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Veedrac commented on I don't think Lindley's paradox supports p-circling   vilgot-huhn.github.io/myw... · Posted by u/speckx
gweinberg · 2 days ago
I read the page on Lindsey's paradox, and it's astonishing bullshit. It's well known that with sufficiently insane priors you can come up with stupid conclusions. The page asserts that a Bayesian would accept as reasonable priors that it's equally likely that the probability of child being born male is precisely 0.5 as it is that it has some other value, and also that if it has some other value that all values in the interval from zero to one are equally likely. But nobody on God's green earth would accept those as reasonable values, least of all a Bayesian. A Bayesian would say there's zero chance of it being precisely 0.5, but it is almost certainly really close to 0.5, just like a normal human being would.
Veedrac · 2 days ago
Wikipedia has a section on this that I thought was presented fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindley%27s_paradox#The_lack_o...

Indeed, Bayesian approaches need effort to correct bad priors, and indeed the original hypothesis was bad.

That said. First, in defense of the prior, it is infinitely more likely that the probability is exactly 0.5 than it is some individual uniformly chosen number to each side. There are causal mechanisms that can explain exactly even splits. I agree that it's much safer to use simpler priors that can at least approximate any precise simple prior, and will learn any 'close enough' match, but some privileged probability on 0.5 is not crazy, and can even be nice as a reference to help you check the power of your data.

One really should separate out the update part of Bayes from the prior part of Bayes. The data fits differently under a lot of hypotheses. Like, it's good to check expected log odds against actual log odds, but Bayes updates are almost never going to tell you that a hypothesis is "true", because whether your log loss is good is relative to the baselines you're comparing it against. Someone might come up with a prior on the basis that particular ratios are evolutionarily selected for. Someone might come up with a model that predicts births sequentially using a genomics-over-time model and get a loss far better than any of the independent random variable hypotheses. The important part is the log-odds of hypotheses under observations, not the posterior.

Veedrac commented on Countdown until the AI bubble bursts   pop-the-bubble.xyz/... · Posted by u/tapematch
gkoberger · 14 days ago
Sure, but crypto companies aren’t as in vogue anymore.

AI companies will someday just be called companies, much like how tech companies are just companies.

Veedrac · 13 days ago
...do you not see the parallel in the words you just wrote? That AI's value will continue increasing even as the buzzwords fall out of the public consciousness, just as crypto continued to gain value even as the buzzwords fell out of the public consciousness?

(Paraphrase != endorsement.)

Veedrac commented on Countdown until the AI bubble bursts   pop-the-bubble.xyz/... · Posted by u/tapematch
gkoberger · 14 days ago
I guess I wonder what people think the AI bubble is.

Are you worried about the high valuations of the big AI companies (OpenAI, Nvidia, etc)? Then sure, that will correct over time. There will likely be 1-2 big winners.

But if you're talking about AI in general... right now is the least amount of money companies will be spending on AI ever. It will only go up. This isn't crypto.

Veedrac · 14 days ago
> This isn't crypto.

Bitcoin is at $92k.

Veedrac commented on James Cameron Says Netflix Movies Shouldn't Be Eligible for Oscars   worldofreel.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/randycupertino
Veedrac · 23 days ago
It's hard for me to respect the intrinsic superiority of a format whose main value-add is exclusivity, rather than fair market competition based on merits.

If theatres pivoted to competing first on format rather than exclusive access to recent releases, and managed to do well in that regime, I'm sure Netflix and other new media would be more than happy to indulge. Seems unlikely, though, doesn't it? The demand exists but I would be surprised if it was a quarter the size.

Veedrac commented on New Glenn Update   blueorigin.com/news/new-g... · Posted by u/rbanffy
bryanlarsen · a month ago
Yup, the thrust improvements were expected. The BE-4 engines have quite a low chamber pressure for their engine class, so they can gain significant performance just by increasing chamber pressure.

Additionally, the New Glenn fairings are very large for their weight capacity. New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass. So many expected that BO designed it this way because they expected to increase performance of their engines in the future, making the weight/volume ratio of their fairing more balanced.

