One funny thing about MA is how happily he broadcasts his white supremacist tendencies on Twitter (by following lots of creepy ones). Makes me hope he won't be in charge of changing my world.
Batteries are not really considered at realistic option for airplanes, AFAIK. The best hope is that they can use synthetic fuel, at a cost of, say, x7 the current price. Regulation could definitely help make that happen -- and those who fly a lot should have to pay for the real price of their transport.
I agree it's rather sad to see such an over-the-top presentation in Quanta. Staying more grounded would definitely serve their longer term credibility.
“The most important thing I’d want New York Times readers to understand is this,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. “If this experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case could be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”
People might be reading too much into the 'demon' stuff: At least in Denmark, all medieval churches had devils painted on the ceiling. Could be the guy just thought it fit well in this Norwegian church too?
Suppose you're broke and then some rich guy walks up to you on the street and loudly proclaims "throwing plastic in this river next to us would be terrible! I would never do it! But, would you mind taking this plastic cup for me? I'll pay you $100 to take it! And I don't care what you do with it ;)".
Writing 'state' is arguably inaccurate if you read it as 'nation state', but taxation in gold by city states goes way back to early city states and more generally gold has a very long history of being accepted as payment by governments. I'm not sure about salt. I'm not convinced Rai stones are a meaningful counterpoint -- reading about them they only appear to act as money in a fairly weak and impractical sense.
Secondly, I did not say that Bitcoin has to be money to be valuable. Rather that Bitcoin is not likely to be 'money' in any serious way, and this makes the 'store of value' proposition precarious. But I don't think it's inconceivable that bitcoin might still be worth a lot 100 years from now.
The point was that Lagarde is a complete idiot for saying that Bitcoin has no (future) value? But, a fairly sound argument can be made that this is a plausible prediction, in part on the basis that Bitcoin is likely fail as 'money', which makes its long-term position as a 'store of value' precarious. So, I don't think the point is fair.
Actually, the explanations for why bitcoin has value coming from different supporters is quite different, e.g. some argue it is useful as a means of payment, some argue it isn't but it will be, some argue it is only useful as a store of value.
If you read "The Nature of Money" by George Ingham, you'll see that many economists think of money as something that is simultaneously: (1) A means of payment (2) a unit of account (3) a store of value. And historically, all successful currencies have been backed by a state that created demand for the currency by taxing people in it.
Bitcoin is arguably doing very poorly on (1) and (2), which from a historical perspective makes it prospects look very uncertain.
It seems a bit off to assert that "people feel it is a price worth paying" when almost all purchases online are made with credit cards which have some protections against fraud, and almost none are made with blockchains in comparison. It seems like so far, most people don't think it's a price worth paying?
It's little-oh, not Big-Oh (o(1) is not O(1)). Instead $f(n) = o(1)$ means $\lim_{n \to infty f(n)} = 0$. So $m^{1+o(1)}$ is smaller than $m^1.00001$ for large enough m.
I don't know about this significance of something like this, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. I know in Denmark, academics have fought to convince regional administrations to contract companies to build open source software, but the companies push back and try to convince the govt to buy closed source instead.
That sounds like pressure from above could matter. Of course not clear if pledge will create such pressure.
The parent comment was saying that when you fix the number of heads to be k in advance, the set of head positions you get is random. That sounds correct.
I don't understand the downvotes. Whenever you find out that an institution you interact with was used to enable a child prostitution scheme, it should cause a moment of reflection, not a reflexive downvote.
Basically, once you're this rich, you can take hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of loans to cover anything you'd like to spend.
Now, you can make sure that you're actually "losing" money in any given year by having (almost) no realized income. Then, at the end, you die, having never paid taxes.
"The price for doing an urban installation was padded; it was padded - padded with the money that stopped the fibres coming out of the pavement and getting ripped up."
If you think this is true, then you haven't been to almost any EU country* -- urban connections are usually better always much cheaper than in the US.
* Well, I can speak to ~8 of them, I didn't check the rest.
The graphic in this Guardian article [1] suggests that for age 40+ the number of covid-related ICU admissions prevented vs. no. blood clots has a factor 10 gap. Of course, clots might be more severe than ICU admission. But still, it looks to me like stopping for over 40 is a huge mistake. Very disappointing.
This is a pretty common omission to make, even though it's strictly speaking wrong. But suppose for a moment that the algorithm was always fast. In that case, it would not need randomness anymore, as you could just pick a fixed string as the "random" outcome, and you would be guaranteed success.
So, if an algorithm uses randomness, it will either fail with some probability or be slow with some probability. If neither is true, that algorithm doesn't need the randomness.
Not really. This algorithm is only fast with high probability, and getting a linear equation solver to be always-correct is just a matter of checking the output at the end and trying again if you're (too) wrong. So always-correct and fast-with-high-probability is a feature of any randomized linear equation solver.
It still amazing stuff, I'm just pointing out that this particular aspect of the behaviour is not surprising.
As a casual observer, I get the impression that Google's corporate attitude toward research on Ethical AI is fundamentally analogous to Exxon's view of climate research in the 80s (and since).
Namely, that Google, correctly, views research in the area as potentially undermining key revenue sources in the short and mid term. It is sad, but unsurprising. Government funded research and regulators will most likely be the force driving AI to be more ethical -- if that's going to happen. That's what we see whenever corporate and public interests collide head on.