algorias

What you say is true in principle, but your numbers are wrong. I got a rather less dramatic 50% difference after a year:

  >>> 1.02**365
  1377.4082919660768
  >>> 1.021**365
  1969.6808462403098
  >>>

This is just nonsense. It equivocates between two separate things by calling both of them "quantum interference":

1) A quantum computer uses computational gates to very deliberately orchestrate interference patterns. This is the reason quantum computers are faster than classical ones at certain problems.

2) On top of (1), there's a ton of undesired interference because of dirty real-world constraints. Quantum computers are not fully isolated from their environment, and executing a gate cannot be done without also affecting qubits that are not supposed to be part of the gate.

> subject to bias due to quantum interference, which they check by solving the path integral in classical simulation

This is an instance of (1)

> because quantum interference is EXACTLY WHY WE CAN’T USE CURRENT QUANTUM PROCESSORS TO “BREAK ALL CRYPTO” IN THE FIRST PLACE BECAUSE WE CANNOT DO EFFICIENT QUANTUM ERROR CORRECTING CODES

This is an instance of (2).

Quantum supremacy is all about showing that you can implement (1) with enough fidelity even in the presence of (2). Now keep this in mind while reading the rant again, and you'll quickly realize it's absolute nonsense.

That statistic sounds highly suspect: if I inherited $5M 30 years ago and am now wort $50M, do I count as "not having inherited my wealth"?

Well, here's an analogy: If you have $1000 salary and $900 of fixed expenses (+ $100 of disposable income), then a reduction of just 10% in your salary reduces your disposable income by 100%. A reduction of 20% in your salary puts you deep into the red and will eventually make you homeless.

Climate is like your budget. There's a lot of factors flowing into it, and even a very small change (e.g. 0.1% additional water vapor) can flip the sign on the total balance. Sorry, but your argument about the magnitude of the problem is just wrong.

Well, "we" don't all eat bacon and wear the skin of cows. What's strange about wanting to respect other living beings and avoid harming them? This is also not incompatible with the belief that a human life should come first, e.g. in your heart valve example.

Presumably, the eventual goal is to grow full-sized organs inside some larger animal. Then the organ can be harvested and transplanted to a human who needs it. Per my understanding, medicine does a lot of work with rats because they're cheap and easy to work with, so any new technology of this type would be tried on rats first.

By the way, my neutral explanation above doesn't mean that I approve of doing such things. Honestly, I'm quite torn about the issue.

There's a very interesting economics paper discussing exactly this kind of issue and the market failures it causes [0]. My favorite quote:

"Dwarf tossing is an activity in which a large person throws a small person. The venue often is one in which alcohol is served. It is often a source of livelihood for the small person, with the large person paying for the privilege. While dwarf-tossing is legal in many places, it is sometimes banned by law."

[0]: https://web.stanford.edu/~alroth/papers/Repugnance.pdf

Sure, but the first step of achieving an actual effect is to aim to achieve it, then think about how to achieve that aim.

I know that it's frustrating when even scientists sometimes act with naive recklessness. A prime example is when people in the social sciences or economics don't think about individuals' incentives enough. But in this case I doubt that the people in question are unaware of the risk of overshooting their target.

For Switzerland, that distance sounds about right, tending more towards 100m (in major cities). There is bound to be a dataset somewhere: being a tiny country means that we map everything in great detail, and the government takes these topics quite seriously. Some links to get you started:

https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/geo-information-switzerland/geod...

https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/geo-information-switzerland/geod...

You can also visualize a lot of the topographic data on map.geo.admin.ch, which is surprisingly useful/flexible, if not very user friendly.

Some people seem to be missing the context in which this article was written: 80000 hours is about effective altruism, in the sense of deliberately building a career that does the most good in the world (whether that be charitable work, politics, or "earning to give" as a software engineer / banker / etc). The article itself doesn't explicitly state this unfortunately.

So yeah, the advice is very nuts and bolts, and several of the points don't make any sense without that context (e.g. picking the low-hanging fruits). It's assumed that the reader is already highly motivated to have an impactful altruistic career, and that this motivation is a primary source of self-fulfillment.

Just pointing this out because there seems to be a bit of confusion in the comments here.

> The definition of enumeration commonly used in computability does not require that you know when you are done enumerating.

Sorry, but this is a non-sequitur. In order to find (by enumeration) the shortest program producing a certain output, you absolutely do need to know when you're done, and thus you do need to solve the halting problem.

>> This is because TSP is not in NP

Um, the decision version of TSP (does there exist a Hamilton path of length at most x?) is definitely in NP. It is also NP-hard (your definition of NP-hardness is wrong).

