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empath-nirvanaon Apple's iOS 18 AI will be on-device preserving privacy, and not server-side

> And, the hallucination problem has only gotten worse, as AI models feed on content generated by other AI models.

They state this as a fact, but I haven't seen this yet.

Consciousness itself is a magic trick, of a kind.

empath-nirvanaon Tech exec predicts 'AI girlfriends' will create $1B business

I'm fairly sure its explanation of integration is correct? Maybe not a good answer for a math major, but it's a good answer for his question.

empath-nirvanaon Tech exec predicts 'AI girlfriends' will create $1B business

Even aside from this skeezy and exploitative business model, there are people who already have sort of para-social relationships with vanilla chatgpt..

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1ba0vha/my_78_year...

that's just one especially sad example I found, but I've seen others..

It is very difficult to _not_ think of these chatbots as people when you interact with them, and if you're a person who is starving for human attention, you're going to start thinking of it as your friend.

empath-nirvanaon A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

This is one of the reasons why I think patents are important, because it allows them to profit from their inventions, and for the inventions to be reused later by others, even if the product was "too soon". They invented innovative technology, tried to build a real product, they should be able to make some money from others picking up the baton -- and presumably they did, when they sold the company through the chain of acquisitions that ended up with them at TomTom and with TomTom in control of their patent portfolio.

empath-nirvanaon Astronomers discover Milky Way’s biggest stellar black hole

> I hadn't heard of the distinction stellar or non-stellar black hole before.

While it's possible that supermassive black holes were formed from stellar collapse, there are models where they didn't, while they _know_ that this one was formed from stellar collapse.

empath-nirvanaon Visualizing Attention, a Transformer's Heart [video]

Yes. This is one of the first things people did with chatgpt:

can you help me invent a language for a fictional setting with talking frogs. Give me a sample sentence that frogs might say in their language, along with a translation. ChatGPT Creating a language for a fictional setting can be a fun and imaginative task! For your setting with talking frogs, we'll consider the environment and characteristics that might influence their language. Here’s a brief outline of the linguistic features and a sample sentence:

Linguistic Features of the Frog Language Phonetics: Since frogs are known for their croaks and ribbits, their language might include a lot of guttural and clicking sounds, which can be represented in writing with characters like "k", "g", "q", and clicks like "!" or "ǂ".

Syntax: We might imagine that frogs are direct and to the point, so their sentence structure could be subject-verb-object (SVO), similar to English, for straightforward communication.

Vocabulary: Words would likely relate to their daily life—water, flies, lily pads, weather changes, predators, etc.

Grammar: Simplified grammar with minimal use of tenses and conjugations to reflect an emphasis on the present moment, which is typical for many animalistic languages in fiction.

Sample Language: Froglan Froglii (hello) Lok (water) Krik (eat) Zraak (fly - the insect) !quu (danger) ǂogg (jump) Sample Sentence in Froglan "Froglii! Lok krik zraak ǂogg."

Translation "Hello! Jump eat fly water."

This sentence, structured in a somewhat English syntax for ease of understanding, would literally mean that a frog is greeting another and then mentioning that it will jump towards water to eat flies. The sentence structure and vocabulary can be further refined and expanded based on how deeply you want to dive into the language creation!

empath-nirvanaon The Papa Johns closest to The Pentagon is far busier than usual

It's pretty much always better to not get into a war than to win a war.

empath-nirvanaon An unusual prehistoric monument made up of three interlocking circles

If you measure the circumference of the circular enclosure and divide it by the diameter, it's a close approximation to pi.

empath-nirvanaon New paintings found at Pompeii

For statuary in particular, it's important to note that Egyptians, and Greeks to a lesser extent, believed that statues of gods were _physically inhabited by those gods_ and could be used to communicate with them, so it was pretty important not to mess with depictions.

For other common tropes, like Medusa, they were used as wards against evil and were basically magical spells or talismans.

empath-nirvanaon Why birds survived and dinosaurs went extinct after an asteroid hit earth (2020)

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

This happened roughly contemporaneously to the asteroid strike.

empath-nirvanaon First languages of North America traced back to two groups from Siberia

I think the headline is a little bit too assertive for a paper that is very tentative, about a topic for which people should be very skeptical. Tracing languages features back 10,000-20,000+ years is a fairly iffy proposition. Proto Indo European is _only_ 5000ish years old in comparison.

empath-nirvanaon New paintings found at Pompeii

Pompeii was a beach resort. You don't go to the Jersey Shore expecting high art.

empath-nirvanaon Peter Higgs, physicist who discovered Higgs boson, has died

Discovery can happen in a purely mathematical/theoretical context, too.

empath-nirvanaon Structuralism as a Philosophy of Mathematics

You don't need paper or ink to start working with math. You don't need symbols. You can just do it in your head. That's the beauty of math. The physical instantiation of it doesn't matter.

empath-nirvanaon What John von Neumann did at Los Alamos (2020)

Eventually you start specializing and learning more and more about a particular topic until you know as much about it as anybody else, and then you just keep going.

