Sniffnoy

3 hours agodiscuss

I think "importance" here is just being rated as 1 to 4 stars. So it's not "second-most important" but rather "one of the top 5 most important". That doesn't change much, but FWIW.

Sniffnoy

4 hours agodiscuss

People don't talk about the cycle double cover conjecture here because this isn't a math website. Its lack of mention here is therefore poor evidence.

Sniffnoy

6 days agodiscuss

Based on the title, I was expecting this to be about the idea of power transmission via microwave (as seen in e.g. SimCity), but actually it's about microwave communications links used by electrical companies.

Sniffnoy

8 days agodiscuss

This is guest post by Cynthia Dwork; that's Dwork's writing, not Aaronson's.

Sniffnoy

13 days agodiscuss

I feel like you ought to be go lower than 17, down to 9, by not counting the 3 generations of fermions as distinct (so you've just got up-type quark, down-type quark, electron-type particle, and neutrino). After all, if they can mix with one another, should they really be considered entirely different particles?

Sniffnoy

13 days agodiscuss

(2020)

Sniffnoy

13 days agodiscuss

I like this explanation of cricket for Americans: https://www.dangermouse.net/cricket/baseball.html

Sniffnoy

21 days agodiscuss

The blog post mentions a draft of a manuscript though. I was expecting something like a preprint. He's not willing to post that draft yet?

Sniffnoy

22 days agodiscuss

I put in my name, and four boxes popped up -- one for "American mathematician", one for "spelling bee contestant", one for "American poker player", and one for "fitness industry entrepreneur".

In fact, both of the first two are me, but I wonder if Claude Opus 4.8 (the only one that hit both of those two) realizes they're the same person? :P

Sniffnoy

last monthdiscuss

  Location: New York City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
  Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
  Email: [email protected]

Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/ConsenSys-archive/truffle/tree/develop/pa...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.

I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)

I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).

I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects, including old ones I've been shepherding through publication. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!

Sniffnoy

2 months agodiscuss

I don't understand what you're trying to imply here. Yes, he co-authored a report. What is supposed to be dangerous or suspicious about this? What does your statement about "reputational consequences" have to do with your original comment, which implies that this some indicates a bias on his part?

It seems to me like you're trying to somehow imply that writing things to convince people of what you believe is somehow nefarious? It isn't! It's what we're all doing here right now! Putting it in a format that certain people will take more seriously doesn't make it nefarious either. I am quite confused by your point of view here.

Sniffnoy

2 months agodiscuss

Yes, I was surprised he never discussed the idea that such exponentials are typically made of stacked sigmoids.

That said... if the exponential is made of stacked sigmoids, it's still an exponential on the whole! The fact that it's made of stacked sigmoids is relevant to the engineers making it, but not so relevant to the users or those otherwise affected by it.

Sniffnoy

2 months agodiscuss

> He's taken a side.

Yes, that's called "having an opinion". Typically people writing argumentative pieces are doing so because they have a belief about the matter. I'm not sure what exactly you expect here.

> if he's wrong I would hope he owns up to it

I think Scott Alexander is pretty good about that.

Sniffnoy

2 months agodiscuss

> FYI: The author has predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years and has staked his public reputation on it. He is personally invested in trendlines being lindy rather than sigmoid.

I mean, that's called "having an opinion".

Sniffnoy

2 months agodiscuss

Oy, the title mangler mangled the title. Any chance the title could be fixed here? It's supposed to be "Extremely Low Frequencies".

Sniffnoy

2 months agodiscuss

Facebook does, I'm not sure why it didn't in your case. It adds an "fbclid" parameter that is quite long. I just tried it to confirm.

Edit: Perhaps it only mangles links for logged-in users? That raises the possibility that some of the others may also only affect logged-in users.

(Trying with other ones I'm logged in on: Reddit doesn't mangle (obviously), Twitter doesn't mangle.)

Sniffnoy

2 months agodiscuss

I mean there are modified gravity candidates other than MOND. I think those are worth more consideration. MOND seems pretty well disproven at this point, yet somehow it's still what people focus on in terms of modified gravity! Where are the tests of other modified gravity theories?

Indeed, in terms of the negatives of MOND, I'll go further than you -- MOND barely explains galaxy rotation curves at all. When you look at the actual rotation curves compared to MOND's predictions, well, yes MOND does better than Newton w/o dark matter, but it's still pretty heavily fudged. If you have to fudge it that much, it seems to me there's no point. So I'd say that really MOND doesn't explain any of the three.

Sniffnoy

2 months agodiscuss

I mean, there are modified gravity candidates other than MOND. I think people should perhaps give more consideration to those and not focus on MOND as their idea of modified gravity. I feel like the evidence is pretty well against MOND at this point. But other ideas of modified gravity, that aren't MOND-like, may still be worth considering. Framing it as "dark matter vs MOND" implicitly excludes these and I think that's a mistake.

Sniffnoy

2 months agodiscuss

You appear to have commented on the wrong post.

Sniffnoy

2 months agodiscuss

  Location: New York City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
  Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
  Email: [email protected]

Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/ConsenSys-archive/truffle/tree/develop/pa...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.

I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)

I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).

I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects, including old ones I've been shepherding through publication. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!

Submissions

From Hookswitch to Grave

Low Frequencies

IrDA

RuBee

Project Xanadu: More Hindsight

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