My point entirely ;) I realize that was not clear.
Dirichlet-to-Neumann
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As far as I am aware, mosquitoes don’t respect international boundaries. If you use this method to eliminate mosquitoes in some random African country, it would just spread to their neighbours.
Any data we have on GDP per capita in the 18th century is probably dubious. In the 10th century ? Not even dubious.
Turns out ACOUP’s last week post is precisely about this question. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
I swear half my comments on the Internet these days are just links to that blog...
It really depends on where you live : which country first, and how good is the heat proofing of your house/appartement ?
This was brilliant.
That’s what they do in go and it makes more sense than a fixed pause after 25 moves. Or if you want to really force people to think for 5 minutes you could make it a 5 minutes every 5 moves—then you can use your 5 minutes to really map out your options for the next 5 moves before the next pause. And it may even be a good training for chess players, avoiding to waste time by redoing the same calculations move after move.
Why not use a standard chess clock when you can freely choose to allocate your time as needed, playing easy moves instantly and taking more time when needed ? It’s a bit sad if the important decision that decides the game has to be made on a 5 s clock at move 23 but you get the whole 5 minutes to contemplate your ruined hopeless position at move 25...
Besides real life mostly plays out like a chess game when you can allocate more time to a decision when needed. In fact, deciding which situations call for a longer time to think is a key chess skill and also a key life skill.
Interesting and thought provoking.
“It’s hard to tell, but there is this ominous comment, in the section where they talk about PaLM vs. Chinchilla:”. In the context of fears about AI alignment, I would say “hopeful” rather than “ominous” !
To expand on my first comment and gjm’s, I would generally distrust the stories that scientists tell about themselves and their discovery process—as I would distrust a general telling how he won a battle due to his bold strategies. Writing about scientists comes with specific tropes, and whimsical outsider genius is too much of a recurring one not to be seen with suspicion.
Feynman, in particular, has a very peculiar place in the scientific mythos, which has probably a grain of truth at its core but should still be viewed critically.
I know next to nothing about Feynman, but my first instinct on hearing those kind of stories is that he was probably also pretty amazing at solving equations in particular and mathematics in general in the most boring way.
At some point in your ever increasing number of gender distinction you are just looking at personality traits.
Gender is the cluster of social norms that coalesce around a sex. When what you are looking at is not a social norm, or does not even remotely coalesce around a sex, speaking of gender does not seem to make any sense.
Seing your comment I now remember that one of my sister would answer the question “What colour is this ?” <pointing at something> by “blue” no matter what the colour was.
In my experience you will find most maths paper on arxiv or some equivalent. In France, public funded researchers must upload an open access version of their articles on HAL—I assume many other countries have similar requirements.
Allan Bloom’s Love and Friendship is an interesting collection of essays discussing love and friendship in literature (Rousseau, Stendhal, Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoï, Shakespeare).
There’s nothing pure enough to be a cure for love. (Except poetry, which does quite well)
You mean it can output a correct program that does the translation, but not translate itself ? That’s even weirder.
This is hilarious.
How would you describe in human terms this failure mode ? Do you think humans would make this category of mistake ?
One arguement we often hear is that GP3/AI is not really intelligent because it is not able to maintain logical consistency in longer texts. This has always seemed a dubious arguement to me because humans are in fact not very good at either logic or consistency—whoever has graded undergrad maths exam has necessarily a dim view of human logic, and even top authors routinely include some inconsistencies in their novels.
However, this Morse error looks really alien to me, in fact I have trouble imagining any human making this kind of mistakes.
Mathews Crawford (physic graduate turned motorcycle mechanic) has an amazing little book—shopcraft as soulcraft—on the subject of blue collars jobs which are in fact not only better financially, but also more intellectually satisfying, than many a desk job in the knowledge economy.
They don’t move very fast by themselves but can when helped by human transportation (source : some post doc at my lab worked on this a few years ago).