radford-neal

Not quite. If the statement is provable, an algorithm can find the proof by just looking at all possible proofs, in order of length. (It's assumed that that a valid proof can be algorithmically confirmed to be valid - there's an algorithm that when given a purported proof will eventually output "valid" if it is in fact valid.) The algorithm will find a proof eventually, if there is one. If there is a (provable) counterexample, the algorithm will similarly eventually find that. What Goedel's incompleteness theorem says is that such a search algorithm may never terminate - never finding a proof, and never finding a counterexample.

(The algorithms described above are of course completely impractical, taking time exponential in the length of the proof (of theorem or counterexample).)

If I understand this comment correctly, it's saying that Micron and the others would be better off selling RAM at below the price they could get, in order to keep competitors from deciding to enter the market.

Such collusion might well be a violation of anti-trust law, but in any case, it wouldn't work. If they decide to sell at below-market price, they must (by definition) be preventing some customers from buying by some non-price mechanism (eg, only selling to companies run by other members of the CEO's family). Potential competitors would then see an opportunity to sell to these excluded customers.

Sorry, fumble fingering on my part...

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Public opinion is not a binary. It could certainly move further against Trump, and just as significantly, it could move in the direction of free trade, whose opponents include plenty of people other than Trump.

What's madness is continuing policies that antagonize other countries, and which are bad for Canada, just to make yourself feel better about having "elbows up".

If a bear is rampaging around your campsite do you think you have to "take a stand"?

This isn't some sort of status game. Well, maybe it is for Trump, but not for anyone who's not an idiot. Unfortunately, Carney is an idiot, and is in it for himself and his friends, not Canada.

The way to deal with the bear to the south is to first get rid of all the stupid stuff that is bad for Canadians regardless of Trump, like provincial liquor monopolies and dairy supply management. Don't ask for anything in return - Trump's word is no good anyway - but it may help with public opinion in the US. It will also help with better trade relations with other countries. After getting these other countries to open up as much as they're inclined, unilaterally eliminate tariffs on all countries (including the US). It's what's best for Canadians, apart from a few who profit off the lack of competition from other countries.

For bonus points, get rid of sales taxes, so there is zero friction importing things to Canada. That's great for consumers, and also great for any business that wants to continue or establish itself in Canada.

Yeah. I'm not sure how one would handle that. (Can't remember if Whitehead & Russell had any inherent operator precedence.)

So may be most useful if you don't have inherent precedence, as might be the case if you're not dealing with the standard math operators.

Alternatively, one might say the dots override inherent precedence. So

    a *. b*c+d*e

means

    a * (b*c+d*e)

with the inherent precedence disambiguating the right operand of *.

It's better visually. No dot, ., :, :., ::, ::., :::, etc. have increasing visual weight, which shows which are the more top-level operators without having to match up parentheses.

The notation for avoiding parentheses is interesting, and I've thought that it might be useful in programming languages.

To illustrate, suppose you have a non-associative operator $. Rather than write a$(b$c), you can write a$.b$c - the . makes the $ before it be lower precedence on the right side. More dots make things be even lower precedence.

So, for example,

    a$b .$: x$y .$. p$q

means

    (a$b) $ ((x$y) $ (p$q))

At least, that's my recollection. It's been over fifty years since I read (significant parts of) it...

The river water picks up silt as it flows to the sea. The silt has to go somewhere. That's why the delta exists, and grows, absent other effects.

The river wandering is part of this. Since the silt can only be deposited where the water goes, for the delta to grow (or just maintain itself) the river has to go here and there all over it.

And yes, people die when this happens. But if you stop the river wandering, the silt isn't going to be deposited so as to maintain the delta.

Maybe it's not a good location for permanent human settlement.

New Orleans is on a river delta, and without human effects on land, and without sea level rise, wouldn't one expect this delta to expand due to silt deposition?

And would this silt deposition actually occur at a rate that would fully counteract sea level rise, just as the huge rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice age did not mean that the delta disappeared?

If so, the danger to New Orleans would be entirely avoidable by changes in local land use.

Perhaps the fundamental issue is that river deltas tend to be dynamic, with the watercourse continually changing, which isn't really compatible with a city in a fixed location. (Hence the damaging attempts at stopping this.)

Those interested in this might find my paper on "Representing numeric data in 32 bits while preserving 64-bit precision" to be of interest. Can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02914 (note the code available as auxilliary files). In the context of this compressor, it could be one of the compressors competing to compress a block. It works well for data converted from a decimal representation with a small number of digits.

The very first of the "false or unproven" claims they list is "animal protein is healthier than plant-based protein".

And at this level of imprecision, that claim is true!

Animal protein has a good balance of amino acids. Many plant proteins do not. Sure, you can mix various plant proteins to get a good balance. But if you don't know what you're doing - getting all your protein from beans, for instance - you can end up with a deficiency.

Maybe rather than say the problem is "an overabundance of conflicting information", they might want to improve the quality of the information that they push.

These are good points, but are mostly pragmatic, resulting from the rest of the system not being designed around a tree representation. Of course, that can be decisive in practice...

