for Python's if/else conditional expression, "a if b else c", this is not about the characters used).

All of the studies I have ever seen discussed are hopelessly terrible. People like Murray cite apartheid-era South Africa IQ studies, for example, where some of the black children being tested didn't even speak the test language natively. Others look at country differences and claim to extract racial differences from that, as if education and culture play no role in IQ scores. Virtually none of these studies actually look at the genetics of the populations they are testing, they just go by outward aspect, thus making most of their genetic claims laughable. And, of course, many of them are either small samples, p-hacking, or outright fabricated - like many papers in psychology.

No, that would be ableist, or maybe eugenics.

And the way IQ is used in modern racist discourse is not this. Instead, the claims are "black people are not less well off on average because of racism in society, either old or current, they are less well off because they are dumber (have lower IQ) on average, so it's only a consequence of that, as dumber white people also tend to fail to get as much success". This is the argument being made, at least publicly, by most modern day scientific racists.

Well, skin color, hair color, hair texture, certain bone structure features. But black skin color alone is 100% enough to be racially profiled in the USA, especially historically. Or do you think people in the deep South 1900s would have accepted a black-skinned blonde blue eyed neighbor?

Of course, any two traits can be correlated. But unless there is an obvious causal mechanism ("whiter skinned people get sun burns more easily", "darker skinned people tend to have vitamin D deficiencies at higher latitudes"), there's no reason to assume it and start looking for it to prove or disprove. It's a priori just as likely that there is a genetic link between toe shape and intelligence as skin color and intelligence. Yet no one is doing the science of measuring toe length correlation to intelligence, just skin color ("race").

Based almost entirely on racist studies, including some famous ones that were comparing white and black school children in apartheid South Africa. I wonder if there may have been some confounding variables there, but surely this is just my bias.

Plus, none of these studies actually spend the money to do any genetic testing, they simply assign people to "white" or "black" race based almost always on skin color (which, since the gene for dark skin is dominant, is a very poor marker of actual genetic similarity - the great grandchild of a dark-skinned person with otherwise only white-skinned relatives can still be dark-skinned).

Edit: and I'm not even mentioning the obvious publication bias, as essentially only racists care about this race vs intelligence discussion, at least enough to invest in creating studies about it. Plus the fact that IQ itself is actually a very problematic measure, when applied beyond its actual medical use (quantifying mental disability).

What plausible mechanism is there to even approach the idea that skin color influences intelligence? Why not study the effects on intelligence of eye color, or blood type?

This is especially clearly just a racist concept once you realize that none of the studies of IQ vs race actually do any genetic testing, they only rely on phenotype. Which is absurd given the fact that the child of a black-skinned person born in sub-Saharan Africa and a white-skinned person born in a village in Ireland is extremely likely to be black-skinned, but is genetically just as much part of both populations. It's only the history of racism that assigns this child as black more so than white.

We know this data is trustworthy because Musk and his companies would never ever ever lie about anything important.

All times are the middle of the night somewhere. Now, it's true that some times are the middle of the night to more people than others, but that's rarely a usable piece of info.

It is how it works, though not all exploits are the same severity of course.

Say I find a vulnerability in OpenAI's API layer. That might allow me to run requests without paying for the actual token counts, or allow me to read prompts sent by other users hitting the same instance.

Now say I find a vulnerability in the web server that OpenAI's API uses, that gives me remote code execution in the web server process - I can do all of the above, but for any API that they expose, not just the Responses API. I might even be able to serve malicious JS to other users who hit the same server, if JS were also served from it.

Now say I find a vulnerability in the Linux kernel on which this webserver is running. Not only can I do everything above, but I can probably access a lot of secret data stored on this machine, and maybe even infect other machines that connect to it, such as when a dev SSHs into it.

Now say I find a vulnerability for the hypervisor running the VM where that kernel was running. Now I can not only do everything above, but also infect multiple instances, including perhaps access to like a KV cache or model weights if they happen to be stored on VMs in the same hypervisor.

