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eynsham commented on Why formalize mathematics – more than catching errors   rkirov.github.io/posts/wh... · Posted by u/birdculture
nyrikki · 4 months ago
LLMs and Lean are orthogonal, neither subsumes either.

They both can be useful or harmful, do to their respective strengths and trade offs.

PAC/statistical learning is good at needles in the haystack problems assuming that the tail losses, simplicity bias, and corpus representation issues are acceptable and you understand that it is fundamentally existential quantification and control for automation bias etc…

Lean is a wonderful collection of concepts and heuristics but due to Rice and Gödel etc… will not solve all problems with software development.

How Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem shows that you can prove anything, without that proof being meaningful is a lens into that.

It is horses for courses, and remember that even in sub-TC total functional programming, proving and arbitrary functions is very hard, while constructing one is far more tractable.

Even those proofs don’t demonstrate semantic correctness. History is riddled with examples of people using powerful tools that elegantly explain flawed beliefs.

The 2009 crash and gaussian copula as an example.

Get all the value you can out of these tools, but use caution, especially in math, where superficially similar similarities often have conflicting conventions, constraints, and assumptions.

Obviously if you problem is ergotic with the Markov property, both will help, but Automated theorem proving and PAC learning will never be a meta theory of the other IMHO.

eynsham · 4 months ago
> Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem shows that you can prove anything, without that proof being meaningful is a lens into that.

What has Gödel incompleteness to do with that? We can just take any sentence φ as an axiom, and we’ve a trivial proof thereof.

eynsham commented on Self-hosting email in 2025 is easy actually (apart from M365)   mastodon.social/@whitequa... · Posted by u/prettymuchnoone
immibis · 4 months ago
Microsoft 365 is corporate business email for corporate businesses. If you're a corporate business, you're already using it, and if you're not then you probably don't want to talk to anyone who's using it anyway. Even if you could pass their filtering, they'd just manually ignore your emails because they only want to talk to corporate businesses.
eynsham · 4 months ago
Most people at e.g. Oxford and Cambridge (and, I suspect, many other universities) use their university emails for a fairly wide variety of extramural correspondence, and are stuck with M$ as the provider, alas.
eynsham commented on Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK   hotminute.co.uk/2025/09/1... · Posted by u/ilamont
patanegra · 5 months ago
This is extremely unfair framing.

Oxford University has been discriminating people from independent schools for a while now. To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.

That's not "letting in poor people" as you framed it. It's letting in dumber people, worse students. Lots of that is mainly based on classism (against people from middle class), racism (against white people).

Oikophobia is a cancer, and Oxford getting worse ratings is the direct result of that.

eynsham · 5 months ago
> To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools

This is not, generally, true. Cambridge tends to have higher offers, and I had a friend offered 5A*+S1 (STEP), but that’s mostly because he buggered up his interview (and he was taking 5 A-levels). The standard offer at Oxford for mathematics is A*A*A, which is exactly what those applying from any public school will be asked to achieve.

> or just 3 As from state schools

Not for maths. For easy courses like PPE, someone who misses a standard offer of A*AA might be let off by a few grades. People at public schools who miss their offers are much likelier to be a bit thick.

eynsham commented on Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet   bozmen.io/fhe... · Posted by u/barisozmen
throwaway478484 · 7 months ago
If Google’s services can respond to queries, they must be able to read them.

If A uses a cereal box cipher and B has a cereal box cipher, B can can make sense of encoded messages A sends them, A can ask about the weather, and B can reply with an encoded response that A can decode and read. B is able to read A’s decoded query, and B knew what the weather was, and responded to A with that information.

Security is not magic.

eynsham · 7 months ago
What do you think fully homomorphic encryption is, then?
eynsham commented on VPN firm says it didn't know customers had lifetime subscriptions, cancels them   arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/ajdude
jqpabc123 · 9 months ago
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

     Lifetime subscriptions that get canceled.

     Unlimited data plans that are really limited.

     Unlimited storage that is actually limited.

     Perpetual software licenses that are no longer supported.

     "Free" software licenses with no support of any kind whatsoever.

eynsham · 9 months ago
I don’t see how free software licences ‘sound too good to be true’, in that they don’t even sound relevantly good: they don’t suggest in the slightest that support will be available.
eynsham commented on High-income groups disproportionately contribute to climate extremes worldwide   nature.com/articles/s4155... · Posted by u/slow_typist
tjpnz · 9 months ago
Bill Gates is among them and has a fleet of four private jets. He uses them to make regular flights around the world - so he can give talks on how it's the rest of us who need to change.
eynsham · 9 months ago
Gates is one of the best placed people to claim that the advantages of meeting people in person &c in disbursing his wealth (rather than just ‘giv[ing] talks’) outweigh the emissions. There’re obviously diminishing returns (do COP delegations need to be so large?) but it would be surprising if the optimum were zero flights.
eynsham commented on Chongqing, the Largest City – In Pictures   theguardian.com/world/gal... · Posted by u/tosh
criddell · 10 months ago
> Europe built the completely novel floodgates for Venice

That's wild! How do you convince people in Latvia or Norway that they should help pay for infrastructure like that in Italy?

