skew-aberration

Crime rates are not independent of incarceration rates and durations (bbviously, since incarceration is a mechanism to deter crime). We could say 'the incarceration required to reduce crime rate to x is much higher/lower in country y'.

I think most economists would contend that the value of the subsidies is largely captured by landowners. Public investment, private profits.

Yes, but public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.

BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services - house prices and rents would have increased substantially. Public investment, private profits. Subsidies in the form of low-cost fares like this are just further welfare for the landowners.

Interestingly, about a third of BART's cost was acquiring land - if/when that same land is cleared and sold on market, the project would have operated at an enormous profit. Certainly, BART's current assets would far exceed 'total fares collected'.

Are we reading the same article?

GP says AI is not the culprit, but that actually agrees with the article + headline - which also blame the humans. Nobody in the article is scapegoating AI at all.

If you are both referring to some other claims by US gov made elsewhere (none are in the article), it might be useful to cite them.

This seems like a meaningless distinction to me. 'Overreliance on AI' implies the humans relied on the AI too much. You aren't even disagreeing with the article.

A system programming language needs to match hardware where mutability is associated with memory addresses, something functional languages can afford to abstract away.

Yep. Particularly obvious with comment ranking too.

Also a layman but I have a different read of it.

1) Dirac actually developed big parts of Lie Theory and its application in relativistic particle physics, without using the mathematical formalisms at all (until later on).

His work was subsumed/beautified by mathematicians after the fact (30s), an 'optimization' really which helped to extend and understand it further, not to discover it. The Gell-Mann prediction mirrors Dirac's own positron (non)prediction closely but was done without Lie formalisms.

The applications of Lie theory in relativistic fields theories began even earlier, with the Noether/Klein/Hilbert/Einstein collaboration in 1910s.

2) Continuous symmetries are a convenience and not essential to particle physics IMHO.

e.g. It's obvious we can swap positive and negative charge and get the same physics. That's a discrete symmetry. But in gauge theories the symmetry is not +ve <-> -ve, but rather the continuous rotation of the unit circle in a complex plane. electron becomes positron via complex numbers. It doesn't mean there's a complex electron with +-ie charge, but it does work better with relativistic Lagrangian fields theories where phase changes are continuous and frame dependent. Noether's methodology of using an invariant action integral leverages the Lie theory very effectively, but there are other ways to skin that cat though.

3) Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I doubt the standard model and the perturbative methods (renormalization, etc) underpinning it would be to Dirac's liking.

It's good game theory. You're much more likely to be able to bully a Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879 members into joining your cult than anybody else.

There are languages with first class continuations, is if every function is async and every call is await. In that context, everything can be stack allocated and every reference to stack memory stays valid always. The cost is that stack is now non-linear / not a contiguous array.

Eh. I wanted to be provocative because I've heard a lot of educated but economically naive people assume 'highly leveraged hotel-casino project' is dumb a priori, even though it's (an example of a) a sensible and common business strategy available to the wealthy. I didn't mean to imply bankruptcy was intentional though.

As to whether Trump did this better or worse than others, I have no idea as I haven't studied it but would assume the latter given the outcome.

A certainty though - plenty of undeserving people you would consider contemptible have successfully played this hand many a time. Yet more reasons to tax land

You could predefine your event handlers within your context, then call 'enter framework' and pass your event handlers as arguments. this is continuation passing style

You could write everything if you refactor to continuation passing style

Did I say that? Since they failed, they were obviously bad business. But they were a rational thing to attempt to do - taking on a massive loan to speculate on land and using a (potentially) high cashflow, quick to setup, easy to market business to offset the high initial interest rates. i.e. the same thing being discussed in this thread

When I speak to people outside of tech the opinions are more negative, in my experience. I've even had people ask my friends/family to ask me about AI - there is huge concern out there.

> Many of them read HN and are offended I put them this way .. I bet that [non-groupthink] world has a lower P(doom).

People are likely offended by your sweeping and totally unevidenced assertion that you are better qualified to both identify mistaken groupthink within the HN-verse and to speak on behalf of the 99.99% of the world who are not on HN.

Same is also true of DJT's various casino gambits. Pilloried in the media but rather sound (though high risk) from a land speculation perspective.

