btilly

For something completely different, try learning Mandarin.

We pay money online mostly through credit cards. Credit card transactions can be reversed. If children spend money on porn, those payments are likely to be reversed. This is really bad for the ability of the porn sites to continue receiving credit card payments, and continue making money.

An age header is a trivial step that can reduce the odds of the adult site receiving payments that later get reversed. Win, win.

But if someone is willing and able to pay, then the adult industry wants the choice of whether to access content to be up to them. If government tries to regulate them, they'll engage in malicious compliance - do the minimum to not be sued, in a way that they can still reach customers.

For example Utah tried to institute age verification. The porn industry blocked all IP addresses from Utah. Business boomed for VPN companies in Utah. Everyone, including porn companies, knows that a lot of that is for porn. But if you show up with a Nevada IP address, the porn's position is, "You're in Nevada. Utah law doesn't apply." Even if the credit card has a Utah zip code.

If you live in Utah, and you're able to purchase a VPN, the porn companies want your money.

I wonder how compiler technology would do. Possibly as a component of an attempted solution.

My perspective is that network effects are far less long-lasting than they feel in the moment. For example if being decent at everything and having a huge community was the only thing that mattered, Perl would still be a big deal. Many similar examples exist.

In the case of Lean, being the first with a huge library really makes a difference. Just as Perl got a big boost from having CPAN. (Which was an imitation of CTAN, except for a programming language instead of TeX.)

But, based on scaling laws, we should expect the value of a large library for most users to grow around the log of the size of the library. (See https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/teaching/courses/2009-08UVM-300/do... for the relevant scaling laws.)

When your library is small, this looks like an insurmountable barrier. But you don't have to match the scale for factors of usability to become more important. And porting mathematical libraries is a good target for LLMs. The source is verified, the target is verifiable, and the reasoning path generally ports.

The flip side of this is that, thanks to LLMs, working on a minority platform isn't the barrier that you might expect. Because if their library can be ported to your platform, then your proof can probably be ported to their platform as well!

The worst case scenario laid out in that article is that most of the carbon absorbed, was later rereleased. So net zero carbon, not net carbon emitter.

I've seen other reports of that exact experiment that estimated a significant net carbon sink. The actual experiment failed to make measurements that lets us know which actually happened.

Regardless, we've certainly demonstrated that, at least sometimes, there is significant net carbon capture, at low cost. Given the certainty of global damage at present, I believe that this justifies continued experimentation. Even if it means accepting possible risk to local ecosystems. The local ecosystem can generally recover. The planet, not so much.

The idea that they have blocked the treatment of Alzheimer's rather than helping it, is very, very painful. This is perfect for creating cognitive dissonance.

And so, no matter what the evidence, they remain committed to the conclusion.

As a result, the latest Alzheimer's drug to enter stage 3 FDA trials is Trontinemab. (It is currently in stage 3.) It targets the amyloid target.

A relative drop in the bucket is going to, say, the infection hypothesis. This despite the fact that the only intervention that has been shown to reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's, is the shingles vaccine.

However research into what we humans can do to ameliorate it is verboten. For example https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizing-ocean... was an actual experiment that found a low cost way to both remove lots of CO2, and improve a fishery. But that line of research has been shut down.

Likewise research into the current impact is only allowed if it agrees with what is politically correct. For example many researchers have found that current severe California forest fires are mostly due to poor past policies, that have resulted in very dense forest, with a large fuel overload. But research that stresses the impact of climate change are easier to publish, and this shifts the apparent consensus on the causes of things like the major 2025 fires in the Los Angeles area.

Which will be true of many human curated corpuses. But it will also be similar to, for natural data as well. Such as the lengths of random rivers, or the brightness of random stars.

The law was first discovered because logarithm books tended to wear out at the front first. That turned out to because most numbers had a small leading digit, and therefore the pages at the front were being looked up more often.

Even if we don't use LLMs, they are still transforming our lives.

Unfortunately, while mathematics should be about a human element, research has focused into little cliques of up to a dozen or so people who are essentially unintelligible outside of the clique. That wasn't historically the culture, but the trend towards it accelerated after WW 2.

Hardy's curse is one of the underlying causes of this. The resulting extreme social isolation was why I chose to leave mathematics. My inclination was very much to try to explain and popularize. See, for example, the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269822. However such an inclination has been actively punished for decades within academia. The key to tenure is sufficient work within a clique to get solid recommendations from the most prominent members of that clique.

I agree with the article on how AI will transform and destroy what's left of mathematics. But I see it as the logical conclusion to what the fragmentation of mathematics has already done.

That said, there really are good use cases for readable formatted files. For example configuration files that are checked into source control are far more trackable than a SQLite database for the same purpose. For another example, the files are convenient for a lot of data transfer purposes.

But for updateable data? You need a really good reason not to simply use a database. I've encountered such edge cases. But I've encountered a lot more people who thought that they had an edge case, than really did.

Things need to be rolled out in advance of need, so that you can get a do-again in case there proves to be a need.

I read a UI book in the early 2000s that cited research showing that most users didn't understand filesystems. They would seem to, but then the idea that the same filename in two places was two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block. Those who got it, didn't find it hard. It's just that some people can't get it.

