cxseven

1. Some of the "AI" proofs applied existing human work from lesser-known papers. AI proofs could solve the long-standing problem in math of almost all attention concentrating on less than 1% of authors. Human effort from the other 99% would have otherwise been wasted, which AI can rescue and give credit to thanks to its superhuman ability to match patterns across reams of text.

Humans may remain superior in spatial / non-verbal reasoning for a while longer yet, and, in the meanwhile, computers may aid us in collaborating to put that to use better.

2. AI-assisted, computer-verified proofs could further democratize mathematics by reducing the power of connections to get a reviewer to look at a journal submission. We can then also decouple the two tasks of

  a. Verifying a statement is true
  b. Explaining it

3. Searching for previous work and finding the edges of human knowledge are now easier. And we can leap across tedious terrain that the machine has the patience to plod through to find more interesting questions.

Engineers would win many more arguments if that was their full-time job. Who has the energy after completing a blitz to solve a highly technical problem by deadline to debate a PM who has spent months cooking up a product story?

Who are the geniuses / slimeballs at Microsoft who snatched the JEDI contract away from AWS for dubious reasons, and who partnered with Duck Duck Go, the most visible complainant about Google's search dominance, and central to the government's antitrust case that it just filed?

Wow, none of my AP teachers back in '97 offered anything close to this advice. I wonder if that was normal for the time, or if I just experienced the low end of the variance of preparation.

I believe this is the truest interpretation:

> In the days of the PDP-1 only one person could use the machine, at the beginning at least. Several years later they wrote a timesharing system, and they added lots of hardware for it. But in the beginning you just had to sign up for some time. Now of course the professors and the students working on official projects would always come in during the day. So, the people who wanted to get lots of time would sign up for time at night when there were less competition, and this created the custom of hackers working at night. Even when there was timesharing it would still be easier to get time, you could get more cycles at night, because there were fewer users. So people who wanted to get lots of work done, would still come in at night. But by then it began to be something else because you weren't alone, there were a few other hackers there too, and so it became a social phenomenon. During the daytime if you came in, you could expect to find professors and students who didn't really love the machine, whereas if during the night you came in you would find hackers. Therefore hackers came in at night to be with their culture. And they developed other traditions such as getting Chinese food at three in the morning. And I remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from Chinatown. It was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, cause' that's such a calm time of day. It's a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. It's so nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds starting to chirp, you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you have done that night.

> Another tradition that we began was that of having places to sleep at the lab. Ever since I first was there, there was always at least one bed at the lab. And I may have done a little bit more living at the lab than most people because every year of two for some reason or other I'd have no apartment and I would spend a few months living at the lab. And I've always found it very comfortable, as well as nice and cool in the summer. But it was not at all uncommon to find people falling asleep at the lab, again because of their enthusiasm; you stay up as long as you possibly can hacking, because you just don't want to stop. And then when you're completely exhausted, you climb over to the nearest soft horizontal surface. A very informal atmosphere.

RMS lecture at KTH (Sweden), 30 October 1986 https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.en.html

JWZ draped camouflage netting around his desk to make an ad-hoc "Tent of Doom": https://www.jwz.org/tent-of-doom/ . Maybe an actual tent would be even better.

Surrounding yourself by whiteboards might also allow you to approximate walls.

I think he meant the airport employees on the tarmac who wear giant ear muffs.

The median Googler works there for about a year, too, so I guess they have little interest or ability to understand existing code.

That would be useful information, but it would also need some way to judge how biased (or not) the promotions are.

There's also another likely contribution to higher pay for women: a shorter supply of them, and Google bidding to hire/keep them versus other companies.

The Bible Belt is running out of notches

Location with respect to what?

Serious question, ignoring the other environmental impacts of logging old growth forest:

Is logging carbon negative?

You'd probably find that ancient humans, just like many animals, formed cooperative groups that weren't limited to family, with children not infrequently cared for by nonfamily. A social safety net is nearly as ancient as life itself and seems to be contributing to the robustness of many lifeforms.

If they blanket an area with cameras, as China does, they can use multiple vantage points to get more accurate measurements and, when a positive ID is made, they can persistently track that person crossing from one field of view to another.

