alan-crowe

6 ms·

1.
by alan-crowe 10d ago
The question is: how did your test reader respond to the version without the "It's not just an X, it's a Y." ? Perhaps the discussion went: Test Reader: I got confused when you started talking about X as though it were a
2.
by alan-crowe 1mo ago
Not a troll. As recently as the 1870s, when Jevons, Menger, and Walras pioneered the Marginal Revolution in economics, this was a deep new insight about elasticity . Imagine yourself a shop keeper, hoping to boost the money coming in at th
3.
by alan-crowe 1mo ago
It is interesting to a pure mathematician. Since it is obviously true, one's intuition is that it should have a simple proof. In particular, the obvious induction ought to work. The base case is n=2. The line joining them passes throug
4.
by alan-crowe 2mo ago
That depends on where you live. If nuclear power is trying to match a fluctuating load it needs storage for a day or two, to escape the Xenon dead time. But solar power for air-conditioning only needs an hour or two of storage to bridge fro
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by alan-crowe 2mo ago
People with serious illnesses long to get on to a clinical trial, hoping to get the latest and best treatment, even before it is approved. But it is not really like that. Only one phase III drug in ten really helps. And what of the other ni
6.
by alan-crowe 4mo ago
There is a folk phenomenon, called The Hum https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13752688 https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/xlsdk5/til_t... so my guess is that LLMs see
7.
by alan-crowe 4mo ago
As a child, I noticed that the proofs of mathematical theorems were esoteric knowledge, known only to a few adults. I struggled to follow even the simplest proofs, and hoped that one day I might learn to create a proof or two of my own. Thi
8.
by alan-crowe 6mo ago
In the UK, there are tax breaks for renting out your spare room https://www.gov.uk/rent-room-in-your-home/the-rent-a-room-sc... I've done this for much of my life. It has always worked out OK. Perhaps because I&#x
9.
by alan-crowe 9mo ago
My "importance of privacy" story: I get my gas and electricity from Scottish Power. Recently a rival company, Ovo Energy made a clerical error and sent me a bill, leading to a dispute. The front line of defence against this kind o
10.
by alan-crowe 9mo ago
I'm still using fvwm2 $ pkg info fvwm fvwm-2.6.9_4 Name : fvwm Version : 2.6.9_4 Installed on : Mon Dec 8 02:01:51 2025 GMT Origin : x11-wm/fvwm2 Architecture : FreeBSD:1
11.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
On a 19 x 19 board the ranks are traditionally determined by the handicap needed to give an even game. So a 14 kyu would give 20 - 14 = 6 stones to a 20 kyu. 20 kyu is a rank that often sees rapid improvement, as the basic ideas "click
12.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
I'm on the other side of this, meeting a friend two or three times a month to play Go and giving him a three stone handicap on a 13 by 13 board. Sometimes I play a move with a huge, but hidden threat behind it. If he plays elsewhere in
13.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
You seem to be telling a tale of two industries, sports-betting and advertising. The sports-betting industry lobbies for reduced regulation, while the advertising industry sits on its hands, ticking along providing advertising for other bus
14.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
It is tricky to boycott Amazon because when I search for a product using Google, I get lots of links to Amazon, and not much else. So I look at the Amazon pages to get search terms and then type those in to other search engines, such as Bin
15.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
LLMs have demonstrated that "intelligence" is a broad umbrella term that covers a variety of very different things. Think about this story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44845442 Med-Gemini is clearly intell
16.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
What I found most interesting in the article was the frank acknowledgement by J B Rhine that Walter Levy, director of the Institute for Parapsychology was committing fraud. I view research into parapsychology with a background assumption th
17.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
I've been thinking of the issue like this: a traditional approach to symbolic artificial intelligence frames problem solving as a search of a tree. Do you go depth first, dodging infinite branches? Or breadth first (do you have enough
18.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
We may be underestimating the effort that goes into cleaning up LLM messes. LLMs learn to program from code bases written by humans. Not just written by humans, maintained by humans. So the bugs that humans spot and remove are under-repre
19.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
Nuclear powered ships and submarines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion The attraction is that high enrichment permits a smaller reactor and less frequent refuelling. US submarines go over 96% enr
20.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
I've no idea. I just want to mourn the utter failure of my 2001 prediction that telepresence would displace business air travel. http://web.archive.org/web/20160305121400/http://www.cawtech...
21.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
LLMs have taught us that there is more than one kind of intelligence. They are definitely intelligent, but not the specific kind of intelligence we were hoping for. We get to be wise after the event and move the goal-posts. It is not so m
22.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
There is an interesting phenomenon with polynomial interpolation called Runge Spikes. I think "Runge Spikes" offers a better metaphor than "hallucination" and argue the point: https://news.ycombinator.com&#x2F
23.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
I've suggested Runge Spiking as an alternative, non-anthropomorphic metaphor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43612517
24.
Do "Runge Spikes" offer a better metaphor for hallucinations by LLMs?
8 points by alan-crowe 1y ago|0 comments
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by alan-crowe 1y ago
I was expecting ancient history, the story of the Turing Institute in Glasgow. Established 1983. Dissolved 1994. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Institute The article is about the second try, commencing 2014.
26.
by alan-crowe 1y ago
Conway's Surreal Numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_number#Arithmetic
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by alan-crowe 2y ago
One wants the money supply to expand to match a growing economy. One way is to permit fractional reserve banking. Bank deposits can grow beyond the amount of gold, both increasing the money supply and creating the possibility of a bank goin
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by alan-crowe 2y ago
As far as I understand it so far, the idea that the trees are "unlabeled" over simplifies. The most common kind of binary tree is defined as binary-tree = nil | node of binary-tree label binary-tree for example empty-t
29.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
That is very helpful. I particularly appreciate the carefully written text. I think the second figure, captioned "Stem with a single leaf child" has a mistake, with the line down from the triangle descending to a square. But that
30.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
Statmist

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