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Enginerrrd commented on Cryptids   wiki.bbchallenge.org/wiki... · Posted by u/frozenseven
cryzinger · 3 days ago
If we can't predict/model these Turing machines' behavior because of unsolved math problems, what's stopping us from actually creating and running them to see what would happen (and maybe getting closer to solving those math problems in the process)? Is it just a matter of scale and resources?

My knowledge here is very limited, so this isn't a "why has no one tried this one weird trick"-type question. I assume there is in fact a good reason that I don't yet understand :P

Enginerrrd · 3 days ago
I’m a little out of my depth, but I’d guess a lot of them would probably fall into one of two categories: Something we believe should go on forever (and not halt) if the math problem is resolved the way we expect, but theoretically could suddenly halt after some absurdly long number of steps. Or something where it halts for a given input after some number of steps unless something some counter example exists where it goes on forever.

In the first, you can’t really do anything but just keep watching it not halt but it isn’t telling you anything about the infinity to go. (Say a program that spits out twin primes, we expect an infinite number but we don’t really know)

And in the second case we’d just have to keep trying larger and larger inputs making this just an extension of the first category if we wrote a program to do that for us. And if we did find an example where it goes on forever without repeating states, how would you even know? It’d be like the first situation again.

Enginerrrd commented on String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof   quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
DoctorOetker · 4 days ago
It's 2025, if you want to publish grand claims, and you're initially the only one who understands your own proof, publish a machine readable proof in say MetaMath's .mm format.
Enginerrrd · 3 days ago
You say that like it’s even remotely feasible at the frontier of mathematics and not a monumental group effort to turn even established proofs into such.

Most groundbreaking proofs these days aren’t just cross-discipline but usually involve one or several totally novel techniques.

All that to say: I think you’re dramatically underestimating the difficulty involved in this, EVEN if the author(s) were a(n) expert(s) in machine readable mathematics, which is highly UNlikely given that they are necessarily (a) deep expert(s) in at LEAST one other field.

Enginerrrd commented on Learning Feynman's Trick for Integrals   zackyzz.github.io/feynman... · Posted by u/Zen1th
charcircuit · 16 days ago
I think it's intuitive to assume what you are being tested on is what is being taught by the book or the teacher. It's unfair otherwise.
Enginerrrd · 16 days ago
I actually think math and sciences should introduce what I call "synthesis" much earlier. i.e. I don't think it's unfair to give students all the ingredients and add in a question on the exam to see if they can take those ingredients and apply it to a problem type they haven't seen before. (This is a great differentiator between C students and A students.) Or for a science class, rather than perform an experiment, I think the students should have to actually DESIGN the experiment first. (I had one laboratory exam in 2nd semester undergrad chem class that did this and it was amazing! The students also performed pretty well at it too. It consisted of being told to figure out how much zinc was in a lozenge. We were also maybe given a handy reaction formula and that was it. You had to design your analysis procedure and figure out how to get the quantity you wanted out of it, and then actually perform your analysis all within the exam period.)

I think not doing this starting in like middle school is a big part of the reason why people think math/science is useless. Unless the exact scenario they have been taught pops up, they can very rarely see the application. But the real world NEVER works this way. A problem is NEVER formulated as a straight forward well-formed problem. Figuring out how to mold it into something that you can apply the tools you know to is in and of itself a REALLY important skill to practice, and sadly, we almost NEVER practice that. Only in grad school does that type of thing come up.

Enginerrrd commented on France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors   mamot.fr/@LaQuadrature/11... · Posted by u/nabakin
wutwutwat · 22 days ago
That was show put on for the sole reason of the public seeing it.
Enginerrrd · 22 days ago
If you follow the things that have been disclosed / leaked/ confirmed when they’re 20+ years out of date, then yes the probability this is true is significant.
Enginerrrd commented on A Spectral-Geometric Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis   zenodo.org/records/175083... · Posted by u/gku
Enginerrrd · a month ago
Don't get excited.

The author also claims to have proved the twin prime conjecture. https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/The_Twin_Prime_Conject...

They don't seem to be affiliated with any university and don't seem to collaborate with anyone except this one person, Andrew Elliot.

My assessment of the probability that this is a real proof: Less than 0.1%.

Enginerrrd commented on Reverse Engineering Yaesu FT-70D Firmware Encryption   landaire.net/reversing-ya... · Posted by u/austinallegro
the_biot · a month ago
That's more like obfuscaton, you got lucky there!

I've reverse engineered lots of things, but the one time I actually got paid for it (this is more a hobby to me), I got the exact opposite of what happened to you.

I quoted some small amount to document the protocol to configure some embedded device that I thought would take a day or so, and it turned into a two-week nightmare. Turned out there was no configuration protocol, it was firmware updates always -- and internal parameters were just overwritten along with the code. So I ended up having to disassemble a big chunk of the firmware before I could configure the device.

Enginerrrd · a month ago
Pro-tip, state your assumptions baked into the estimate. If one of them is wrong you can renegotiate price, although depending on the client, you may not always want to do that to show good will and whatnot.
Enginerrrd commented on AI's Dial-Up Era   wreflection.com/p/ai-dial... · Posted by u/nowflux
geon · a month ago
The LLM architectures we have now have reached their full potential already, so going further would require something completely different. It isn’t a matter of refining the existing tech, whereas the internet of 1997 is virtually technologically identical to what we have today. The real change has been sociological, not technological.

To make a car analogy; the current LLMs are not the early cars, but the most refined horse drawn carriages. No matter how much money is poured into them, you won’t find the future there.

Enginerrrd · a month ago
The current generation of LLM's have convinced me that we already have the compute and the data needed for AGI, we just likely need a new architecture. But I really think such an architecture could be right around the corner. It appears to me like the building blocks are there for it, it would just take someone with the right luck and genius to make it happen.
Enginerrrd commented on What is a manifold?   quantamagazine.org/what-i... · Posted by u/isaacfrond
andycrellin · a month ago
This has always caused me trouble when learning new concepts. A name for something will be given (e.g. manifold) and it sounds very much like something that I've come across before (e.g. a manifold in an engine) - and that then gets cemented in my brain as a relationship which I find extremely difficult to shake - and it makes understanding the new concept very challenging. More often than not the etymology of the term is not provided with the concept - not entirely unreasonable, but also not helpful for me personally.

It becomes a bigger problem when the etymology is actually a chain of almost arbitrary naming decisions - how far back do I go?!

Enginerrrd · a month ago
On many occasions in my mathematics education I was able to figure out and use a concept based solely on its name. (e.g. Feynman path integral)

Names are important.

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u/Enginerrrd

KarmaCake day5388September 11, 2019View Original