The disconnect is not between some developers, and the younger folks. It is between some developers, and most of the world.

Even if you do say that it qualifies, it doesn't qualify as productive debate.

There is really no productive debate to be had here. Even if you think that Iran needed to be bombed, it took absurd incompetence to start doing so before planning how to handle asymmetric warfare against drones in an affordable way.

Even more painfully, I've been the maintenance programmer who was burned because some OTHER programmer trusted such a feature. And then it was my job to figure out the hidden assumption after it broke, long after the original programmer was gone. You know the old saying that you have to be twice as clever to debug code, as you need to be to write it? Debugging another person's clever and poorly commented tricks is no fun!

I'd therefore trust this feature a lot less than you appear to. I'd be tempted to instead wrap the existing loop with a new loop to which I can add instrumentation etc. It's more work. But if it breaks, it will be clear why it broke.

It sounds like it should solve your problem. At first it seems to work. Then you keep on finding the footguns after it is too late to change the design.

We've always been bikeshedders. For example, back in Slashdot days, some company would decide to migrate something from Windows to Linux. Immediately the debate became whether they should have gone with Debian or SuSE instead of Red Hat.

Lack of fair trials: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20251120IP...

Illegal surveillance of political opposition: https://rm.coe.int/pegasus-and-similar-spyware-and-secret-st...

Strong arming companies into bribes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Fidesz

Not only are there not similar reports about the UK, but its better position in international corruption rankings points to a culture that would be less likely to tolerate this.

Any further questions about why there should be concerns about how Hungary would be likely to abuse a law like this?

Around 2000 the founder stepped away, and MBAs brought in automated machines. They were more efficient and consistent at making the drinks than the baristas, and business tanked. The founder came back in 2008, got rid of the machines, and brought the baristas back. Business took off again.

It really is the experience that is being sold.

Their business has run into trouble a couple of times because MBA types in the company lost sight of this, then focused on trying to sell drinks efficiently. Thereby diluting the brand and business.

If you've got 22 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym7YwFq8ZuM is a very informative walkthrough of the history and the business by the always funny youtuber, The Fat Electician. Highly recommended.

The problem is that one's past success leads to ego. Ego makes it hard to accept the evidence of your mistakes. This creates cognitive dissonance, limiting contrary feedback. The result is that you become very sure of everything that you think, and are resistant to feedback.

This kind of works out so long as things remain the same. After all one's past success is based on a set of real skills that you developed. And those skills continue to serve you well.

But when faced with something new, LLMs in this case, past skills don't apply. However your overconfidence remains. This makes it easy to confidently march off of a cliff that everyone else could see.

The UK does a lot of prosecuting people for having said nasty things online that someone else didn't like.

Hungary is far more inclined to surveil political opponents, put people in their network in jail without fair trial, surveil successful businesses whose bribes were insufficient, find excuses to punish those businesses.

Even more unfortunately, the issue is so emotional that we can't have a reasonable discussion on it. This limits the discussion to proposals that sound good to angry people. And the opposition to those who can get angry about something else. Which limits how much reason is applied on either side.

For example, look at the idea of a national sex offenders registry, like we have in the USA. The existence of such a registry is reasonable given that we're no more successful at stopping people from being pedophiles, than we are at stopping them from being homosexuals.

But the purpose of such a list is severely undermined when an estimated quarter of the list were themselves minors when they offended. The age at which people are most likely to land on the list is 14. But a man who liked 13 year olds when he was 14, is unlikely to reoffend at 30. What is the purpose of ruining the rest of his life for a juvenile mistake?

Such discussions simply can't be had.

A more limited bill takes off the pressure to "do something", and therefore makes the more extreme bill harder to pass later.

In this case there is reason to suspect that the real goal of the bill is not catching pedophiles. Instead it is to give police broader powers of surveillance in the name of catching pedophiles, which they will then be able to use for other purposes. This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU. Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

As for protecting one photon with a sheathe of other photons, the energy density required for that tube is absolutely insane. We're talking photons spaced the width of a proton apart, with very high energy. Even assuming that it could be assembled, the gravity from the leading edge of the tube is going to do "interesting things" to the rest of the tube. Maybe even black hole levels of interesting...

If an electron and a positron meet, they turn into two very high energy photons.

Because physics is time reversible, if two high energy photons meet, they have a chance to turn into an electron-positron pair.

If an extremely high energy photon meets a low energy one, there is a moving reference frame in which they have the same energy, and are both high energy. Therefore they have a chance to turn into an electron-positron pair whose center of mass is in that reference frame.

The result is that if a photon is above something like 10^15 eV in energy, it can annihilate itself against any photon in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). There are lots of photons in the CMBR. Those collisions are sufficiently likely that such photons essentially cannot travel intergalactic distances.

If you go back to the early universe, the CMBR was much denser than it is today. Making the distance that such photons could reasonably travel even shorter then than it is today.

That said, no good storyteller should let inconvenient physical fact keep them from writing a good story.

Take, for example, backprop in machine learning. The model operates forwards. Then you solve backwards to figure out how to update the terms.

Other than that, great game!