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pfortuny

6,156 karma · joined February 25, 2012

http://pfortuny.net also info AT pfortuny.net
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pfortuny··on Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines
That is the joke, indeed.
pfortuny··on Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met
The Jacobian Conjecture settles the "solve a math problem" and is controversy-free.
pfortuny··on Effective altruism is this century's biggest idea
The basic idea of EA is the same many people have (especially those not used to the idea of nonlinear orders): quantifying everything, even "goodness" or "utility".

Not everything is quantifiable, and even more, not any family of things (investments, in this case) admits a linear ordering (they may even not admit a total order).

There can be incomparable outcomes from actions, and they may be maximal in their suborder.

This is difficult until you stop measuring everything and dedicate a minute to think of ordered trees.

pfortuny··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
Right now, "The Lord", by Romano Guardini, a large collection of homilies covering the whole life of Christ. Obviously, this is a Catholic text.

Also, "Heaven on Earh", by Emma Wells, about nine or ten Gothic Cathedrals (mostly the history of their building and preservation). A bit too plain for my taste but includes interesting facts and anecdotes.

Finished recently:

-Flowers for Algernon, which I liked a lot.

-Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, so beautiful and surprising.

-The Great Gatsby, which I had not read yet and which I have loved reading.

pfortuny··on Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
Are you from a main Spanish city? Because the chargers are being set up but not so fast, and parking is not exactly an easy thing to find for most people.
pfortuny··on I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband
The father-mother-child-donkey conundrum. Its only solution is: to hell with anyone's thoughts, we'll act as we prefer.
pfortuny··on OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US Government agency sites
Because egress firewalls have existed since way before "ai" and are very easy to set up.
pfortuny··on Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe
And memorizing. Rote learning makes the brain.
pfortuny··on Microsoft abandons personal AI chatbot race with Copilot reboot
[un]believable. Thank you.
pfortuny··on Microsoft abandons personal AI chatbot race with Copilot reboot
Sorry what? Honest question.
pfortuny··on People Training OpenAI's AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI
That is exactly what "training AI" needs: labeled data.
pfortuny··on Show HN: Navier-Stokes Visualized as 1kB i386 demos
It might be that the velocity at the spiraling axis is not infinity (i.e. there is no blow-up in finite time). Viscosity is a bitch.
pfortuny··on The Shadows Lurking in the Equations – Underwater Islands
That has another name but I forget. Essentially contour plotting in high res.
pfortuny··on Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
Yep: the problem with IP is exactly the "Property". The texts are economically (even if only for leisure) valuable, so the producer deserves a fair comoensation unless he has explicitly dismissed it.

So paying a price for an intelectual product is reasonable. Nothing to do (per se) with property.

pfortuny··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
Wow, this is really interesting. Thanks.
pfortuny··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
Apart from the well-known dubious position of OpenAI wrt truth, the prompts/inputs do mot include the outputs.

You can train on a sequence of outputs. In the end, OpenAI outputs are OpenAI's property.

You can learn a lot from a single side of a conversation.

pfortuny··on OpenAI loses trademark dispute at EU court
Courts exist, among other things, to specify the rules in ambiguous cases. Rules will be ambiguous always.
pfortuny··on I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets
Colima is in Mexico.

Kolyma is in Russia.

pfortuny··on A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes
As long as you can get an exogenous reaction from it, which is not guaranteed at all.
pfortuny··on A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes
The self-replication assumes also that there is enough energy stored in each planet (or coming from a Sun) to do the work... That is pretty much unlikely.
pfortuny··on Australian energy retailers must provide three hours of free daytime electricity
Unbelievable: I read the title and the only thought I got was that households get 3h free energy in Australia.
pfortuny··on Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works
OK, and the median?
pfortuny··on Zero Knowledge Tolstoyan Art
Also "neuron" should be at least italized.
pfortuny··on Berkshire's $397B Bet Against an Overheated Market
Well, that is what markets do: behave. Rationally or not.

The 1929 panic was also irrational but it happened. There is no way to solve that.

Panics happen and bubbles too, and in the meantime, very long term investments tend to grow (in average), as long as the economy works as expected (improving in average, long-term).

Of course, catastrophes are not impossible (the Black Death, the French Revolution, World Wars...).

pfortuny··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
That summurizes it pretty well. The Commission is essentially omnipotent, and there is no relevat judiciary to stop it.

This is farcical.

Yes, from a PURELY MONETARY viewpoint, Brexit was a disaster. But there are more important things than money.

I'm from Spain btw.

pfortuny··on The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
The first thought when moving people must be "where/how will they shit?" Only once this is solved can you ask "what will they eat?".
pfortuny··on The AI Superforecasters Are Here
This is not even dumb. Unbelievable coming from act....
pfortuny··on Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
I guess they do not understand the relevance of the median in this. They just take the average and think it is "good enough"...
pfortuny··on The fall of the theorem economy
I would call it "Engineered (as machine-made trustworthy) Mathematics": you have results but nobody undrstands them but they were not produced by humans.

Despite that, people use them. In that sense, similar to the Finite Elements method. But the tools (statements) are machined like any other tool (screwdriver).

Similar to microprocessors in your example. But about statements.

pfortuny··on The Fall of the Theorem Economy
Well, by "understanding" I mean "understanding by humans", indeed.
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