There's always massive open questions because every question you answer generates more questions.

empath-nirvanaon Structuralism as a Philosophy of Mathematics

Yes, typically the base layer is set theory (with ZFC being the "standard" formulation).

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

empath-nirvanaon Structuralism as a Philosophy of Mathematics

Well, given that structuralism as a program didn't exist until basically the 19th century, you can look at the entire history of mathematics to see what mathematics without structuralism looks like. It's sort of hard to argue that the isomorphism between symmetries and permutations is "obvious" when group theory wasn't invented until the 18th century, and symmetry groups weren't formalized until the 19th century. Your comment is basically this:

One fish says to another fish: "The water's nice today." and swims off, the other fish says "What's water?". Your entire mathematical world view is so permeated with the language of structuralism that you can't see it any more.

empath-nirvanaon AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse

I uploaded the paper to chatgpt and it summarized it, wrote pseudo code and wrote haskell code with very little prompting from me... no idea if it's _good_ code, because I didn't run it and I don't know the domain or haskell, but it did produce code -- and explained that some of it is non trivial to implement and might need more attention and explained why.

empath-nirvanaon Roblox Studio boss: children making money on the platform isn't exploitation

Plato put all writing in the same category as poetry and believed that only person to person dialogue could transmit truth. He didn't have a special animosity toward poetry. He would say that a biography was as useless and dead as a novel.

empath-nirvanaon Some colleges will soon charge $100k a year – how did this happen?

The US already has a 'loan forgiveness program' that works for every single loan _other_ than student loans, called "bankruptcy". It's worked for hundreds of years, and we used to allow it for college loans.

empath-nirvanaon Some colleges will soon charge $100k a year – how did this happen?

Schools should be on the hook if students default on their loans.

empath-nirvanaon Some colleges will soon charge $100k a year – how did this happen?

Private loans aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy.

empath-nirvanaon Some colleges will soon charge $100k a year – how did this happen?

This problem would be solved immediately by making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. The easy money would evaporate and a lot of colleges would have to figure out how to make money on lower tuitions.

empath-nirvanaon Some colleges will soon charge $100k a year – how did this happen?

> The rise of bootcamps and micro-certifications teach people 80% of the stuff in 20% (or less) of the time, and at fractions of the cost as well.

It really depends on what you sorts of jobs you're talking about. There's a bunch of work available in the vast realm of "computer jobs" that are essentially on the intellectual level of plumbing or hvac repair and indeed, college is a waste of time for those sorts of jobs and boot camps are fine. I'm not denigrating it, that's mostly what I do. I wire together systems that other people mostly developed and do a bunch of troubleshooting and most of the value I bring is on-the-job experience with the systems involved.

There's also a lot of cutting edge R&D and dev work that does indeed benefit from an academic background, and you don't really have to look any further than open ai for that. But even outside of machine learning, a lot of people have built companies on taking academic research papers and turning them into products.

empath-nirvanaon Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage

Everyone jumping into AI, but there's going to be a business opportunity for curated sources of information with proof that actual human beings created it.

empath-nirvanaon Roblox Studio boss: children making money on the platform isn't exploitation

I could fill volumes with descriptions of temples and palaces, paintings, sculptures, tapestry, porcelain, etc., etc., etc.—if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty. The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences: the art of legislation and administration and negotiation, ought to take place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other arts. I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

-- John Adams

empath-nirvanaon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

Rewards cards should be illegal and basically are privately levied tax on the poor and a subsidy to the wealthy.

empath-nirvanaon Dark Star at 50: How a micro-budget student film changed sci-fi forever

Influence is not a straight line and more than one movie can "change sci-fi forever".

empath-nirvanaon The Quintic, the Icosahedron, and Elliptic Curves [pdf]

> In 1963, the Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold gave an alternative topological proof of the unsolvability of the quintic in a series of lectures to high school kids in Moscow.

...

> Arnold’s insight was to show that if there is a radical formula for the roots of a general polynomial, then the “dance of the roots” cannot be overly complex, in the sense that the image of the monodromy map must be a solvable subgroup of . But, for example, the 1-parameter Brioschifamily of quintics () = 5 + 103 + 452 + 2, ∈ ℂ has monodromy group 5 (see Figure 1), which is certainly not solvable since it is simple, as we will see by relating it to the icosahedron in the next section. Hence the unsolvability of the quintic.

...of course, well within the reach of most high school students.