Rent is the realization of value appreciation - value is just the NPV of future rents

It is a shame to think that people might be aware of Dirac only through reference to Feynman, whose greatest works extended Dirac's own original breakthroughs. He has been rightly likened instead to Einstein for the brilliance and creativity of his contributions. Dirac created much of the foundations, modern formalisms, and mathematical tools of (especially relativistic) QM and also wrote the best textbook on the subject.

To be effective requires power. Therefore, the most altruistic strategy is to acquire all the power. This argument has seemingly convinced a lot of people, or perhaps they just wanted power anyway and now have an excuse too.

Never been my experience of maths, which is one of the most accessible disciplines to have ever existed.

I also have a degree, but mostly taught myself the important undergrad-level concepts as a kid. I just went to the library and borrowed any of the hundreds of books written to clearly communicate maths to beginners or downloaded any of the free ebooks / lecture notes.

Name a single field of endeavor that is more open in 2026. Software certainly isn't one of them - the best stuff has always been gatekept.

Captures it perfectly. I notice it more in newer sessions too where it doesn't have a clear understanding yet and is making a lot more assumptions. I wonder if this could be an emergent RLHF strategy - by drawing attention to (seemingly obvious) assumptions or context being made (e.g. I'm only interested in tea not coffee) it increases the chance that a human will correct the rare incorrect assumption sooner. If you are scored on solving problems, with no weight given to human frustration levels, this is probably a good technique.

RSI scenario is not scientist-limited though. So, you'd better get cracking if you want to catch up before it's impossible. Will first need to raise some serious capital too...

Drinking culture changed more dramatically in English-speaking countries in late 1800s/early 1900s (temperance movement) than elsewhere.

I'm not convinced this is an alignment or technology problem.

If my boss vibe coded an app for the customer and then assigned me to get it working, it would be impossible to maintain. If he gave me enough AI tokens to vibe code the MVP myself and to my design, I wouldn't mind.

I think the same issue is at play here in maths. OpenAI owns the model and they can direct it as they please. They chose to spend lots of money getting a quick result, instead of developing mathematical infrastructure for the next generation of problems. The managers are in charge rather than the experts.

Sure, but to clarify the article is describing formalization (writing a correct program), not verification (compiling said program). The author is not making the same comparison.

Verification is also open ended (not sure about lean specifically) - you could in theory give just the Navier-Stokes problem definition to an ATP and let it run.

Downvotes?

Just drag South America or Australia onto Africa and tell me it changed more than a few percent in size. Barely perceptible.

North America is not 21.3 but 24.7e^6 m^3 according to google, so the ratio is 4:3. Asia to Africa is 3:2

Arable in your stats just means cultivated, it isn't a measure of the natural productivity. People in Africa work poorer lands due to necessity.

North America has more non-desert land than Africa and produces 3x as much food. Asia nearly 10x food production. Europe 2x. Antarctica has no non-desert land and Australia has very little. Asia has the most by a long way. This lines up pretty well with each continent's historical economic significance.

Regarding 'small Africa' conspiracy - I have never not been told that Africa is a huge continent. Documentaries, podcasts, TED talks, movies, Top Gear, books, atlases (they all have multiple projections btw), globes, video games. Five weeks in a balloon? I may have consumed well over 100 hours of media romanticizing the vast scale of Africa. Colonialists had no reason to conceal it either - selling big Africa investment (exploitation) opportunities was their business model

This is a Mandela effect moment for me. Or maybe it's an American education thing?

Continents are in truesizeof btw. Asia is much bigger than Africa, North America is only a little smaller. When you account for the Sahara Desert of course, there is more usable land in North America.

I don't get why people say this / focus on Africa in this conversation. I've never thought Africa was small and was taught about the Berlin Conference, etc in school.

All the large continents are near the equator and hence the relative size of Africa, Australia, North/South America, Asia is not affected much by the projection. Antarctica is big too, even though wildly exaggerated by Mercator.

If anything, it makes more sense to say people don't realize how small UK/Europe is.

Viruses probably too hard but I think small scale bioterrorism is much easier and doesn't require fancy enzymes. I think this is actually the best argument for regulation of current models.

It's even happened pre-AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

The second field can probably be created by changing the first field while the piece is still cooling down.