mjd · HackerTrans

mjd

1,779 カルマ登録 18 年前

https://blog.plover.com/

投稿

5.6 Sol produces a new research paper in one shot

aifails.substack.com

3 ポイント投稿者 mjd一昨日1 コメント

Six mistakes I made in my dioramas-and-felt Steam game and one I didn't

novalis.org

81 ポイント投稿者 mjd昨年41 コメント

コメント

一昨日議論

Ignore the title of the blog itself (“Funny AI Fails”). I confirmed with the author that he wasn't kidding:

* He gave ChatGPT a single 300-word prompt describing an open problem in his area of expertise, game theory, and asked it to write a complete paper

* It thought for 90 minutes and wrote the paper without any guidance

* “If this had been an advanced undergraduate doing a semester-long independent study, I imagine it would have very easily been an A and I would have encouraged the student to work on it just a bit more to submit it for publication somewhere.”

11 日前議論

Something in the main game page runs my Firefox process up to 100% CPU.

18 日前議論

I know your comment wasn't. What do you feel you're bringing to the conversation? Are HN readers going to see your comment and say “Good thing this anonymous rando spoke up or I would have wasted my time!”

23 日前議論

The author is a mathematician, so when he says “it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code” he does not mean it is completely impossible to find bugs. He means only that it is not possible to find all bugs or even any particular bug.

25 日前議論

In “The Origin of Consciousness” Julian James argues that human consciousness substantially predates language and even writing.

For example he contrasts the language in the Iliad (which he claims was written before the development of consciousness) and the Odyssey (which came after).

27 日前議論

I've been having fun getting better at understanding where the letters begin and end. Something like this is easy for me now:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-516170388361w7xlt8c...

Next I'm going to learn the rest of the letters and try to start reading menus.

先月議論

I think you left out an important technical advance: A theory of parsing was developed, parsing was systematized, and automatic parser generators were developed.

Parsing in 1992 was very much a solved problem. In 1974, writing a parser was still hard.

先月議論

One of the reasons I was so interesting to find this thing I had written was that things had (in some ways) changed so little in thirty years.

Today I was re-reading Donald Knuth's 1974 paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” where he says:

“At the present time I think we are on the verge of discovering at last what program- ming languages should really be like. … My dream is that by 1984 we will see a consensus developing for a really good programming language (or, more likely, a coherent family of languages).”

Hoo boy, was he ever wrong.

先月議論

Not from the chatbot. From me. I'm the one who sent the message.

And it wasn't inauthentic. I wanted to be polite and inoffensive, but I didn't know how.

先月議論

Perhaps I'm wrong, but yes, I believe there is. Your own personal preferences are not universal.

先月議論

As I mentioned, I'm hard of hearing and phone calls are difficult for me.

先月議論

Your use of the phrase “undeserved politeness” suggests to me that maybe you aren't someone I should look to for advice on how to behave.

先月議論

Two sentences in recruiter register, yes. I'm really bad at it and I do need help.

先月議論

I would never use AI for something where I need my own voice, say a blog post or a personal letter.

But I'm not ashamed to say that I used it last week in a chat conversation with a recruiter to turn this:

    1. I just said I'm hard of hearing and prefer text.
    2. If it's only two minutes you can darn well send email.

into this:

    As I mentioned, I'm hard of hearing and phone calls are difficult for me —
    I find I miss things and it's frustrating for both sides. If it's just a
    couple of minutes' worth of information, an email works great and I can
    give you a thoughtful response. Happy to go from there!

I'm not ashamed, I think I'm right, and I'll do it again. This recruiter didn't deserve my authentic voice or my personal toil, not for this task.

If it makes James Bach think I'm a liar, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

先月議論

Better. But I think we still are much better at building tools than at using them.

先月議論

You left out perhaps the most widespread and important example! Many western European cultures, going back I think to Charlemagne, had a monetary system in which a pound was divided into 20 shillings / solidi, and each shilling was divided into 12 pence / denarii. This system persisted in England into the 1970s but it was widespread before the 20th century. For example, in France each livre was divided into 20 sou, and each sou into 12 denier, until 1795.

Leonardo of Pisa's famous book "Liber Abaci" spends a lot of time showing how to do arithmetic on these complicated mixed units, and has an interesting notation for them. If you're interested see https://blog.plover.com/math/liber-abaci-fractions.html .

先月議論

Thanks for the callout to my Telugu fractions article!

If you enjoy ৪ being four and ৭ seven you will probably enjoy the thousand-year-old magic square inscribed at the Parshvanatha temple in Madhya Pradesh.

https://blog.plover.com/math/magic-square-puzzle.html

Shreevatsa R. tells me that the digit symbols are probably Nagari, which predates Devanagari.

先月議論

That's an interesting theory but I don't think I find it plausible. Say we're cutting bars like you said. With the obvious strategy I have to cut the three bars into a total of 9 pieces of sizes no less than 1/3 bar each: I cut two of the bars into pieces of 3+3+1 and one bar into pieces of 3+2+2. Then I give five of the people the size-3 bars, and the other two people each get 2+1.

The two people getting the 1/7 + 2/7 pairs can easily verify they are not getting shortchanged, simply by putting their next to one of the 3/7 bars to make sure they add up to the right length.

(Someone dividing 7 sacks of grain among 3 people can do something similar. Maybe they compare two shares of grain on a balance.)

But if you're trying to give everyone a 1/4 bar, a 1/7 bar and a 1/28 bar, sure, it's “trivially obvious to be fair” if you believe you can divide a 1/4 bar into seven exactly equal pieces. But you can't, some will be a little bigger and some will be a little smaller. Seriously, have you ever tried to cut something us unmanageable as a metal bar into seven equal pieces?

先月議論

Thanks, I think they raised the limit in the last few years and I forgot.

I have definitely gone over the limit for single documents in the past, although I've never been over the quarterly waiver limit. Judicial opinions and hearing trancripts often exceed 30 pages.

先月議論

PACER fees are waived if they are under $15 per quarter.

That's about 150 pages of material.