It's known that BB(14) is bigger than Graham's number, but this new finding leads me to believe that BB(7) is probably bigger than Graham's number. Intuitively, the technology required to go from pentation to Graham's number feels simpler than the technology required to go from `47,176,870` to `2 <pentate> 5`.
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MichaelDickens commented on BusyBeaver(6) Is Quite Large scottaaronson.blog/?p=897... · Posted by u/bdr
I know it's practically cliche to say so these days, but that picture is giving strong AI vibes. Look at the joints between the big beams. If you needed beams that large to hold up a building, you wouldn't cut them in the middle like that. And you wouldn't have those gaps.
Plus, all the text on the page is future tense, talking about what the super wood beams will be able to do.
So I don't know how much that picture really represents what the wood will look like.
I'm almost positive it's AI generated. Look at the chairs at the kitchen island in the background. No human would draw chairs that look like that.
The picture at https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-facade also looks AI-generated.
The fact that they're using AI images on their landing pages does not give me confidence in the quality of the product.
> Price is 3-4 times higher but it lasts 5-10 times longer and is much more pleasant to use.
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."
This is one economic function of loans: borrow money to buy the more expensive boots, pay extra in interest, but save money in the long run. Assuming it is in fact cheaper to buy the more expensive item.
MichaelDickens commented on NSA spied through Angry Birds, other apps: report (2014) nbcnews.com/tech/tech-new... · Posted by u/__natty__
> you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys
it's very unlikely you'd have to check the entire keyspace before you found it. On average it would be about half.
That reduces the runtime from 2.7 x 10^41 universe lifetimes to 1.35 x 10^41. I'm still not worried.
Remember those gan demos where a single carefully chosen pixel change turns a cat classification to dog? It would be really surprising if people aren’t working out how to do similar things that turn your random geography question into hotel adverts as we speak.
At least it seems likely to be more expensive for attackers than the last iteration of the spam arms race. Whether or to what extent search quality is actually undermined by spammers vs Google themselves is a matter for some debate anyway
As I understand, the LLM version of "single pixel change" is a significant unsolved problem. I would be surprised if marketing companies were hiring the level of ML talent required to solve it.
MichaelDickens commented on AI Horseless Carriages koomen.dev/essays/horsele... · Posted by u/petekoomen
> My pet theory is the BigCo's are walking a tightrope of model safety and are intentionally incorporating some uncanny valley into their products, since if people really knew that AI could "talk like Pete" they would get uneasy. The cognitive dissonance doesn't kick in when a bot talks like a drone from HR instead of a real person.
FTR, Bruce Schneier (famed cryptologist) is advocating for such an approach:
We have a simple proposal: all talking AIs and robots should use a ring modulator. In the mid-twentieth century, before it was easy to create actual robotic-sounding speech synthetically, ring modulators were used to make actors’ voices sound robotic. Over the last few decades, we have become accustomed to robotic voices, simply because text-to-speech systems were good enough to produce intelligible speech that was not human-like in its sound. Now we can use that same technology to make robotic speech that is indistinguishable from human sound robotic again. — https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/ais-and-robot...
Reminds me of the robot voice from The Incredibles[1]. It had an obviously-robotic cadence where it would pause between every word. Text-to-speech at the time already knew how to make words flow into each other, but I thought the voice from The Incredibles sounded much nicer than the contemporaneous text-to-speech bots, while also still sounding robotic.
This is never about protecting the children.
This is always about government overreach.
People are less likely to criticize the government, or even participate in political debate, if their online identities are know by the government. Governments like obedient, scared citizens.
The only ethical response to laws like this, is for websites and apps to terminate operations completely in countries that create them. Citizens who elect politicians without respect for human rights and privacy don't really deserve anything nice anyway.
> Citizens who elect politicians without respect for human rights and privacy don't really deserve anything nice anyway.
Unfortunately things don't always work out that cleanly:
- Sometimes you vote for the pro-freedom candidate, but your candidate loses. - Sometimes there are only two dominant candidates, and both disrespect human rights. - Sometimes one candidate disrespects human rights in some particular way, but the other candidate has different, bigger problems, so you vote for the lesser of two evils. - Sometimes a candidate says one thing while campaigning, and then when elected does something different.
MichaelDickens commented on Markov Chain Monte Carlo Without All the Bullshit (2015) jeremykun.com/2015/04/06/... · Posted by u/ibobev
Science communication is so important. I write scientific papers and I always write a blog post about the paper later, because nobody understands the scientific paper -- not even the scientists. The scientists regularly read my blog instead. The "scientific style" has become so obtuse and useless that even the professionals read the blog instead. True insanity.
What would happen if you wrote the paper like a blog post and submitted it to journals? (With some structural changes to meet journal requirements, like having an abstract)
35% for this masterpiece? Rigged