In all of these cases, I am hacking a single layer, but that allows me to gain access to all of the layers above it. Defense in depth makes sure that finding an API-level bug doesn't allow me to break out of the process or the VM, so it limits the damage I can do, but my app is still compromised, overall.

The first expression is fine, as it uses extremely commonly known precedence rules. The second is more arguable.

However, the following expressions should be invalid in any language, and no one should write them even in languages where they are unfortunately allowed:

  a + b >> c & d && 0 % 9

  a >> 4 ? b : c & d ^ 7

The point here is that not all operators should have a concept of precedence. Expressions like "a & b + c >> d" should be invalid, as no human actually understands them unless they spend a lot of careful focus. Instead, such an expression must be written as "((a & b) + c) >> d" explicitly. On the other hand, "a + b + c" and even "a + b * c" are fine, as addition and multiplication (and subtraction and division) are so drilled into everyone in early education.

Not really, no. If you're running an application server, then your entire app can get compromised if there's a security exploit in any of your app code, your web server, your kernel, your hypervisor.

Defense in depth says that simply compromising your application code shouldn't provide access to the physical hardware you're running on, and that's hopefully the case, but it doesn't mean your app is not hacked. It just hopefully means that a hack on your app code doesn't automatically give the attacker access to your entire company.

> For example, we now have now have a deterministic interger factoring algorithm with run time N^o(1), where N is the integer being factored. Heuristic algorithms already achieved this bound, but the new claim is a deterministic worst-case guarantee. The result is a fairly straightforward application of the new 3-SAT solver.

This can't be true unless you're talking about unfathomably large integers, since the new 3SAT algorithm only improves on the 2^n bound for n > 10^100000000. That is, it's not in any way a practical algorithm that will ever be runnable on any possible computer.

Yes, I should have been more careful with the wording. Some problems have polynomial numbers of possible solutions, so for those there is no discussion of this kind. The more important point is that for some problems with a more-than-polynomial solution space (since even exponential is not precise enough, the solution space can be more than polynomial, such as n! for traveling salesman) we still have polynomial solutions, whereas for others we do not know of such algorithms.

The question can actually be generalized further - is it the case that for any solvable problem it's possible to find a solution without verifying every possible solution, and more specifically, only a tiny subset of the solution space? This would apply even beyond P vs NP, the same question would arise for EXP vs NEXP (that is, problems where we can find a solution vs just verify a given solution in exponential time), and same for factorial or Ackerman or any other complexity we want to imagine.

Looking at the problem in this way should also make it easier to construct a more strictly practical version of P vs NP, though it actually gets much harder to pin down details. That is, we can construct complexity classes that better match "what is plausibly solvable with a real computer" vs "what is plausibly verifiable with a real computer" and ask a similar question: given any problem of the second kind, can there be any generic algorithm of the first kind that would solve it?

Sounds so nice, for anyone who hasn't seen actual advertising in today's world, where only the absolute more clear and demonstrable lies are even theoretically illegal.

Unfortunately, the law only applies to objective claims that are false. It should apply to virtually all subjective claims as well.

Survivor is the opposite of how real human societies work - especially the tribal ones that thes show is aping. Real tribal societies are stable forever, and they are almost entirely related people (especially if we're talking about smaller tribes). You're reputation for helpfulness is crucial in any such society, so the kind of backroom dealing and betrayals the show is known for are almost entirely out of the question: if you are found out as a schemer, you don't get to go home to your real family, you risk being ostracized for the rest of your life.

But you can pick those other values as basis vectors, and they are just as good a choice as alive/dead. The only reason that you can say "the cat's brain doesn't experience those other states" is that you've presupposed a classical cat, that has some preferred basis. But this is just begging the question. We only get classical behavior when the wavefunction gets entangled with a classical object, but the math predicts you should also have non-classical "half-here" objects that would experience non-classical "half states" - and those are actually infinitely many.

So how did the classical world arise? Or how come we happen to be in the classical world, when there are infinitely many other non-classical observers? And note that the anthropic principle doesn't help here - all of the real laws of physics are the same for those other observers, you get the same chemistry etc, it's just the classical approximations that fail.

