Dr_Birdbrain

What is the Year Zero stuff?

I don’t think the claim in the article is true at all. A high mutation rate is definitely bad for the virus in the short term, which is why Molnupiravir has an effect on reducing disease in individuals. But, of course a high mutation rate also increased the likelihood that a more dangerous variant will be found.

Haha my thinking exactly. I actually read some of Guzey’s crazy ideas on sleep last year, and I am happy to discover he was just going through a phase.

I thought it was quite clear. i interpreted it as a humorous turn of phrase to say that not only did they hallucinate the belief of the fossils, but then they also hallucinated the fossils themselves, and later started seeing them everywhere.

I think search is about to become a big expensive meat grinder, extremely competitive. The good news is that everybody who was just laid off by BigTechCos is likely about to get rehired at a premium—they are going to need lots of hands to build their competing products.

It’s one of those things where if you don’t have the math knowledge, the opportunities to apply it will be literally invisible to you.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail—but the converse of that is that if you have never seen a hammer, nails will be invisible and incomprehensible to you, they will just blend into the background of noise.

When I learn about something, I suddenly see it everywhere.

Hypothetically, if you wanted to learn it, I would recommend devoting the first hour of every day to it. Before your brain fully wakes up and starts asking why you are doing it, just do it.

I assume you have the standard CS background, with decent knowledge of discrete math, calculus, linear algebra. I would recommend starting with a graduate-level linear algebra textbook. A friend of mine used to say “linear algebra is the new addition”, it permeates everything, and knowing it well produces massive dividends.

I wonder if it’s the other way in this case? It seems to me that Japan’s advocacy of hydrogen is geopolitical, and the corporations like Toyota are getting dragged along to make poor business decisions, favoring hydrogen over electric.

Japan has no significant sources of fossil fuels or lithium (for a potentially lithium-based future), so they would prefer that the energy of the future were hydrogen, which they could produce themselves. Of course they would prefer to live in a future where they could make their own energy, rather than be at the mercy of imports. Corporations are getting dragged along to support this dream, even if it does not look like a great business decision.

Right, so your check should be in a context where another move was mate in 1

This take is surprising to me, because it actually seems to me that it would be easy-ish to auto-generate accessibility aids, for example in the form of automatic caption generation for hearing impairments.

That’s an interesting idea. Maybe.

I actually disagree with the idea that alienation is a feature of capitalism—I think it’s a feature of an industrial mode of production that is not necessarily linked to capitalism.

Suppose there is a creative designer who develops a widget with a specific purpose, and then this widget is mass produced by humans on an assembly line who might not even get to see or understand the completed product, since they are just performing a repetitive chore on an assembly line.

One observation is that the assembly-line workers are more alienated than the designer, who understands the purpose of the widget and who produced the blueprint. However the designer is still somewhat alienated, since they don’t get to see the final product.

Another observation is that it is possible to have a capitalist society in which there is no alienation at all—a designer develops the concept of a widget, and then manually builds a small amount of the widgets by themselves (see for example Etsy).

Also, I would contend that assembly-line workers in a communist society suffer the exact same amount of alienation as those in a capitalist one.

I don’t understand this sentiment.

The rating of a player will reflect their strength, regardless of whether they are an unaided human, a full computer, or a human with some heuristic to consult an engine. Whatever the player is doing, their rating will reflect their average strength, and the website matches us to players of similar rating. Whether or not a player is pure human, pure engine, or centaur, we get matched to a player that we have a roughly even chance of beating.

Pure cheaters will quickly skyrocket to the top of the ratings and I will never see them. Hybrid cheaters, who do not have a perfect rating, have a probability of losing because their heuristic to switch to an engine is imperfect, and their rating reflects this imperfection.

Whatever the player is doing, their numeric rating reflects their average strength, and if you have a similar rating you have roughly even chances of beating them.

The article mentions it’s a freshwater environment. Are they going to get wiped out if the ice melts enough to expose them to salt water?

It’s not about protecting their rights, it’s about encouraging corporations to release the processes of their invention. The point is that we provide legally enforced protection in exchange for it entering the public domain after a few years. The alternative is corporate secrets that never become public (unless stolen), like the formula for Coca Cola.

I would recommend two things:

- Do lots of tactics puzzles—treat it like exercise, consistency is key. 1 to 3 puzzles per day is ideal.

- Read strategy books. Don’t worry about memorizing, just get the intuitive gist of things like moving rooks to open files, knights to outposts, keeping pawns on opposite color squares of your bishops, try to pile up pieces against the enemy king, etc.

ML is Turing complete in the sense that every computable function can be approximated to arbitrary precision by a 3-layer neural network. Classic result from the 90s, the paper in question (iirc) is titled something like “neural networks are universal approximators” Turing machines also can only approximate to arbitrary precision, so the computation models are equivalent.