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griffzhowl

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Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)

archaeologyworlds.com
154 points·by griffzhowl·5 माह पहले·55 comments

Oldest cave painting could rewrite human creativity timeline

bbc.com
3 points·by griffzhowl·6 माह पहले·0 comments

Earliest evidence of making fire 400k years ago

nature.com
7 points·by griffzhowl·7 माह पहले·1 comments

A New Bridge Links the Math of Infinity to Computer Science

quantamagazine.org
3 points·by griffzhowl·8 माह पहले·0 comments

Complex Analysis

complex-analysis.com
2 points·by griffzhowl·8 माह पहले·0 comments

comments

griffzhowl
·2 माह पहले·discuss
If someone steals my passwords and then does nothing with them, or just uses them for their private purposes, then there's no problem. The problems only occur if my passwords are used to take control of my accounts or identity, which would deprive me of my accounts or money etc. So your example actually reinforces that the relevant ethical distinction (the harm) is indeed in intending to deprive someone of something they possess/control
griffzhowl
·3 माह पहले·discuss
National security can mean protecting a society founded on the values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It can also mean facilitating a militaristic surveillance state.

Not necessarily the same things, and at some point we might have to choose who's side we're on
griffzhowl
·3 माह पहले·discuss
It applies to anyone knowingly using false information to try to influence people
griffzhowl
·3 माह पहले·discuss
The point is to convince people who are undecided. Using information that's known to be false or weakly supported is then short-sighted and counterproductive, because enough false predictions will turn up that those undecided will tune out entirely
griffzhowl
·3 माह पहले·discuss
They are. I just used different words to refer to the same idea
griffzhowl
·3 माह पहले·discuss
Good points, but it any case, it's true that chimps in general treat group members very differently to outsiders isn't it? Those behaviours that de Waal mentions seem probably directed towards group members. Are there any documented chimp populations where chimps aren't violently aggressive towards members of other groups?

I remember reading, not sure if it's from de Waal, about chimp "raiding parties", where groups of young males will get excited and loudly vocalise as they gather together and head towards a neighboring territory, but when they get close they all go very silent, and will attack individuals from a neighboring troop if they sufficiently outnumber them. They tend to target the face and genitals when attacking other chimps, a different behaviour to when they're hunting monkeys, for example. I think Wrangham mentions that some chimps will hold the targeted individuals' limbs while others attack.

Aside from the brutality, these behaviours seem too cogently goal-directed and sophisticated to just be responses to environmental pressures. There's some deeper reasons involved, imo, even if the severity of the violence is exacerbated by resource and territorial pressures.
griffzhowl
·3 माह पहले·discuss
noob question: can't we just use longer classical keys, at least as a stop gap?
griffzhowl
·3 माह पहले·discuss
In the UK the main deception was the farcical Iraq Dossier, aka "the dodgy dossier", put together by Blair's propaganda chief Alaister Campbell. Colin Powell had seen it before release but not sure what role it played in the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier
griffzhowl
·3 माह पहले·discuss
Looks like not much. The book is about using Python to implement numerical methods, mainly about teaching the Python part, and that's all explained. You might be missing motivation if you don't know any physics, but even so, basic mechanics using differential equations seems to be enough to give context, at least for the earlier parts
griffzhowl
·3 माह पहले·discuss
Dogs are allowed though, and used to herd sheep and cattle, so ground-nesting birds don't seem to be a big concern
griffzhowl
·4 माह पहले·discuss
Of course, but everything depends on context. Stating a mathematical theorem in English will also make no sense to someone who's not acquainted with the field
griffzhowl
·4 माह पहले·discuss
> People who really grasp a subject can usually explain it well in plain language.

That's very much a matter of style. An equation is often the plainest way of expressing something
griffzhowl
·4 माह पहले·discuss
Ah, I thought writing a bit was irreversible, because after writing say 1, the previous state could have been a 0 or a 1. But in fact writing a bit should be thought of as the whole process "0 to 1" or "1 to 1", including the initial bit, so that the process is logically reversible. Is that right? Then what I had in mind as an irreversible process of writing would be equivalent to first erasing the bit and then writing the new one.
griffzhowl
·4 माह पहले·discuss
> The platform doesn’t need to bother with individual prompts - it just needs to see where the questions cluster. A map of where the world is moving.

This was insightful, but is it much different to the kind of data google and other search engines have had access to for a long time?

And while LLMs might have sped up the rate of code generation, the tech giants have always been able to set a team on reverse engineering whatever they feel like, though they also often just bought up the startup that was producing what they wanted. I guess I'm not seeing exactly where LLMs specifically are creating the dark forest, rather than the consolidated, centralized tech landscape itself
griffzhowl
·4 माह पहले·discuss
Nice post. Just this bit:

> Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.

I would say the solution is just having two eyes, since their respective blind spots don't overlap in the visual field.

I would also say that the brain doesn't hide the blind spots, but rather doesn't pay any attention to them in the first place. There's just a lack of information from them, and this deficit isn't normally noticeable because the other eye makes up for it. I think Dennett explains it that way somewhere, probably in Consciousness Explained
griffzhowl
·4 माह पहले·discuss
Is the focus on the erasure of a bit, rather than writing a bit, just conventional or is there a significant difference between the processes?
griffzhowl
·4 माह पहले·discuss
Did you try turning your computer off and on?
griffzhowl
·4 माह पहले·discuss
I was talking about Greek texts rather than Roman legacy, whatever that means. Arabs certainly preserved some of the Greek texts, because many haven't survived in origianl Greek manuscripts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeco-Arabic_translation_move...

The Muslims also made original contributions to science, e.g. Ibn Sahl discovering what later became known as Snell's law of refraction.
griffzhowl
·4 माह पहले·discuss
Nevertheless, many of the texts from the Greeks were first translated into Latin from Arabic copies in Spain from the 11th century, because the Greek versions were inaccessible in Western Europe until Constantinople was conquered in 1453 and the scholars escaped to the west with their scrolls
griffzhowl
·4 माह पहले·discuss
Because sycophancy in humans is motivated not by the wellbeing of the person seeking advice, but by the interests of the sycophant in gaining favour.

It makes sense that this behaviour would be seen in LLMs, where the company optimizes towards of success of the chatbot rather than wellbeing of the users.