I think whether any text is written with the help of AI is not the main issue. The real issue is that for texts like police reports a human still has to take full responsibility for its contents. If we preserve this understanding, than the question of which texts are generated by AI becomes moot.
Readit Newseterevsky commented on AI Police Reports: Year in Review eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12... · Posted by u/hn_acker
In all seriousness, XSLT looked stillborn even 25 years ago when it was introduced.
eterevsky commented on Analysis indicates that the universe’s expansion is not accelerating ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/... · Posted by u/chrka
If they are replacing a fixed cosmological constant by a model with variable dark energy, doesn't it introduce extra parameters that describe the evolution of dark energy over time? If so, wouldn't it lead to overfitting? Can overfitting alone explain better match of the new model to the data?
eterevsky commented on Resolution limit of the eye – how many pixels can we see? nature.com/articles/s4146... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
Yeah, I think diminishing returns kick in at some point.
Going from 1080p to 1440p feels like a huge improvement. Going from 1440p to 4k (aka 2160p) is a little bit sharper. I don't think the jump from 4k to 8k will improve things that much.
Probably not for 32” monitor, but I think 8k would be noticeably better for a 43”.
eterevsky commented on Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane old.reddit.com/r/Experien... · Posted by u/laiysb
With how stochastic the process is it makes it basically unusable for any large scale task. What's the plan? To roll the dice until the answer pops up? That would be maybe viable if there was a way to automatically evaluate it 100% but with a human in the loop required it becomes untenable.
The plan is to improve AI agents from their current ~intern level to a level of a good engineer.
This article seems to argues from the way scientific discoveries are made by humans. It seems to me that its gist is similar to some article from the 80s that claims that computers will never play good chess, or an article from the 2000s that claims the same for go.
The general shape of these arguments is: "Playing chess/go well, or making scientific discoveries requires specific way of strategic thinking or the ability to form the right hypotheses. Computers don't do this, ergo they won't be able to play chess or make scientific discoveries".
I don't think this is a very good frame of reasoning. A scientific question can take one of the following shapes:
- (Mathematical) Here's a mathematical statement. Prove either it or its negation.
- (Fundamental natural science) Here're the results of the observations. What are the simplest possible model that explains all of them?
- (Engineering) We need to do X. What's an efficient way of doing it?
All of these questions could be solved in a "human" way, but it also possible to train AIs to approach them without going through the same process as the human scientists.
Krapivin made this breakthrough by being unaware of Yao's conjecture.
The developer of Balatro made an award winning deck builder game by not being aware of existing deck builders.
I'm beginning to think that the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before. This makes me kind of sad, because the current world is so interconnected, that we rarely see such novelty with their tendency to "fall in the rut of thought" of those that came before. The internet is great, but it also homogenizes the world of thought, and that kind of sucks.
If we achieved local maximum at something, the only way to progress is to make a big leap that brings you out of it. The trouble is that most of such big leaps are unsuccessful. For every case like you are describing there are probably hundreds or thousands of people who tried to do it and ended up with something worse than the status quo.
eterevsky commented on Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019) carto.com/blog/zip-codes-... · Posted by u/voxadam
ZIP codes are a simple approximation, which does their job good enough in most cases.
The alternatives that the author suggests are much more complicated, both in terms of the implementation and in terms of convincing the user to give you their full address.
eterevsky commented on Backblaze seemingly does not support files greater than 1 TB wadetregaskis.com/backbla... · Posted by u/amwolff
I read "no file size restrictions" and assume I can create a file as large as the storage space I can afford.
What else would I assume?
If there's a 1TB limit I would expect that to be described as "create files up to 1TB in size".
I would assume some limit no higher than 2^64, since all common file systems have file size limits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
eterevsky commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler
First, there's hardly any evidence that these are anywhere near "brilliant engineers" let alone 1%. Their claims to "fame" were being interns or working on tightly scoped greenfield projects. Some might be interesting, sure. But it's hardly relevant to operating in a complex organization.
But more importantly, the real issue is regardless of how old they are an unelected individual is doling out hyper-privileged access to sensitive data to folks without any kind of oversight. It's a total mess.
It's hyperbolic to the n-th degree to call these "the best of nerds" as well.
Government employees are never elected. They are hired by the elected officials. In this case the general public in the US was aware of DOGE before the election and chose to vote for it.