mppm

I've had the same experience, and likewise I have no idea what to do.

Or rather, I do have ideas, but they do require substantial restructuring. E.g.:

1) Strict, in-person (no exceptions), electronics-free exams with written and oral portion.

2) Transition to guided independent learning: students are given written materials and recommended exercises to study. They are shown how to use AI assistants productively. Instead of lectures, there are scheduled discussions, where students can ask questions and listen to additional explanations from the lecturer. They can also seek feedback for completed exercises. However, none of this contributes to grades in any way.

With such an incentive realignment, I think it's possible that higher education could be salvaged. But... apart from general institutional inertia, there is also the political angle standing in the way. Everybody needs a degree in the "developed economy", and the above changes are basically the opposite of the nobody left behind policy that enables half the population to attain one...

> On what legal footing does this recap feature stand?

It's not a crime if you do it with AI.

I have stopped reading Ed Zitron quite a while ago because of his long-winded and polemic style. But counting his failed predictions is maybe not that useful, in the sense that his core thesis is really just the AI Bubble. While it hasn't burst, all of his predictions remain wrong; when (if) it does, he'll have been right. Trying to guess the exact time or failure mode (whether it's open models or corporate sticker shock or a bond crisis) is a fool's errand when there are so many powerful actors all-in on keeping up appearances. Exposing the financial and corporate shenanigans of the AI world is nonetheless useful. I just wish someone would do it in a more level-headed way.

Note to self and others who have read Richard Preston's "Hot Zone": The 1989 Reston (US) incident was NOT caused by a single-base mutation of Ebola, but by a distinct monkey virus. Preston seems to have made that up to dramatize events.

Cheating and overfitting, as discussed in the article, are the most obvious problems with benchmarking LLMs. But there is also the aspect that, at least for closed models, the tokens still have to be sent to the provider's servers for inference. This makes the holdout set not as held out as it may appear. OpenAI and Antropic probably don't care about your private set of regex benchmarks, but for the headline "closed" benchmarks, I'd be surprised if they haven't collected a nice representative set of "holdout" problems to be examined at leisure.

> OpenAI had argued that the word "open" has multiple possible meanings and that "OPENAI" is a coined term without a fixed meaning.

Duh. The open in OpenAI isn't supposed to mean open. We've all been complaining about nothing.

... which is entirely unsurprising given that exhaled air is about 50.000 ppm CO2 and can vary by several 10.000s depending on depth and rate of breathing. I actually consider the recent wave of findings that CO2 levels as low as 500-1000 ppm measurably affect cognitive performance and well-being to be a great example of how you can prove literally anything with statistics and a sufficiently small sample size.

This is cute, but here is the result I got by always clicking the longest answer, or the first one if two seemed equal:

Scientific Estimate: 71,650 words

"Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"

Core Basics: 16/20

Intermediate: 15/20

Advanced: 19/20

Expert: 18/20

Grandmaster: 16/20

This is significant beyond this particular app, because biases like this are found all over the place in popular LLM benchmarks.

> I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL

I was genuinely puzzled by that, actually. I thought it quite obvious from the start that Nadella is no longer interested in Windows and other Microsoft software as products and will be moving them to thin cloud wrappers, but for some reason people were really optimistic about the "New Microsoft".

"A guy on HN told me one time, 'Don't let yourself get attached to any cloud services you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.'" -- Robert de Niro

Theoretically yes, practically no. The ECJ can order the revision of national laws, but the country in question is responsible for implementation, and can send plaintiffs on a multi-decade merry chase. Several countries have also taken the view that they can refuse changes to their constitutions. This stands on shaky ground legally, but there is no real enforcement mechanism anyway.

Thank you for Making Minesweeper Great Again!

What you are seeing here is probably the effect of window size. BZip has to perform the BWT strictly block-wise and is quite memory-hungry, so `bzip2 -9` uses a window size of 900KB, if I recall correctly. Dictionary-based algorithms are more flexible in this regard, and can gain a substantial advantage on very large and repetitive files. The article kind of forgets to mention this. Not that BZip isn't remarkably efficient for its simplicity, but it's not without limitations.

> Every time you look up something related to Radon, it's always cited as "the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking"

> I wonder if that's really true.

That claim is in fact based on extremely poor research methodology. It is made by combining the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage (which contradicts everything we know about cellular repair and hormesis) with evidence from "case-control studies", a kind of retroactive hand-waving that has nothing whatsoever to do with a "controlled trial", despite the name.

Maybe a bit late to comment, but for what it's worth: There is no primer that could be actually useful, because the "tax optimization" landscape is fragmented and constantly shifting. Everything depends on where you live, where you do business, how much much money is involved, etc.

But there is a central driving force behind it all: governments constantly fight for "tax justice" with one hand and create various "incentives" and exceptions with the other, in an effort to briefly gain the upper hand over other countries in the zero-sum game of attracting international capital. The former tends to plug all possible loopholes for the "ordinary wealthy", while the latter always leaves options for the truly big fish, they just don't stay the same decade-over-decade.