A more fundamental issue (which I mention in the document) is that there is a discordance between the 2D textual display and the underlying tree. I think this becomes more apparent when input is not only keystrokes, but also mouse positioning.

Of course, these disadvantages do not necessarily outweigh the advantages of editing in terms of trees!

Well, I think most common transformations work reasonably well. One usually doesn't want to do things completely contrary to the AST, such as convert "while a<b" to "whilea = b".

And it's certainly possible to create any valid AST in the editor I describe. The set of valid trees is extended to those with "holes" in places, which one fills in when entering a program, and it's always possible to do this.

The challenge is one of finding an intuitive user interface, not whether it's possible at all. One issue is that infix notation is unnatural for entering trees (prefix is more natural).

Many years ago, I created an editor operating on syntax trees that I think is more "hard-core" than this - that is, only tree-oriented operations are done. There is no parsing of text, since entering plain text, rather than a tree, is impossible. Hence, there can be no syntactically invalid programs.

The challenge is getting this to be a useable way of entering programs. I think I made progress on this, but the feasibility varies with the programming language.

I can't run it any more, since the display hardware it assumed is no longer available, but you can read about it at https://ucalgary.scholaris.ca/items/da8b823b-c344-4ffb-aa37-...

I don't know what political machinations go on in the International Energy Agency, but one has to wonder why they thought it was useful to define a term "renewable" in this way, considering that such a term is of no use in formulating any rational energy policy. Could it be that it lets some companies get subsidies targeted at "renewable" energy, which sound good to the voters, without also providing such subsidies to nuclear power?

Nuclear power is "generally accepted" as non-renewable amongst people opposed to nuclear power. Since uranium fuel is not going to run out on any reasonable time scale (and thorium will last even longer), it is "renewable" by any practical standard.

It makes no sense to worry about how "renewable" or "sustainable" some technology is if the time when it would start to matter is long after the technology has likely been replaced by something else anyway. That is, it makes no sense unless you're trying to score some political point...

"If you want every CPU to support every instruction..,"

That does indeed seem nice. As long as there's an easy way to enquire about whether an instruction is slow or not, it means that all the software runs, and the software that knows about issues with some instructions runs as fast as it would without support for those instructions. The only downside is the effort put into writing emulations of the instructions, which seems small in context.

A recorder is a flute, more specifically, a fipple flute. But there are other fipple flutes, such as tin whistles. (One distinguishing feature of a recorder is the use of the thumb hole to control octaves.) So calling a recorder a "flute" isn't exactly wrong, but is under-specific. Also, nowadays transverse flutes are often called just "flutes", inviting confusion if you call a recorder a flute.

The etymology you reference seems speculative, not really contradicting the article's claim that the etymology isn't clear.

"Power-off data retention is increased from 1 month to 3 months."

I don't think these are meant for ordinary users. One extended vacation and your data is toast...

The court's ruling has actual legal effect. The inquiry's conclusion is, well, just somebody's opinion.

One might also note that the invocation was never approved by parliament (it was terminated before the deadline for the Senate to vote on it).

A court has ruled that it did not:

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/a-judge-ruled-trudeau...

A basic problem with evaluations like these is that the test is designed to discriminate between humans who would make good lawyers and humans who would not make good lawyers. The test is not necessarily any good at telling whether a non-human would make a good lawyer, since it will not test anything that pretty much all humans know, but non-humans may not.

For example, I doubt that it asks whether, for a person of average wealth and income, a $1000 fine is a more or less severe punishment than a month in jail.

One hears stories of people with dementia having a day or two of mental clarity just before they die. Could this explain that? Perhaps their bodily processes are failing so much that normal glucose production is impaired, leading to ketones being produced instead, and temporary clarity before the failures lead to death...

"there is no guarantee that your preprint is accurate with the final, published version, so most people will still trust the paywalled version more than your PDF"

I think this is backwards. The definitive version that should be cited is the freely-available one, since that is the version that everyone can read. No one should cite the paywalled version.

Since we're warm-blooded animals, maybe it's because IR vision would be swamped by the emissions of the eye itself?

Exact addition using accumulators has progressed since the work of Zhu and Hayes in 2010.

See my paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05571 (repository at https://gitlab.com/radfordneal/xsum), which is used in the Julia xsum package (https://docs.juliahub.com/General/Xsum/stable/). There's also recent work by Marko Lange at https://web.archive.org/web/20220616031105id_/https://dl.acm...

I think these methods are probably faster than the exact methods you benchmark.

The commenters here saying "humans cannot win anymore", "there is no chance that humans can beat the best Go AI anymore" are apparently unaware that this is no longer true.

See https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00241 and https://goattack.far.ai/

The best Go programs have a flaw that allows a good, but not championship-level, human to defeat them, by creating a group that encircles another group, which apparently confuses the AI's method of counting "liberties", which determine whether the group lives or not.

Some appear to dismiss this as just a "trick", but it seems to me to point to a more fundamental deficiency in the architecture or training method.

From 1992: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/44289908.pdf