ogogmad

ogogmad

그저께discuss

Wow. That went over the heads of both a Harvard student and an Atlantic journalist.

ogogmad

15일 전discuss

username checks out

ogogmad

15일 전discuss

The Jewish Talmud uses Epicurus's name as a term meaning "heretic".

ogogmad

17일 전discuss

Once you have a bicameral syntax*, is there much point left in formal language theory? For instance, why would you still need complicated notions like LR(k) grammars (which Wikipedia confuses with LR(k) parsers)? I ask out of genuine confusion: I've been reading about formal grammars, and have even added to Wikipedia - but I'm still puzzled as to why PL designers might choose to have hard-to-parse syntaxes. Why don't people instead adopt an intermediate syntax like Rhombus's shrubbery notation†?

* - https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/bicameral-not-h...

† - https://docs.racket-lang.org/shrubbery/index.html?fam=Rhombu...

ogogmad

18일 전discuss

I think BC's features are equivalent to:

- Python's native integer handling, which already has no size limit.

- PLUS part of the Decimal module in Python's stdlib: BC's floats are DECIMAL by default, not binary.

- PLUS an implementation of Bessel's J function, while neglecting Bessel's K.

- Some features for base conversion using `ibase` and `obase`. So, I suppose you can output numbers to base 60. [EDIT: Correction from earlier: ibase is allowed to be at most 16, while POSIX allows for the maximum value of obase to be at least 99, which therefore does allow for formatting output to base 60.]

ogogmad

18일 전discuss

Good point. But what if `i` does not divide `ans` evenly? I suppose you could use floats and then round.

ogogmad

18일 전discuss

  me@localhost:~> bc
  d=1; for(i=21; i < 41; i++){d *= i;}; print d; print "\n";
  335367096786357081410764800000
  n = 1; for(i = 1; i < 21; i++){n *= i;}; print n; print "\n";
  2432902008176640000
  d/n;
  137846528820

I couldn't start Python for some reason, so I went 1337 and used BC, which comes preinstalled in every Unix-like OS. BC has a surprising advantage here since 40!/20! cannot be represented as a 64-bit integer since its value exceeds 2^64. That said, BC's stdlib does not provide the factorial function* - so I had to resort to using for-loops instead.

* - What it does contain is sine, cosine, exponential, log, arctan, and Bessel J (?!?!?!?!)

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

[flagged]

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

This is one of the most interesting comments I've read on this website.

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

See the recent breakthrough "Erdos Problem 1196" which experts couldn't solve for 60 years until ChatGPT Pro did. ChatGPT's key idea was the use of the "Von Mangolt function" which it showed could finally settle the problem. Terry Tao has condensed the AI's proof to around a page. The problem was well-known to experts (in the field of number theory) but it was a Large Language Model that ultimately solved it - which it did without human help!

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

Maybe it's a good idea for SWEs to consider using LLMs to train themselves into new careers -- just in case.

Most other "knowledge" professions -- by which I mean teaching, programming, some engineering, and the arts -- are even further along into obsolescence. That said, you can still use the knowledge gained in a knowledge profession to convert into a more hands-on profession. We might have a bit longer before humanoid robots destroy all hands-on job opportunities as well. Once that happens, every person will be equally poor and destitute.

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

That's a provocation of sorts, maybe. However, I'm curious how Israel's invasion was supposed to stop that. Either they would occupy part of Lebanon, but open up their soldiers to attacks from irregulars, which doesn't seem any better for Israel. Or, they would expel tens of thousands of people AND occupy parts of Lebanon, which would still expose the Israeli occupiers to attacks from just outside the new border.

If Israel was going to kill tens of thousands of people, it had an obligation to have a plan which wasn't completely stupid. I don't see what WASN'T stupid about it.

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

Hezbollah was formed after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed 17k+ people, mostly civilians, and which Israeli historian Ilan Pappé said was mainly unprovoked (see below). Israel's explanation for why they decided to risk killing tens of thousands of non-Israelis - which is ultimately what their invasion did - was highly dishonest.

The reason for Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982:

Israel said it invaded Lebanon in June 1982 to stop PLO attacks from southern Lebanon and push Palestinian fighters far enough north to protect northern Israel.† The immediate trigger was the attempted assassination of Israel’s ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov. But that attack was carried out by the Abu Nidal group (based in Iraq), not the PLO, and Israel used it as the opening for a much broader war: destroying the PLO’s power in Lebanon, besieging Beirut, weakening Syrian influence, and trying to install a friendly Lebanese government. So, bluntly: there was a real security problem, but the 1982 invasion was also a war of choice and political engineering, not just self-defense.

† Right before the June 1982 invasion, the "they were shelling Galilee" line is weak: even the IDF says that after the July 1981 Habib ceasefire, "from July 1981 to June 1982, the Israeli-Lebanese border was quiet."

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

> Jews

What does this word mean in the year 2026?

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

I don’t think "Spectre doesn’t work across process boundaries" is correct as stated; cross-process and cross-security-domain Spectre attacks have been demonstrated. But I agree that "a malicious app can trivially Spectre its way into an arbitrary banking app on a patched iPhone" is a much stronger claim, and I’m not aware of a public demonstration of that exact attack. My point is only that process isolation alone is not, in principle, a complete answer to Spectre-class attacks.

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

This reminds me of crypto wallets. I also dispute mike_hearn 's:

> Smartphone HW attestation is better in every way

They're still prone to side-channel attacks like SPECTRE. Crypto wallets are practically immune because they're air-gapped.

[edit] I just realised that's Mike Hearn of early BTC fame. I suppose he would know what a crypto wallet is.

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

> Can you show me examples where locking down an OS has prevented fraud in banking?

This is a non-sensical remark because it's impossible to "prove" a counterfactual. I find stuff like this incredibly annoying - please don't say this.

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

ὦ Ευρώπη, this would kick off an arms race. μολὼν λαβέ!

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

Whenever you solve any hard problem, you start off by finding a complicated solution, which you then scale down to a simpler solution.

LLMs are a "complicated solution" in the sense that they're expensive. Once you know what they're capable of, you can scale them down to something less expensive. There's usually a way.

Also, an important advantage of LLMs over other approaches is that it's easy to improve them by finding better ways of prompting them. Those prompting strategies can then get hard-coded into the models to make them more efficient. Rinse and repeat. Similarly, you can produce curated data to make them better in certain areas like programming or mathematics.

ogogmad

2개월 전discuss

ChaCha20 got discovered using a computer search testing out resistance to certain attacks. Hence, the architecture came first and then the parameters came next. Any link with NN gradient descent? It would likely be an abstract one.

Submissions

Swalt Smart Case, the ultimate way to protect your mobile

Critical Perspectives on Provable Security: 15 Years of "Another Look" Papers [pdf]

Simple Machines

Why Everyone Gets the F1 Inerter Wrong – Explained Clearly [video]

Chlorpromazine

Does Syntax Matter?

Bead Sort (Gravity Sort)

OpenSUSE Kalpa

Boss of 'Black Swan' fund expects stocks to surge higher before a historic crash

Riemann Surfaces

Computability of Differential Equations

GraphCore

Schwarz-Christoffel Mapping

Riemann Mapping Theorem

Installing Gnome on OpenBSD 7.8

I was placed in the "retarded" class in first grade

Vitalik Says Ethereum Just Solved Crypto's Biggest Problem

Oliver Byrne's "The Elements of Euclid", First Six Books [pdf]

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