I think the main advantage of gait analysis (or limb proportion measurement) is that it will encourage a more efficient, decentralized computation that first distills the observed data into a fingerprint that can be more easily transmitted over a wire to a massive database for matching, rather than the alternatives of either replicating that database or transmitting raw, high-bandwidth data.

Besides limb measurements, they could also use last known location, residence, and vehicle ownership information to increase the certainty of loose matches.

This could be the product of sharing course materials they already mostly had, at a low additional cost.

Update: It looks like on October 2nd, Facebook clarified that 50 million users actually had their login credentials stolen, and an additional 40 million were unconfirmed but known to have been touched by the buggy "view as" feature:

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/facebook-login-update/

> But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding.

The median Googler works there for something like 1.1 years, and gets recruited straight out of college. Combine this with the fact that Larry Page almost immediately abdicated after being handed back the reins from Eric Schmidt around this time, and a lot of other influential old timers like Marissa Mayer are long gone, it's no small wonder, I guess, that the sensibilities and follow-through of early Google are dead.

I always wondered why Facebook didn't just syndicate its site, i.e. allow people to congregate on differently-themed sites as they wish, while using the same infrastructure underneath.

Just possible. Similarly, the recent FB hack didn't actually penetrate 50 million accounts -- that was just an upper bound estimate based how many accounts were "exposed to the risk" of being compromised, probably because they were noted as being touched by the buggy "view as" function.

I don't understand how that follows. Google doesn't need to fix its purported usability problems.

It can let the non-corporate users enjoy the fruit of their labors at keeping Google+ running for corporate users at almost no additional cost.

What's the point, then? Google will (or should) spend just about as much effort keeping it live for enterprise users as it would for the rest of us.

I don't use it often, but occasionally find useful communities there, especially concerning technical subjects. Now all of that is going to disappear.

It's annoying that Google apparently prizes the opinion of enterprise customers enough to half-abort the plan to shut down Google+, while for some reason maintaining a stubborn insistence on removing its access for the rest of us. Yes, this will be another point to add on the list of reasons to never become invested in a new Google product.

There's not going to be anything more hospitable than Earth for a long time, long enough for the warnings here to come true and then some.

Windows 10 Education also lets you do this, and is a lot less expensive than Pro. Sometimes it's free to members of certain organizations.

For the Kepler Conjecture, human mathematicians first found a way to show that it could be proved by checking a finite (but long) list of computer-verifiable claims.

Here Scholze is saying that part of the proof simply hasn't been written, so there's nothing to verify. I think he's missing that computer verification proponents are also aware of that and are either

1. trying to motivate the camp that claims to understand Mochizuki's work to formalize and computer-verify it

and/or

2. suggesting that some of the gaps can be filled in by automatic theorem provers

The no-context Linus quotes and the outlining of how he gets paid made this article seem like somewhat of a hatchet job meant to milk clicks out of the #MeToo movement, which I otherwise have no problem with.

The problem is that the death of Reader also inflicted a death blow to blogs in general. Aggregation was entirely forfeited to Facebook, and clickbait became the norm for driving eyeballs, not fascinating writing that Readers shared and loved.

Also, "sort by magic" provided an excellent feed of articles to me in Reader, and all of the alternatives I tried either didn't have a comparable algorithm or their userbase was too small to train it.

They have convictions, too. The more salient differentiator is probably extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivations, i.e. the need for a church to be a place to show off or enforce virtues

If you're talking about one of the few US cities like New York where the vast majority of people use public transportation, then that's why it's not going to match other people's experiences where public transportation is mainly used by people who have no other option.

If this is all that's done and companies stop paying for insurance, I would expect employers to use the opportunity to pocket most of the savings and only pass on a pittance to their employees.

Also, uninformed consumers will opt for cheap plans without checking for (or realizing their personal susceptibility to) major pitfalls that the ACA used to protect against before the Republicans pulled it apart.

Also, imagine the joules saved worldwide if known key names didn't have to be sent each time, or, better yet, data was packed in a format that optimized for size and processing speed rather than readability.

I mean, I enjoy the idea of human readability as much as Jon Postel, but at certain scales you have to wonder about the hidden cost of petabytes of human-readable data flying over the wire, never to be seen by anything but computers.