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alkyon

494 karma · joined February 23, 2017

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alkyon··on Did OpenAI solve the wrong Navier-Stokes problem?
Fefferman was right to include option C as someone could have come up with less contrived counterexample accompanied by some interesting theorems that actually shed light on the general case
alkyon··on Spain orders blocks on Archive.today and its mirrors
Enabling ESNI in Firefox should be a countermeasure (encrypted SNI extension of the TLS so that hostname is no longer sent in plain text)

https://superuser.com/questions/1346634/modern-browser-with-...

alkyon··on Spain orders blocks on Archive.today and its mirrors
According to this site https://bandaancha.eu/articulos/gobierno-tiene-lista-web-ofi..., they use SNI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication)
alkyon··on Spain orders blocks on Archive.today and its mirrors
I live in Spain and can still enjoy access to this site. This is enforced by major ISPs (Vodafone among others), so anyone sane just opts for a local ISP (if they have a choice)
alkyon··on If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it
> It was a short film called Outside In, perhaps the earliest example of a viral video about substantive math, visualizing the key idea of Thurston’s own construction for sphere eversion.

This is really interesting and available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbGNZQvobkc

alkyon··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
Ant Intelligence will be next big thing in machine learning after this bubble bursts
alkyon··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
In the first case, we'd still have a chance to take a glance at the frontier of discovery (even if ordinary human mathematicians had to spent years translating what metahumans achieved).

In the second case all human-level maths would be solved and what lies beyond would be always out of our scope.

alkyon··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
It's still an optimistic scenario. Artificial superintelligence may develop hypermathematics of a kind that never will be accesible to human mind, enhanced or not. One can't teach geometry to ants even if you put them on a Moebius strip.

It would be more like Lem's novel where it completely disappears from the human horizon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV

alkyon··on Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap
Only two stone handicap against the machine with much deeper tree searching capabilities. This means that KataGo is lacking in strategy compared to Shin and he could leverage this to achieve this significant win.
alkyon··on Emacs vs. Vim 2026: 24.3% vs. 8% Usage, 20x Memory Gap
About 800ms - 2s startup time for emacs. I run it as as systemd service so it's only started once.

hyperfine 'emacsclient -n -r file' gives me only 15ms on average

alkyon··on Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"
SNR aka flag-to-commotion ratio

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22f...

alkyon··on Bigos (Polish Hunter's Stew) Recipe Builder
Home made sauerkraut maybe. In Spain it's impossible to buy anything decent either.

Edit: Low quality may be the result of adding vinegar instead of relying on natural fermentation. Also cabagge should be cut really fine, otherwise the copious amount of juice is not really there to keep it going

alkyon··on Bigos (Polish Hunter's Stew) Recipe Builder
Tradional bigos was made with venison. Decent sauerkraut really matters as do dried mushrooms which should include boletus.

Fun fact, it gets gradually better with each reheating

alkyon··on 2026 Eclipse Webcams
Saw it today in Zaragoza. Corona was amazing but what took my breath away when I looked through my binoculars were pink (fuchsia?) prominences close to the solar disk. As describes here they are in fact plasma structures:

https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/space-photo-of-the...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_prominence

alkyon··on Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse
I think I will just cross the river and find a better place somewhere in the Parque del Agua Luis Buñuel or Expo. Should be also packed but a bit less then the bridges
alkyon··on Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)
I stopped taking melatonin because I had problems waking up in the morning and was getting nasty headaches even with half a dose (1 mg).

Edit: Maybe I should try reducing the dose even further (to 200 μg) as mentioned in other posts here

alkyon··on Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse
At least you learned something new today
alkyon··on Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse
"Zaragoza (Spanish: [θaɾaˈɣoθa]), traditionally known in English as Saragossa[7] (/ˌsærəˈɡɒsə/ SARR-ə-GOSS-ə)" according to Wikipedia, originally Caesaraugusta and later Saraqusṭah to be exact
alkyon··on Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse
In Spain it's a trio of consecutive eclipses from 2026 to 2028 (the last one annular). To view the second one I don't even need travel anywhere.

Will be in Saragossa on Wednesday and gonna use Canon binos with image stabilization, the partial phase with filter and then some precious seconds without (a scary moment, I'll rely on an alarm to prevent my eyes to get damaged when the totality is over). Some people generally advised to skip any instruments and just enjoy it with your own eyes for the first time, but I'm too curious about corona details to let this opportunity pass.

alkyon··on EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams
I'm not so sure it's just perception involved. You're going along a street and can hear a violin playing. A melody develops, you establish a sense of tonality, can predict next sounds maybe. And then you also make out a recorder. Another piece, totally unrelated harmonically. Another stream to process, I would assume a brain can handle it (at least a musical one should).

I agree that language processing is different, but some similarities do exist.

alkyon··on EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams
It's incorrect to reduce polyphony to just shifting harmonies. Harmony is of course the constraint but the whole point is about intertwined voices - various melodies that your brain can process simultaneously. Music is not speech, but it's not that far from the language as it seems in terms of processing. When you hear 2 melodic lines at the same time, you're brain needs to encode them separately, in a similar manner to parallel speech streams.
alkyon··on EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams
The same is true for music, otherwise canons and polyphony wouldn't work.
alkyon··on The Tower Keeps Rising
Ultimately, AI models will need to ingest the slop ziggurat they created. This means, other things being equal, that it won't be so easy as it is now to achieve incremental gains from the sheer fact of gobbling up more code.
alkyon··on SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
I wonder if it would be possible for Starlink to use less reflective materials for their satellites so that the sky is less polluted for the astronomers.
alkyon··on Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows
Yes, I was taught that relativity is a significant part of quantum chemistry equations in gold atoms 25 years ago. The idea is quite old and the title is misleading.
alkyon··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
Calling someone "stinky manager" is not ad hominem. It's a way of saying that he's managerial skills are very poor. Does it relate to the argument? Very much so. Changing a bread factory into a slop factory makes Jarred a stinky manager and even a "sloppy" one
alkyon··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
I think you meant lossy compression and not lossless. I'm not suggesting this as a method to extract those books from the models, which by their nature are not databases. Just commenting on the somewhat surprising fact that the bigger the model the more likely it is to produce some (short) excerpts of the original training material
alkyon··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
Gemini should be trained on those books already, so in theory it could regurgitate some verbatim fragments (as NYT lawsuit against OpenAI showed some time ago).
alkyon··on Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected
I wonder what will be the next big thing for Zuck after metaverse failure and now AI coming to nothing? Perpetual motion machines?
alkyon··on Why I Stopped Arguing with People
Nice quote from Tao Te Ching about complexity and simplicity completing each other.

The rules of go could be explained to a 4 years old. On the other hand, the superficial complexity of so many framworks/systems is just a facade and nothing more.

The same goes for NP-hard problems where complex solutions have trivial verification methods.

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