ttctciyf

Yeah, the best advice is: Don't. Write it yourself; make judgements; learn.

In general use today, AI primarily functions as a stupidity amplifier: it empowers dumb people to do dumb things more pervasively, with less effort, and at unprecedented scale.

We're moving into an era of artificially enhanced stupidity.

Number theorist Manjul Bhargava[0] presents an accessible overview of fascinating recent work on n-dimensional extensions of magic squares, explaining the construction of, and showing in public for the first time, a "most perfect" magic tesseract with the same properties as the Khajuraho magic square[1] at ICM 2026[2]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manjul_Bhargava

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-perfect_magic_square

2: https://www.icm2026.org

The only explosive growth we're seeing out of the ongoing tech bonanza is growth in inequality, afaics.

Yes! As a frequent user of youtube queues, it feels like they have a dedicated team of one or two junior devs to futz around with it on a weekly basis and zero QA, because it is always breaking in new, unexpected ways.

"Everything is broken" used to mean "all software is insecure because the inherent complexity of a modern software stack ensures it's beyond the abilities of the average developer to eliminate all attack vectors" [1].

Now it just means [2].

1: https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndhO5DcSI0

We're really getting into Computers Don't Argue[0] territory here, eh?

0: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

(available in Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2 at https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ah... , p.133)

I've long admired Chaitin for his original thinking and especially his ability to clearly convey his ideas about foundations, complexity and information in concise and digestible short proofs.

I'm a little surprised, however, to see him here proselytizing for a particular side in the constructivism debate. I associate him more with what he has described as a "quasi empirical" approach to mathematics[0] where the adoption of new axioms (such as for example the axiom of choice) is justified by their resulting in new, interesting mathematics.

But here, it seems his goal is to arrive at a somewhat Platonic conclusion, that either the reals are valid numbers or (seemingly he prefers) not.

My lay and naive take would be: if you adopt these rules (this Formal Axiomatic System) then you can have Big Fun in the playground of ever more esoteric and complex infinite cardinals, or if you adopt this other FAS you get to discover which results can and can't be obtained under a strict constructivist regime, and whichever FAS you choose it's just the same process of choosing axioms and applying valid deductive steps to arrive at a result you find interesting, with no more "existence" implied than the thoroughly non-Platonic existence of a solution to a problem, which can be demonstrated by solving it: if you take such-and-such steps then such-and-such result will follow.

I suppose the point being made is that avoiding axioms which imply the "existence" of the reals is more useful for doing physics, but that seems non-obvious in a field which for the last 200 years has seemingly sought to progressively make more and more phenomena intelligible by means of differential equations from infinitesimal calculus!

0: see, for example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0303352, 1.9 Is Mathematics Quasi-Empirical

> @ttctciyf you are marked dead. Not sure why.

Beats me too! Thanks for the heads up.

Clearly Amazon don't want their code fixed.

Reminds me of something I saw on shadertoy a while back:

> wiggly string-like texture from treating a noise field as an angle and sampling the curvature, with some dodgy trig.

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XssGD8

I wonder if the gifs in TFA would translate into the shader animation domain?

archive.ph came through on this one:

https://archive.ph/fM7jf

Me too. From duckduck's search result excerpt it seems to be something of a departure from the normal string theory skepticism at Peter Woit's blog:

> The US/Israeli wars and threats to end Iranian civilization with massive bombardment have drawn attention away from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Looking back, the Columbia students with their encampment were very much right about what was going on.

Baseline epistemic hygiene would tend to preclude taking llm advice seriously, on any personal matter of consequence, in my view.

However "baseline" epistemic hygiene seems to be a somewhat distant goal for the vast majority now we live in an infosphere essentially comprising a Darwinian nightmare of competing agnotological agendas.

Personally, as a gmail user of about 2 decades, this is the first I've heard of this particular issue, probably because for some years I don't even read past the word "smart" before disabling whatever feature du jour is being pushed in my face.

I'm just now migrating away from gmail for a different kind of inanity[1] all the same.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367950

I mean the implications and ramifications are fascinating, but .. I just need to take a few moments to absorb the sheer spectacular stupendous glorious DUMBNESS of a multibillion dollar corp with its generously paid staff utilising $multibillion SOTA tech to ignore any reasonable security checks and give prized accounts away for nothing to random hackers. It is difficult to comprehend in its enormity.

A breach which surely will go down in computer history as one of the most egregious and avoidable corporate IT failures of all time.

Personally it seems mostly about prizing the phone number out of my cold clammy hands.

I recently tried to access my google account on a new browser install. Google did not believe my login/password was sufficient, and insisted on me surrendering my phone number:

> To help keep your account safe, Google wants to make sure it’s really you trying to sign in [...]

