guyomes (u/guyomes) - Readit News

guyomes commented on Colleges see significant drop in international students as fall semester begins text.npr.org/nx-s1-549866... · Posted by u/mooreds

strict9 · 2 days ago

>America is closing a college per week due to student population declines.

This is kind of misleading. There were 16 nonprofit college and university closures in 2024 [1]

I also have reservations about making predictions of what will happen in 10 years, much less 40. There are challenges relating to demographic change but it's not predetermined as you present it.

Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book [2]

1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/financial-healt...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb

guyomes · 2 days ago

> Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book

Fortunately, almost twenty years before the Population Bomb book, others such as Alfred Sauvy were already warning against confident overpopulation arguments. They suggested more reasonable arguments such as examining countries on a case-by-case basis [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sauvy#Key_ideas

guyomes commented on Google admits anti-competitive conduct involving Google Search in Australia accc.gov.au/media-release... · Posted by u/Improvement

svat · 13 days ago

If I'm reading this correctly, this is about the deals Google had, between December 2019 and March 2021, with Telstra, Optus and TPG (apparently Australia's three largest telecommunications companies), to be the default (and only) pre-installed search engine on Android phones sold by those companies, and those companies would in return be paid by Google some fraction of its search-ads revenues.

Some things I'm curious about, and would be helpful context:

- Why did they stop in 2021, and is it normal for these things to take 4+ years to resolution?

- Does Google have similar deals in other countries, e.g. in the US does it have similar deals with T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T? If yes are they are similarly anticompetitive, and if not why not?

- Similar question about the agreements Google has with Mozilla and Apple, to be the default search engine on their browsers.

- Roughly how much would this deal have been worth to Google? I imagine it's not very likely the providers would have chosen a different default search engine, though without this deal they'd likely have more options pre-configured so users would have had more choice (and this I imagine is the primary anti-competitiveness complaint in the first place).

guyomes · 13 days ago

> Does Google have similar deals in other countries

Wikipedia has pages on antitrust cases against Google in the world [0] and specifically in U.S. [1,2] and in European Union [3].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#Antitrust

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...

guyomes commented on The Math Is Haunted overreacted.io/the-math-i... · Posted by u/danabramov

brookst · a month ago

I’ve been kicking around the idea of something like Lean (maybe even just Lean?) to rewrite news and other non-fiction articles, treating statements as theorems that need to be proven. Proofs could include citations, and could be compound things like “this is a fact if three of my approved sources asserted it as a fact”

It should then be possible to get a marked-up version of any document with highlighting for “proven” claims.

Sure, it’s not perfect, but I think it would be an interesting way to apply the rigor that used to be the job of publications.

guyomes · a month ago

For the form, you might be interested in Ethica, by Spinoza [1]. On the other hand, for fact checking, the key concept seems to be trust in sources rather than logical consistency.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinoza%27s_Ethics

guyomes commented on Paul Dirac and the religion of mathematical beauty (2011) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=jPwo1... · Posted by u/magnifique

throw0101d · a month ago

See also perhaps the 1960 article/essay "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

guyomes · a month ago

See also the Wikipedia page on the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics, notably in biology and economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreasonable_ineffectiveness_o...

guyomes commented on Gradients Are the New Intervals mattkeeter.com/blog/2025-... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

guyomes · 3 months ago

A generalisation of this idea is known as Taylor model in 1998 [1]. It might even have been known in 1984 as neighborhood arithmetic [2]. The generalisation works by taking a Taylor expansion of the function up to order n, and then by using a bound for the remainder using bounds on the partial derivatives of order n+1 [3].

[1]: https://www.bmtdynamics.org/cgi-bin/display.pl?name=rdaic

[2]: https://books.google.fr/books?id=2zDUCQAAQBAJ

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor%27s_theorem#Taylor's_th...

guyomes commented on Benchmarking vision-language models on OCR in dynamic video environments arxiv.org/abs/2502.06445... · Posted by u/ashu_trv

michaelt · 7 months ago

What models would you recommend instead, for sophisticated OCR applications?

Honestly I thought Claude-3 and GPT-4o were some of the newest major models with vision support, and that models like o1 and deepseek were more reasoning-oriented than OCR-oriented.

guyomes · 7 months ago

My anecdotal tests and several benchmarks suggest that Qwen2-VL-72b [0] is better than the tested models (even better than Claude 3.5 Sonnet), notably for OCR applications. It has been available since October 2024.

[0]: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct

guyomes commented on Benchmarking vision-language models on OCR in dynamic video environments arxiv.org/abs/2502.06445... · Posted by u/ashu_trv

yorwba · 7 months ago

What would you say is currently the most accurate OCR solution if you're not concerned about speed and memory usage?

guyomes · 7 months ago

For handwritten texts, the tool that works best for me is Qwen2.5-VL-72b [0]. It is also available online [1]. I'm surprised that it is not mentioned in the article since even the previous model (Qwen2-VL-72b) was better than the other VLMs I tried for OCR on handwritten texts.

[0]: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct

[1]: https://chat.qwenlm.ai

guyomes commented on Why Does Integer Addition Approximate Float Multiplication? probablydance.com/2025/02... · Posted by u/ibobev

Animats · 7 months ago

Neat. Of course it works for the exponent, but that it's not that far off for the mantissa is unexpected. It helps that the mantissa is normalized.

guyomes · 7 months ago

For the mantissa, the insight is probably that :

(1+e1)*(1+e2) = 1+e1+e2+(e1*e2)

If e1 and e2 are small, then e1*e2 is negligible.

guyomes commented on LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning arxiv.org/abs/2502.03387... · Posted by u/trott

guyomes · 7 months ago

I wonder if their curated set of 817 math problems is also useful as teaching material for training math students on a diverse set of problems.

guyomes commented on Precursors of Copernicus' heliocentric theory johncarlosbaez.wordpress.... · Posted by u/chmaynard

guyomes · 9 months ago

> Aristarchus had come up with a heliocentric theory way back around 250 BC.

He notably did convincing calculations showing that the sun should be larger than Earth. However, this was not convincing enough for his opponents who argued notably that usually fire hardly remains in a fixed position. Also, if Earth was moving, it was hard to understand why there was no observed parallax on the stars at night. Actually, the first apparent proof that Earth was moving came after inventing instruments precise enough to observe parallax on far enough stars, in 1727, from James Bradley. It actually had different results from expectation, due to the finite speed of light [1].

Just after Aristarchus came also Seleucus of Seleucia [2]. He supposedly had a theoretical argument for heliocentrism, but it was lost.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Ar...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bradley

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seleucus_of_Seleucia