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At the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, this will be a rebranded Chinese phone, if it happens at all. The photo on their website [1] is a quick and sloppy Photoshop job (note identical lenses and lack of flash), and the specs and pricing are totally implausible for a US-made phone. Compare that to the 2000$ Purism charges for their comically under-powered Liberty phone [2] that is mostly US-made.

1. https://trumpmobile.com/t1-phone 2. https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/

It's legalized graft, not a subsidy. The tens of billions flowing into SLS do not bolster productive capability in the civilian or military aviation sector, they tie up engineers in a nonsensical, dead-end project, and totally mess up incentives on top of that.

I think you are misusing Berkson's Paradox here. It applies when you sample two extremes, i.e. when you look at the richest 0.1% and the most moral 0.1% and notice that the two appear mutually exclusive, even though they might actually be uncorrelated in the general population. When you look only at the richest 0.1% and notice their lack of morals compared to the general population, that is a legit correlation.

Yeah, seems I was wrong about that. Apparently most IFRS countries allow expensing R&D for tax purposes, regardless of accounting. Many even have an R&D superdeduction nowadays.

Sorry for the noise :(

Elsewhere in the world (under IFRS accounting rules) capitalization of R&D costs has been a firm requirement for a while. The US has been somewhat unique in allowing them to be expensed instead, until recently.

If the business has some revenue, but is not yet profitable after deducting development costs, it can become profitable on paper (and owe tax) if R&D is capitalized instead.

That depends on what kind of aviation we are talking about. An air taxi usable over 200km with 2 passengers is easy to achieve. But a minimally useful regional plane with 100+ passenger capacity is an entirely different matter, because it will be subject to the same regulations as conventional airliners. That is operational margin, winds, diversion and hold, etc. This means you probably need something like 2000km net range to be able to fly 500-1000km routes, which means you need close to 1000 Wh/kg batteries under reasonable assumptions for battery mass fraction and L/D-ratio.

That's an interesting sentiment, coming from you. Is privacy officially over then? Should I stop pushing my friends to use Signal over WhatsApp?

> Note: When I say “wheel” throughout this post, please replace it with whatever tool, protocol, service, technology, or other invention you’re personally interested in.

How did we sink this low?

> I could see a highly hydrophilic capillary restricting a vapor enough to where it has better entropy in a liquid state.

My other comment here (and and a reply to a similar question) has more detail [1], but in short: this is true for capillaries and pores, it is not true for "collectable" droplets on a flat surface.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099078

What you are referring to is called capillary condensation [1]. When you have a hydrophilic surface with thin capillaries or small pores, they can pull water from the air below 100% RH. However, this process requires an enclosed space with a very small radius and the air-water interface is always concave in this case (it's just how capillary forces work).

Forming a convex surface, on the other hand, requires an at least slightly hydrophobic material and produces a positive internal pressure. This is a key difference, because condensation into a hydrophilic pore is favorable in terms of free energy, while condensing onto a hydrophobic surface is unfavorable (unless you have a supersaturated vapor).

> Theoretically speaking, you can have a material that somehow absorbs high moisture from the air but has microscale properties that promote creation of droplets then somehow these droplets are separated from the rest of the air

That "somehow" is what makes the paper's claims impossible. The water condenses spontaneously into the pore because it thereby lowers its free energy. Extruding it onto the surface is then even more unfavorable than direct condensation. Unfortunately, no passive system can achieve this feat, no matter how cleverly nanostructured, as it would go against the arrow of increasing entropy. You need an external energy source to drive that process.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capillary_condensation

Keeping the temperature constant with a thermostat is not an issue here. That would only explain things if the surface were kept cooler than the surrounding air (below the dew point), but from the description in the paper that does not seem to be the case. They basically claim that macroscopic droplets form spontaneously from an unsaturated vapor. And no, this is not something permitted by the second law of thermodynamics.

Unless they have buried some really important caveat somewhere in the paper [1], it really looks like they are making claims that are incompatible with the second law of thermodynamics. They claim that water droplets are condensing on their nanomaterial at constant temperature and less than 100% relative humidity. This is absolutely forbidden by thermodynamics as we understand it. Under these conditions droplets can condense within pores (forming a concave surface), but they can never form a convex droplet on a flat surface.

Their mumbo-jumbo about water being "squeezed out" onto the surface by the hydrophobic component is totally bogus as well. The condensation will just stop earlier, without overflowing. Water condensing in concave pores and being squeezed into convex droplets requires hydrostatic pressure to be positive and negative at the same time.

The possibilities I see are: 1) contaminated surfaces 2) miscalibrated relative humidity or 3) they've neglected to mention a cooling plate that keeps the material below ambient.

1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu8349

Zeus would like to file an injunction against the impostors associating his name with a something-equivalent¹ something. The Zeus brand stands only for supreme dominance. Zeus would not object to an actual zettawatt laser being named after him.