If Manhattan wants flood gates, NY will have to build them. At some point, they will probably have to because the cost of insurance will exceed the cost of the bonds needed to build.

eynsham · 10 months ago
The European Investment Bank provided €1.5b of funding.¹ EIB decisions don’t generally attract lots of attention from member states other than those concerned, since it is generally understood that the EIB is funding lots of projects in member states simultaneously. Similarly, the budget of the Commission and similar bodies will generally be set in advance, usually with a formal or informal understanding as to the broad distribution of funds between member states that will follow.

In any case, this project seems to me to be no more extraordinary than the redistributive effects of e.g. Medicaid or Pentagon spending, or the construction of Interstates. The Interstates, in the present US political environment, might indeed seem extraordinary; but the question is then not how one convinces people from state A to spend on state B, but how to convince people to make large long-term investments in the first place.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20130111042126/http://archiviost...

eynsham commented on WhatsApp defends 'optional' AI tool that cannot be turned off   bbc.com/news/articles/cd7... · Posted by u/bishopsmother
adelmotsjr · 10 months ago
"Personal information fuels much of AI innovation so people need to trust that organisations are using their information responsibly," it said.

No, we do not. First and foremost, in our current society, trust should be earned, and not understood as already given on first sight. Second, even if said trust is earned, it can be lost.

Most of these companies have shown, time and time again, that they cannot be trusted with personal information. To give credit, some companies do put up a disclaimer that you should not provide sensitive information. But that is only acknowledging that they are going to use in a public way, i.e. everything you feed into AI models is going to be public.

And finally, advances in AI do not require personal information. Not ever. Just because we CAN provide personal information, it does not mean we SHOULD provide it.

eynsham · 10 months ago
It’s rather odd that the ICO is saying this rather than industry lobbyists. No 10 is full of middle-aged technically unsophisticated types who want to look otherwise, and substitute credulity for wordliness, and I think Quangoland’s denizens are following the party line. (The shadow cabinet, but they aren’t that focused on growth because they have the luxury of not having to run the country.) The ensuing disasters may well be far worse than Horizon, if HMG ever gets anywhere with its AI plans.
eynsham commented on The British Nationality Act as a Prolog Program (1986) [pdf]   doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/... · Posted by u/Tomte
traceroute66 · a year ago
Such examples can be found all over UK law, it is, as you say in effect a by-product of the common law system.

But also it also comes from the way legislation is written in the UK...

    1. A member of parliament (MP) brings a "bill" to Parliament proposing a new law or a chnge in the law.
    2. If it has legs, then it will end up being debated in Parliament
    3. Almost always politics starts coming into play and MPs of all parties will usually propose real or party-political amendements to the bill which are then debated and voted on.
    4. You then have a ping-pong process with the upper house (Lords), stuff goes back and forth between Lords and Commons ... more amendements are made along the way.
    5. Finally once everyone has come to some sort of agreement it goes to the monarch to be signed into law (this is purely ceremonial, the document is presented to the monarch as a done-deal).

So that's why you end up with all these messy looking and almost incomprehensible pieces of legislation, there's quite a lot of "too many chefs" going on at every stage apart from the first and last.

Therefore as you point out it looking at UK law in the absence of case law is a fool's errand.

It is also where good barristers are worth their money because they are know the case-law like the back of their hand, and if there is no case law for your situation, they will have a good handle on the "letter and spirit" of the law in question and hence your prospects if it goes to court.

eynsham · a year ago
Most important legislation, including the BNA, is government legislation (indeed, see the white paper: https://www.uniset.ca/naty/maternity/wpaper.pdf). It is therefore drafted by parliamentary counsel, whose advice remains available when amendments are proposed. Most governments also command sufficient majorities to push this kind of legislation through, or at least to come to consensus on amendments. The relevant passage seems clear enough that parliamentary counsel could have drafted it and so I doubt there were ‘too many chefs’ as you put it (although I haven’t checked Hansard).

It is also hard to see what these drafting habits have to do with the common law system. Points 1–5 could be true of a legislature in pretty much any legal tradition.

u/eynsham

KarmaCake day583May 25, 2021View Original