New Glenn has 45t of capacity now. Increasing thrust by 15% should increase that to 51t, thus making New Glenn 7x2 also just barely a Super Heavy booster. Perhaps they didn't call that out because that would overshadow the 9x4 announcement.

Veedrac · a month ago
Falcon Heavy is a huge outlier, and has never actually demonstrated the capability to lift close to its nameplate capacity to LEO. Falcon 9 is already volume constrained to LEO outside of Starlink or Dragon launches, and Starlink is packed incredibly densely to get to that point. When I ran the numbers some time back, New Glenn was similar to Falcon 9.

Increasing thrust by 15% doesn't just increase payload by 15%. I don't know a simpler way to estimate this than to run a simulation, and I don't have one with numbers I can toggle.

Veedrac commented on Tesla's ‘Robotaxis' Keep Crashing—Even With Human ‘Safety Monitors' Onboard   miamiherald.com/news/busi... · Posted by u/voxadam
seanhunter · a month ago
> lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product.

I just don't buy this at all

>"The new iPad Pro adds ... a breakthrough LiDAR Scanner that delivers cutting-edge depth-sensing capabilities, opening up more pro workflows and supporting pro photo and video apps." [1]

Yes of course the specs of LiDAR on a car are higher but if apple are putting it on iPads I just don't buy the theory that an affordable car-spec LiDAR is totally out of the realm of the possible. One of the things istr Elon Musk saying is that one of the reasons they got rid of the LiDAR is the problem of sensor fusion - what do you do when the LiDAR says one thing and the vision says something different.

[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2020/03/apple-unveils-new-...

Veedrac · a month ago
Tesla got rid of radar because of sensor fusion, and particularly for reasons that wouldn't apply to high resolution radar. Sensor fusion with a high resolution source like LiDAR isn't particularly tricky.
Veedrac commented on NASA's Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage   caseyhandmer.wordpress.co... · Posted by u/phpnode
Veedrac · 2 months ago
Lori Garver, former NASA Deputy Administrator, has interesting additional context on the matter.

https://x.com/Lori_Garver/status/1985147604121092154

Veedrac commented on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission   cnn.com/2025/10/20/scienc... · Posted by u/voxleone
sobellian · 2 months ago
The space program stalled because pouring national wealth into gigantic single-use rockets was unsustainable. They tried with Shuttle but the material science wasn't there yet (heck it might not be even now, it doesn't seem that they've really nailed down the heat shield on Starship yet).
Veedrac · 2 months ago
Au contraire, the space program stalled because pouring national wealth into gigantic space projects was _too_ sustainable. The idea that NASA has had a lack of funding is a myth. The problem has long been them spending it ineffectively.
Veedrac commented on Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware   blog.google/technology/re... · Posted by u/AbhishekParmar
einsteinx2 · 2 months ago
> demonstrates the first-ever algorithm to achieve verifiable quantum advantage on hardware.

Am I crazy or have I heard this same announcement from Google and others like 5 times at this point?

Veedrac · 2 months ago
This is as would be expected if it were real. Advantage isn't a black and white thing, because the comparison starts against 'any task done the best we know how to do using the most resources we happen to be willing to throw at it, even if we don't have a means to check that the output was correct', and ends at 'useful output you can formally verify where you have a strong reason to believe no classical algorithm would be effective.'
Veedrac commented on Don't Force Your LLM to Write Terse [Q/Kdb] Code: An Information Theory Argument   medium.com/@gabiteodoru/d... · Posted by u/gabiteodoru
Veedrac · 2 months ago
> Let’s start with an example: (2#x)#1,x#0 is code from the official q phrasebook for constructing an x-by-x identity matrix.

Is this... just to be clever? Why not

    (!x)=/:!x
aka. the identity matrix is defined as having ones on the diagonal? Bonus points AI will understand the code better.

u/Veedrac

KarmaCake day3779December 10, 2014View Original