Specifically, decoherence provides a mathematical reason why we don't see self-interference and similar quantum phenomena on classical objects. It doesn't on its own explain why the single classical world arises from the infinitely many solution pairs to any quantum equation.

> There's no component of the wave function in which Schrodinger's cat experiences anything other than being alive or being dead.

The problem is that this is not what Schrodinger predicts, though. If |alive> and |dead> are valid solutions to the Schrodinger equation of some system, then so is any linear combination of them whose norm is one, such as 1/sqrt(2) |alive> + 1/sqrt(2) |dead>. So the math of QM predicts that there should be infinitely many cats that should feel partly alive and partly dead, many times more than the one live cat and the one dead cat. And yet you don't find this in any classical experiment.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with Kolmogorov complexity anymore, or with music enjoyment as a search for a patter - which was my original point.

Well, when we set an experiment up, we can measure in any basis we like, and get the corresponding results as probabilities per the Born rule, so I don't think there are any constraints on this. Plus, local interactions can't explain why the same classical basis arises globally - after all, when we investigate a distant star, it's never detected as being in some other basis then the local area.

Mostly a note, but the game was released 2 weeks ago. We'll see how well it sells, but it seems to be getting good reviews on Steam so far.

> Many worlds is just the Schrödinger equation without the wave function collapse.

It is not, it is the Schrödinger equation plus an extra rule that says that classical observers are only certain kinds of quantum states. There's no explanation in the MWI for why a device never reads out that a particle is 1/sqrt(2) |here> + 1/sqrt(2)|there>, even though that is exactly as probable a state as being |here>. And it turns out that this is exactly equivalent to positing wave function collapse / the Born rule.

And no, decoherence has nothing to do with this. Decoherence explains why there is no observable interference at the classical level between these states, not why you can only observe some states.

This is known as the preferred basis problem, for anyone who wants to read more about it.

While this might explain certain aspects of music, it doesn't explain the strong emotional reaction that music produces, even without lyrics. Kolmogorov complexity can't explain why Ode to Joy evokes so different feelings from Requiem, and why these feelings generally persist if you play the same notes with the same timings on very different instruments.

I imagine they might mean more like either early video game music (the kind produced by the same synthesizer the BIOS uses to emit beeps) and the style that mimics that, or extreme minimalism experiments in various musical disciplines.

There are some fundamental differences between liquids like water and gases like the air, they're not a continuum - moving from a liquid state to a gaseous state is a phase change, and comes with a huge, and measurable, energy cost (getting 1 kg of liquid water from 0C to 100C takes as much energy as converting that water entirely into water gas at 100C). Note that evaporation is different - it's just tiny bits of liquid water flying away.

Also, any atmosphere can carry any sound wave for at least some distance. It takes more or less energy to do so, and if the medium attenuates rapidly, you have to start with higher frequencies so that the right frequency reaches your audience, but that's it. You need different instruments to play in different atmospheres, sure, but not different music. And electrical instruments actually work exactly the same regardless of the medium.

Musical notes are pretty well defined sound frequencies. The medium which carries that sound wave is irrelevant. You can even get yourself a pair of bone conduction headphones, which would work for listening to music even if you were in a vacuum - since ultimately what matters is the sound wave hitting your ear bones, thr air is just the most common way for it to happen.

Of course, the sound that non-electrical instruments make is indeed dependent on the atmosphere in which they are played, assuming the same motions etc. You could probably make a violin produce the exact same sounds that it does on Earth playing it on Mars, but you'd have to play it differently than you do here. But even this doesn't apply to electrical instruments - Jimi Hendrix would sound the same if he could somehow play on the surface of Mars.

The English name of the country of ایران is Iran, pronounced "eye-ran", there's nothing wrong about that. Just like the English name of the country which calls itself Deutchsland is Germany. And the French name of the country that calls itself England is Angleterre, and the Japanese name for China is 中国 (chuugoku).

There is nothing wrong or weird about exonyms. Sometimes they happen to be relatively close to the endonym, sometimes they are not.