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jungturk commented on Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale   terrytao.wordpress.com/20... · Posted by u/nabla9
lacker · 2 months ago
The point I found most interesting is what the author calls "robustness".

Another advantage of AlphaEvolve was robustness: it was relatively easy to set up AlphaEvolve to work on a broad array of problems, without extensive need to call on domain knowledge of the specific task in order to tune hyperparameters.

In software world "robustness" usually implies "resistance to failures", so I would call this something different, more like "ease of integration". There are many problems where in theory a pre-LLM AI could do it, but you would have to implement all this explicit modeling, and that's too much work.

Like to pick a random problem, why does no superhuman AI exist for most video games? I think most of the difficulty is not necessarily in the AI algorithm, it's that the traditional method of game playing involves programming a model of the game, and for most video games that's an incredible amount of work, too much for someone to do in their spare time.

LLMs, on the other hand, are decent at integrating with many different sorts of systems, because they can just interoperate with text. Not quite good enough at video yet for "any video game" to fall. But a lot of these problems where the difficulty is not "algorithmic" but "integration", the LLM strategy seems promising for cracking.

jungturk · 2 months ago
Looks like he's updated the text, striking through "robustness" and substituting "adaptability"
jungturk commented on Doomsday scoreboard   doomsday.march1studios.co... · Posted by u/diymaker
LorenPechtel · 2 months ago
What would a Neanderthal say about this?

What would a Denesovian say about this?

jungturk · 2 months ago
More generally, what would _any_ collapsed society or extinct evolutionary branch have to say?

"Not much", outside of what they'd contributed to any surviving lines.

To your point, whether we're winning or losing very much depends on how we define our team.

jungturk commented on Doomsday scoreboard   doomsday.march1studios.co... · Posted by u/diymaker
wartywhoa23 · 2 months ago
It can show 0 successful predictions all it wants, but we'd been through global lockdowns and forced vaccination, there's an ongoing war in Europe with casualties in hundreds of thousands on both sides, Gaza is being demolished by Israel, Internet as we knew it is about to turn into whitelisted fiberoptic/5G TV, surveillance is rampant, and the rise of the global technofascist police state as the public is being entertained by the clown shitshow of top level politicians is not obvious only to those who've been trying to save their sanity by remaining in denial.
jungturk · 2 months ago
Don't disagree with any of that, and I don't want to minimize the seriousness of the issues you've cited, but that kind of reinforces the implication of the scorecard?

People are persistently presented with perils (plagues, parasites, pollution, power-hungry politicians, propaganda, plutonium-powered projectiles, etc...) and humanity keeps finding a way through (though certainly at great personal and population-wide cost sometimes).

Some pretty serious chokepoints in the full history (including research suggesting that something reduced our ancestors numbers by ~99% a little under a million years ago) and yet this particular strain remains.

jungturk commented on Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement   cnbc.com/2025/07/18/meta-... · Posted by u/rntn
tjwebbnorfolk · 5 months ago
You know it's possible to make good reasoned points without cramming in "<psuedo-marxist buzzword> capitalism" into a sentence for absolutely no reason.

All I want is to not be forced to irritate my customers about something that nobody cares about. It doesn't have to be complicated. It is how the internet was for all of its existence until a few years ago.

jungturk · 5 months ago
There's nothing marxist(?) about the industry of surveillance capitalism. Its just a regular segment of data-driven advertising and marketing optimization that instruments our technology and observes user behavior (typically without users' knowledge or consent). There's no value judgement there - its literally just surveillance and capitalism put together to achieve some goals - usually advertising optimization but sometimes not.

And it happens to subsidize the tools you'd like to you use.

Whether you as a simple shopkeeper are aware of that or not doesn't change the equation or make anything buzzwordy.

jungturk commented on Babies made using three people's DNA are born free of mitochondrial disease   bbc.com/news/articles/cn8... · Posted by u/1659447091
MrDrDr · 5 months ago
I think it would be better to describe this as an ‘organelle’ transplant as it would be easier for people to understand and discuss. Yes there is a donor (egg) and yes the new child will pass on the mitochondria to her children. But calling it a 3 person baby is unhelpful and misleading as IMO mitochondria DNA is of a different category to chromosomal DNA.
jungturk · 5 months ago
DNA can migrate between the nucleus and the mitochondria (and vice versa) so its not entirely black & white.
jungturk commented on Meta says it won't sign Europe AI agreement   cnbc.com/2025/07/18/meta-... · Posted by u/rntn
tjwebbnorfolk · 5 months ago
No it's because I'll get fined by some bureaucrat who has never run a business in his life if I don't put a pointless popup on my stupid-simple shopify store.
jungturk · 5 months ago
Is it an option for your simple store to not collect data about subjects without their consent? Seems like an easy win.

Your choice to use frameworks subsidized by surveillance capitalism doesn't need to preclude my ability to agree to participate does it?

Maybe a handy notification when I visit your store asking if I agree to participate would be a happy compromise?

jungturk commented on Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole   port.ac.uk/news-events-an... · Posted by u/zaik
nbulka · 6 months ago
We think the universe had to "begin" because we "began" and tend to anthropomorphize. Is that necessarily true? The universe is under no obligation to have a beginning. Sail around the Earth and you might just end up right where you started.
jungturk · 6 months ago
Yes, but earth still had a beginning.

I agree with you, though - causal explanations are compelling and confer a sense of certainty and humans seem to like that, but it doesn't make them necessary.

jungturk commented on 23andMe Sells Gene-Testing Business to DNA Drug Maker Regeneron   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/wslh
rudedogg · 7 months ago
Not sure if it's still the same procedure as in March, but if you haven't done it already: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/how-delete-your-23andm...
jungturk · 7 months ago
It is - just followed these steps this week.

As noted therein, you need to request a download well before you actually delete your account, since the former requires to batch work to complete and the latter will cancel any in-progress requests.

jungturk commented on Electromagnetism as a Purely Geometric Theory   iopscience.iop.org/articl... · Posted by u/andyjohnson0
pdonis · 8 months ago
> the same deal as with gravity in GR.

But it can't be quite "the same deal", because gravity obeys the equivalence principle, and electromagnetism does not. (Nor do the other known fundamental interactions.) The paper does not appear to address this at all.

jungturk · 8 months ago
Not "same" as in unifying EM and GR, but rather "same" both can be described as geometric regimes in spacetime (though GR be metric compatible and EM in this formulation requiring a relaxation to semi-metricity.

From the conclusion: >Charge is therefore to be understood as a local compression of the metric in the spacetime, which relates to longitudinal waves as described in [12]. This provides some aesthetical features into the model, as electromagnetism seems to be orthogonal to gravity in the sense that current theory of gravity is a theory based on metric compatible connections.

jungturk commented on Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'   krebsonsecurity.com/2025/... · Posted by u/mmsc
hi_hi · a year ago
I don't quite understand how they are gaining the access credentials required? Where I work, it takes days to onboard people, through standard processes. Whats happening in this case.

Given the highly volatile, and legally gray, situation; I'd expect the front line people who usually grant access are at least flagging these requests to their boss, who flags to their boss etc. Is everyone up the chain just giving a shrug and saying "seems legit, give them the access".

Of course people don't want to loose their jobs, but I would have expected someone in a senior leadership position to take a stand in preventing this (unless their all on board?)

jungturk · 10 months ago
The president appoints new bosses at all the executive branch agencies, and those bosses approve the access.

Several recent news stories have described situations where the agency head resisted and was removed.

u/jungturk

KarmaCake day381July 19, 2015View Original