boothby

15시간 전discuss

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

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

> 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

11일 전discuss

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

12일 전discuss

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

boothby

15일 전discuss

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

17일 전discuss

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

18일 전discuss

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

18일 전discuss

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

18일 전discuss

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

22일 전discuss

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

24일 전discuss

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

boothby

24일 전discuss

> 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

24일 전discuss

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.

boothby

25일 전discuss

>> AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."

> This is unhinged.

The only way for Musk to become a quadrillionaire is hyperinflation. And a week later, we'll be quadrillionaires too!

boothby

26일 전discuss

> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?

boothby

26일 전discuss

If anybody has ever tried folding a very large paper (or, bedsheets, tarps, etc), they'll realize the wisdom of this comment. Our intuition from folding paper on the order of several to tens of centimetres does not scale to arbitrary size and precision. Paper is relatively rigid, but its rigidity is finite and ensuring local-to-global flatness becomes a painstaking endeavour.

boothby

26일 전discuss

It depends what you need that line for -- if you're projecting onto a wall, that sag matters. If you're projecting onto the ground, it doesn't.

boothby

26일 전discuss

I had the same thought -- with a checkerboard pattern of 1:1:2 "brick" voids where each brick would be surrounded by bricks of a differing offset, one could conceivably calibrate the injection step and the print might have less propensity to cleave along xy planes. But, given the complexity of that calibration (and need for a high-flow head) I'd rather use the brick infill available today.

boothby

28일 전discuss

> a land border with a large continent that has a lot of guns and violence and criminality

That's a curious perception indeed, given that guns predominantly flow from the US to Mexico and not the other way around, and guns in Mexico are of mostly US origin.

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