isaacfrond

Physics Nobel prize now also covers computer science, I guess.

tl;dr

If the information is accurate, this is a crucial milestone in China’s attempt at becoming independent of other countries for its semiconductor needs, especially as the U.S. is increasingly tightening and banning the supply of the latest, highest-end chips for Beijing in the U.S.-China chip war.

despite the name ‘mini’. it is actually more optimized for code. so that makes sense.

Obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/416/

omg, 'midwit teacher deducts marks for failing to write answers in a designated format'

this is exactly the math teacher my kids have. So frustrating.

original paper: https://www.eneuro.org/content/11/8/ENEURO.0291-24.2024

Popular write-up: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a62373322/quantum-t...

Phew. That was a close call.

Not enough Kamala Harris motorcades in the training data I gather.

The wikipedia article doesn't do full justice perhaps though the essence is there. The reason the halting problem is equivalent to solving collatz like problems is because you can rewrite any turing machine in terms of a generalized collatz function. The Fractran wikipedia page has more info.

(the original conway article itself is also very readable: FRACTRAN: A SIMPLE UNIVERSAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE FOR ARITHMETIC)

That's right, the function in the article is:

Given an input n, if n is of the form 3k then output 5k+6

if n is of the form 3k+1 then output 5k+9

if n is of the form 3k+2 then halt

So starting with 0, which is of the form 3x0, we go to 5x0+6=6, then to 5x2+6=16. Because 16 is 3x5+1 we then go to 25+9=34, etc.

The bb program is made such that one computation of the function takes an insane long time.

By the way Conway proved [0] that any computer program can be rewritten in the form of these collatz like functions. So they are pretty prowerful.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture#Undecidable...

tl;dr

maybe we’ve learned that “intelligence” is a meaningless concept, always enacted on levels that don’t themselves seem intelligent. Once we pull away the veil and learn what’s going on, it always looks like search, statistics, or pattern matching. The only difference is between intelligences we understand deeply (which seem boring) and intelligences we don’t understand enough to grasp the tricks (which seem like magical Actual Intelligence).

I've turned off the spell checker. Spell checking is done just fine in Word so I don't need it there.

Nowadays I just load the whole thing in to chatgpt and it checks the whole thing better than I ever could. You got to be clear what you want do in the prompt. Don't change my writing! only correct errors.

And you can write your own custom rules. It's great as a reward for spotting an error in your writing you get to write a tiny little bit of code to spot it automatically next time. I've collected hundreds.

tl;dr

Nevada plans to launch a generative AI system powered by Google that will analyze transcripts of unemployment appeals hearings and issue recommendations to human referees about whether or not claimants should receive benefits.

The system will use Google's Vertex AI studio to create a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model, which will draw on a database of Nevada unemployment law and previous appeals cases. Proponents argue that if done correctly, AI automation can address some of the problems that caused life-altering delays for unemployed Nevadans during the pandemic.

From the article: Other competing models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Microsoft’s LLaVA-Med, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, mostly scored below 30*, which is statistically no better than random guessing.

How is chatgpt the competion? It’s mostly a text model?

tl;dr

“Law enforcement cannot do this alone,” Monaco said during a gathering in Washington of federal law enforcement officials, members of the 3D-printing industry and academia. “We need to engage software developers, technology experts and leaders in the 3-D-printing industry to identify solutions in this fight.”

This is too hard to be fun.

It's always chess or music, sometimes basketball. But how does one become say, a first class lawyer, or a teacher, or any of the 99% of human skills that do not have easy performance metrics?

Did Boeing have enough after their final indignity?

Could it be related to Huygens publication in 1657? (De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae)

Best short story is available on-line here:

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/

includes an audio version.

Although 94% sounds like a made up number (as in 94% of statistics is exaggerated), I'm afraid the number sounds plausible enough.

On occasion I get to debug spreadsheets from my wife's business and they're always riddled with errors: plain errors, as in wrong numbers; data that was measured differently last year; high level problems as not understanding relative versus absolute growth, etc.

But as the sheets are only used to support whatever the managers thought anyway, it doesn't even really matter!

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

The patent itself:

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/2...

tl;dr

"Consumers must not be lured into believing that they would either pay and not be shown any ads anymore, or receive a service for free, when, instead, they would agree that the company used their personal data to make revenue with ads," Reynders said. "EU consumer protection law is clear in this respect. Traders must inform consumers upfront and in a fully transparent manner on how they use their personal data. This is a fundamental right that we will protect."

hugely popular?

<citation wanted>

I guess the price of the CO2 butter is vastly higher than that of real butter. So this is probably not going to fly. But speaking more generally, the one thing I miss from CO2 capturing industry is that they have no kill-app so to say. They are mostly a cost center. Seeing stuff that you can actually do with captured CO2 is surely helpful.

I saw the same problem with recycled plastic. We had large plastic recycling plant here. It basically got its raw material free, yet it went bankrupt because companies prefer to buy new plastic which is both cheaper and more convenient. That way things never are going to change.