I guess what you're trying to say is that the optimization version of TSP (find the shortest Hamilton path) cannot be verified in polynomial time, as this would require answering the decision version of TSP in the negative for some length x, and this is hard to verify since TSP is not in co-NP.

In spirit, your comment is absolutely spot on. But as we all know, technically correct is the best kind of correct :)

um, what you're describing sounds exactly like regulatory capture.

> So we’ve got an exact algorithm that needs to solve an np-complete problem to produce a result, making it at least as hard.

This is not correct. It's very obvious that all-pair similarity search can be solved in O(n^2) calls to the similarity metric, as stated in the readme. So unless the metric itself falls outside P, this problem is easy (but still hard to scale up in practice, of course)

I feel for the guy, but keep in mind: just putting some text in your readme does not create a legally binding contract.

That's great to hear. However, keep in mind that appendicitis is still an extremely serious condition that will kill you if left untreated. The fact that you can avoid surgery in some cases doesn't mean that surgery is not an adequate treatment.

It's amazing how medicine has advanced: We can now cure illnesses with very minimal amount of invasiveness required in most cases. Even before this news, open surgery was already mostly supplanted by laparoscopy, which involves only a few tiny cuts.

No. In Braess' paradox both the situation with and without the extra road have the exact same total flow from A to B. Removing flow capacity is not allowed.

> Perfect competition, perfect information, etc. -- these assumptions weren't commonly built in to models because they actually simplified them

Um, what? That's exactly why these things end up in so many models.

> (there are plenty of better ways to simplify economic models).

Such as?

I have health issues that make avoiding steep streets important for me. The problem with topo maps is that it's a pain in the ass to read them, specially in areas with lots of features, such as cities.

I like color-coded height maps, they can give you an intuitive feel for how a city lies on top of its terrain. It's very hard to make out moderate slopes though, e.g. if the city has high hills. I would most prefer a color-coded map showing the gradient.

Incidentally, if anyone has pointers to where this kind of map could be obtained (mostly for european cities in my case, but any resource would be helpful), I would appreciate it. Right now, I just try my luck with google when visiting a new city.

For extra fun, if you plot the number of times a specific prime factor occurs, you get a fractal pattern. E.g. for the prime factor 2:

  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15
  0  1  0  2  0  1  0  3  0  1  0  2  0  1  0

Maybe he backed a security with the house and sold that instead...

I think the conceptual difference between a clone and a reference is that clones have no hierarchy. If I have two clones, then removing either one will cause the other one to become the "original".

I attended this talk at IJCAI, and I must say that the whole system 1 / system 2 analogy rubbed me the wrong way.

A solver for e.g. 3-SAT is general only in a very narrow sense, namely that an entire class of problems can be reduced to the specific problem it solves. However, the solver itself is not doing the reducing, rather it is being spoon-fed instances generated by somebody, and that somebody is doing all the hard work of actually thinking. The solver is just doing a series of dumb steps very quickly, with lots of heuristics thrown in. How is that not also "system 1"?

Anyway, the whole thing was just a fancy way of saying that you can either solve problems exactly, in the way that complexity theorists and algorithm designers do things, or statistically, in the way that learning theorists do things. No need to superimpose a strained analogy.

I think that would be 5% of gross revenue, not profits. I think it's an appropriately large number.

I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to sell a pot made out of unsafe materials and market it as a cooking implement. I'm also quite confident that it's technically possible to make a safe vaping device. So the issue would be a lack of regulation?

I don't understand exactly what you're afraid of. I often prepare the food I eat in a contraption of "heated metal alloys". We know perfectly well how to make such things safe.

If you talk about the "volume of a sphere" (like the article does), then a sphere embedded in 3 dimensions should be 3 dimensional. This would usually be called a ball and not a sphere, though.

Note that analogously, a cube in 3 dimensional space is always considered to be 3 dimensional.

Hey man,

I also have some permanent health issues (not as serious as yours probably, but still) and I totally get the frustration of people applying wishful thinking to your situation without having any experience with the kinds of problems you're facing (as is happening in this thread).

I know it's not what you asked for, but feel free to drop me a line anytime if you need to talk to someone who has at least a slight chance of getting it. I can be reached on gmail under the same username.

Sorry, but this seems like cartoon logic to me. What power would knowing the word PANDA give me in this case? None. What knowledge does it give me? That the US does signals intelligence, and that someone on wikipedia/HN claims that such SI includes programs X,Y,Z, without any actual evidence.

For all I know, SJG picked a cool sounding word a 16 year old would like, e.g. SHARK, and it just happened to be an actual code word.

It definitely does work. I suspect that vouching (like voting itself) has an influence weighted by the reputation of the user in question. Reputation being some secret sauce correlated with, but not identical to karma.