> Enter a phone number to get a text message with a verification code.

I have never given my phone number to Google for that account (I have a separate account on my Android phone).

So how on earth this will "make sure it's really you" I have no idea.

I am unable to access Google from my new browser install so am stuck with using my old one for anything which requires a Google login.

I guess at some point I'll try and resolve it by adding a recovery email or something, but.. my inclination is to throw Google and the account in the trash right now.

You can accomplish "no ads" and arguably substantially less tracking without Premium, though, with (e.g.) firefox and ublock origin. The only downside is an occasional ignorable warning that you're "seeing interruptions".

If browsers have enough low-level access to my storage hardware to carry out timing attacks for fingerprinting, it seems likely they also have enough to maliciously chug the hardware sufficiently to degrade capacity over time and otherwise impact system integrity. I hate the thought of some random website writing and overwriting random bytes in a tight loop in the background while I'm browsing elsewhere to find the cause of my slow disk subsystem.

To that end an option to disable storage access by type would be nice to have. All I see in firefox settings is the ability to block all storage including cookies, and the ability to block persistent storage when the site requests it. It's not clear to me how the OPFS system in TFA relates to either of these, but I'd guess that it's a separate system. There's a bunch of storage quotas in about:config, but nothing obviously related to OPFS (that I can see).

Given the choice I would be happy to allow traditional cookie storage and block everything else with any exceptions I need (none that I can think of) on a per-site basis. If this can be achieved via about:config, I'm all ears!

While looking at my storage data, I see youtube has 174(!) cookies and 57M data stored on my machine. Sigh.

If you don't care about the facticity of the answer, AI is less clicks, granted.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on Roguelike Radio[0], still putting out episodes - 3 already this year! - to see if any coverage emerges.

0: http://www.roguelikeradio.com/

See also: https://ddosecrets.org/article/kash-patel-emails

noscript, ublock origin, reader view: the referenced page loads in 2s on a bad connection and downloads no ads while remaining perfectly readable.

Browsing and not using these tools nowadays is volunteering for a bad time, IMO.

Probably asked an llm

Those are not mutually exclusive in this instance, it seems.

Maybe it's intended to avoid legal liability resulting from reproducing copyright material not licensed for training?

The agnotologists[1] have never had it so good!

The production of ignorance is booming as its trajectory takes it from roots in advertising, then lobbying, then political campaigns to center stage in political strategy and official government business.

I suspect the academics who study culturally cultivated ignorance will be playing catchup for at least a decade after this administration!

(Assuming they are still around, of course.)

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

> Perhaps you can tell me what use "3 ∩ 4 = 3" has.

As I said:

> a handy set theoretic implementation of the min() function.

i.e. if you wanted (for whatever reason) to define min(a, b) directly and briefly in your set theoretic reconstruction of the natural numbers, you can just use intersect operator and define it as "a ∩ b".

Perhaps because in terms of the interesting distinction you introduce:

> you have to distinguish things that are true of natural numbers as an algebraic structure, from things that just happen to be the case because you picked some specific representation to use for natural numbers

this particular operation seems to be part of the former rather than of the latter.

Maybe I'm too familiar with the set theoretic construction of the natural numbers (0 is the empty set, 1 = {0}, ..., 5 = {0,1,2,3,4}, etc.) but their example of "3 ∩ 4 = 3" or "4 intersect 3 is 3" doesn't seem weird, problematic or even useless to me, it just looks like a handy set theoretic implementation of the min() function.

From TFA:

> [Indyke] was hired by the Parlatore Law Group in 2022, before the justice department settled the Epstein case. That firm represents the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and previously represented Donald Trump in his defense against charges stemming from the discovery of classified government documents stored at Trump’s Florida estate.

So I don't know about "not a Washington person", but clearly connections exist to the current administration.

No, it's not. It has various functionality, as shown by the built-in help:

> Example output of the SysRq+h command:

> sysrq: HELP : loglevel(0-9) reboot(b) crash(c) terminate-all-tasks(e) memory-full-oom-kill(f) kill-all-tasks(i) thaw-filesystems(j) sak(k) show-backtrace-all-active-cpus(l) show-memory-usage(m) nice-all-RT-tasks(n) poweroff(o) show-registers(p) show-all-timers(q) unraw(r) sync(s) show-task-states(t) unmount(u) force-fb(v) show-blocked-tasks(w) dump-ftrace-buffer(z) dump-sched-ext(D) replay-kernel-logs(R) reset-sched-ext(S)

But note "sak (k)".

Well, there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key