boothby

13 uur geledendiscuss

Your phone has an accelerometer, which can be integrated twice to result in slightly accurate dead reckoning; just keep accumulating 3-vectors with every time-slice. That's a helluva lot easier than visual cues.

boothby

eergisterendiscuss

> Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime

How, praytell, will surveillance end wage theft?

boothby

4 dagen geledendiscuss

> You can ask, but whether it will succeed depends on the competency of those who established the infrastructure under attack.

Consider that "available resources" may include the training of models and harnesses used by the developers working for governments and private corps maintaining that very infrastructure. This decade's take on trusting trust is very hot.

boothby

13 dagen geledendiscuss

No, I'm interacting with people in person. I'd debate your claim that "most of the shit that humanity is producing" is internet-mediated, but your choice of noun renders that rather moot. Stop ingesting shit. There's a whole world out there.

boothby

13 dagen geledendiscuss

I do not spend even 5 minutes on facebook. Aside from a comment or two per day on HN, the only human interactions I have on the internet are with coworkers, a of whom I regularly see in person.

If you find yourself consuming more than 5 minutes of content you don't find thoughtful per day, I would ask why. "Touch grass" seems to be the common advice to combat this.

boothby

13 dagen geledendiscuss

This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way. Do you not engage in thoughtful conversation with the people you meet? Do you not know people who make art as a hobby? When techies propound such a dim view of humanity, I truly fear for our species. Nobody will shed a tear when your bodily resources are reallocated to paperclip production.

boothby

17 dagen geledendiscuss

Do you prefer a web-weaving snail or an extra-bitey spider? I'm leaning spider.

boothby

19 dagen geledendiscuss

I made the slightly alarming realization yesterday that some script kiddies are old enough to have grandkids by now.

boothby

21 dagen geledendiscuss

> it seems like a bad thing to compare inventions to haunted artifacts that mind controlled their users into betraying their friends to a powerfully evil being.

It's worked pretty well for Palantir?

boothby

28 dagen geledendiscuss

So if liquid water is really a mixture of water and water, is it safe to say that this paper establishes that water is wet?

boothby

29 dagen geledendiscuss

First letter of the Hebrew alphabet, used by mathematicians to denote infinities.

boothby

vorige maanddiscuss

Large rockets are one thing; spacex doesn't really have the inventory to do much. It's the ~10M lithium bombs that are one OTA from weaponization that would make Musk especially dangerous if he were so inclined.

boothby

vorige maanddiscuss

That's a typo, I meant CPU! I work with quantum computers, where we do discuss QPU (quantum processing unit) time, but that's not how I did this.

boothby

vorige maanddiscuss

This is why I explicitly mentioned that in my puzzle ethics. I reject that as a valid solve.

(And amusingly I said "qpu time" when I meant CPU)

boothby

vorige maanddiscuss

I crushed wordle within a few days of its popularity entering my sphere. It was pretty easy to brute-force a decision tree minimizing the average number of guesses using a lowly python script and a few days of qpu time.

Don't Wordle[1] is significantly more interesting; I've got a solver but the maximum score takes my lowly python script upwards of a day (per day) to solve using brute force. For now, I solve it with a heuristic that terminates in about 20 minutes. My old wordle solver was useful to find a good but suboptimal tree for identifying the answer in 5 undos or less.

Today:

  Don't Wordle 1491 - SURVIVED
  Hooray! I didn't Wordle today!
  ..... 8089
  ..... 4647
  ..... 2492
  ..... 1026
  .Y... 231
  ..G.. 100
  Undos used: 3

    100 words remaining
  x 10 unused letters
  = 1000 total score

My puzzle ethics are: you can and should download the dictionaries of valid answers and valid guesses, you're allowed to keep them separate, but you must not keep the list of answers in its original order.

[1] https://dontwordle.com/

boothby

vorige maanddiscuss

A great many real world problems have, at their crux, a mathematical problem. A mathematician paired with a subject matter expert can be powerful indeed when each sees deeply into the others' blind spots. But, I've heard statements like yours a lot over the years: assuming mathematicians aren't fully aware of the limitations of what you think math is.

boothby

vorige maanddiscuss

If you're going to strike up conversation with strangers, it's best if you make it easy for them. If you're asking for a joke, you're making it easy on yourself and setting a bar for them. I'm a jokester but I don't have a good repertoire of jokes on hand -- I respond to banter. So if you ask me if I have a joke, I often just sputter and throw out the last bad pun somebody shared with me.

Make a joke yourself, if you're feeling funny. But be warned... a stranger once asked me why I was going on a trip. I was visiting my dad who was presently in surgery for cancer that would go on to end his life. I was too emotional to answer with anything but the truth. I certainly wasn't going to respond well to humor.

boothby

vorige maanddiscuss

If tech isn't special, why are nine of the ten richest Americans in tech?

boothby

vorige maanddiscuss

> The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.

Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare.

Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.

boothby

vorige maanddiscuss

Timnit Gebru was laughed out of town for overlooking research into making LLMs more energy efficient. By the logic used to drag her through the mud, Musk must be a total idiot to be buying so much fossil fuel capacity. Truly, nobody could see this coming. Must be 5d chess.

Submissions

Scientists accidentally discover sea cucumber with 'tissue immortality'

List of Works Based on Dreams

Quantum annealers and the future of prime factorization

What's it take to make a chip with over a million Josephson junctions?

Making music in excel

Apparent utility of thermal fluctuations in quantum annealing

Show HN: Disable Python assertions per file/module

Designing metamaterials with quantum annealing and factorization machines

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