l33t7332273 (u/l33t7332273)

l33t7332273 commented on A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com follow.agwa.name/notice/A... · Posted by u/sanqui

saghm · 9 months ago

I feel confident in guessing that any net changes in Windows popularity have close to no relation to Microsoft's policies around trusted CA. The number of users who are worried about sketchy certificates being trusted by default are dwarfed by the number of users who don't have any idea what a "trusted CA" is but care about more "visible" things like UI changes, performance, and how hard Windows is pushing Edge and other things they don't want.

l33t7332273 · 9 months ago

It’s not becoming the users that are the decision makers. A few CTOs could make decisions based on this

l33t7332273 commented on The Influence of Bell Labs construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/mooreds

ggm · 9 months ago

I tried using some online systems to help formulate weighted sum decisions over unrankable choices and it's bloody hard work getting people on board. I think how the logic presents could improve.

This stuff while old, is not routine for decision makers. They don't seem to grok how to formulate the questions and the choices.

l33t7332273 · 9 months ago

I think it’s fundamentally hard to make tools like that because models can be sensitive to specifics, so dumbing them down is generally not great

l33t7332273 commented on The Influence of Bell Labs construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/mooreds

ggm · 9 months ago

I think my reading of your comment is: that's just wrong. And I tend to agree. The current STEM and FAANG activity is second order work in the main. I wouldn't hold AI work up as a paragon, myself. It's diverting from progress across a field.

I have hopes of a resurgence of operations research and linear optimisation as goods in themselves: we could be plotting more nuanced courses in dark waters of competing pressure. Decision systems support across many fields would remove subjective, politicised pressures.

l33t7332273 · 9 months ago

Do you think there is room for a resurgence in linear optimization?

Linear programming, and even integer linear programming are pretty well solved practically speaking.

l33t7332273 commented on The Influence of Bell Labs construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/mooreds

pinewurst · 9 months ago

I’m hoping this is sarcasm deserving my heart-felt belly laugh. FANG (or whatever the backcronym is these days) “selective hiring” is just puzzle driven mediocrity with a ridiculous amount of elect self-praise at their own good fortune. And “performance metrics”, give me a break - product innovation is in the toilet and product quality even further down the drain. Unless you’re talking about advanced PR and market manipulation techniques to capture and retain ad revenue…definitely genius there.

l33t7332273 · 9 months ago

I agree with the vibes of your comment, but I have to reply to this:

> Unless you’re talking about advanced PR and market manipulation techniques to capture and retain ad revenue

Those very much _are_ the goals at those enterprises.

l33t7332273 commented on The Influence of Bell Labs construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/mooreds

paulpauper · 9 months ago

I think the mythos of the Bell labs and other thinktanks of the Cold War era is overstated to some extent. https://greyenlightenment.com/2024/07/19/the-decline-of-cold...

These organizations employed too many people of relatively mediocre ability relative to output, leading to waste and eventual disbandment. Today's private sector companies in FAMNG+ are making bigger breakthroughs in AI, apps, self-driving cars, etc. with fewer people relative to population and more profits. This is due to more selective hiring and performance metrics. Yeah those people form the 60s were smart, but today's STEM whiz kids are probably lapping them.

l33t7332273 · 9 months ago

> making bigger breakthroughs in AI, apps, self-driving cars

Those weren’t really the topics people were interested in at the time (depending on your definition of AI).

The shoulders of giants, as they say.

l33t7332273 commented on The Influence of Bell Labs construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/mooreds

ioblomov · 9 months ago

All true, but monopoly profits sure help.

l33t7332273 · 9 months ago

As do high corporate tax rates

l33t7332273 commented on The Influence of Bell Labs construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/mooreds

dr_dshiv · 9 months ago

Once we get superintelligence — some time next year I’d say — then we will have a tool to make all those dreams come true.

l33t7332273 · 9 months ago

What are you basing such a bold prediction on?

l33t7332273 commented on The $5000 Compression Challenge (2001) patrickcraig.co.uk/other/... · Posted by u/ekiauhce

Dylan16807 · 9 months ago

1. Which line in the FAQ are you making an analogy to?

2. A FAQ for the newsgroup is not automatically part of the rules for the challenge.

3. If the entire FAQ is treated as rules text, then the rules directly say you cannot win, and that's not an acceptable way to do rules.

l33t7332273 · 9 months ago

>Which line in the FAQ are you making an analogy to?

The line about filename shenanigans being disallowed.

>A FAQ for the newsgroup is not automatically part of the rules for the challenge.

I think it’s completely clear that this FAQ was about the challenge.

l33t7332273 commented on The $5000 Compression Challenge (2001) patrickcraig.co.uk/other/... · Posted by u/ekiauhce

hgomersall · 9 months ago

Not necessarily. Consider a big file of random uniformly distributed bytes. It's easy to show that in practice some bytes are more common than others (because random), and that necessarily therefore the expected spacing between those specific bytes is less than 256, which gives you a small fraction of a bit you can save in a recoding of those specific bytes (distance from last byte of a specific value).

With a big enough file those fractions of a bit add up to a non trivial number of bits. You can be cunning about how you encode your deltas too (next delta makes use of remaining unused bits from previous delta).

I haven't worked through all the details, so it might be in the end result everything rebalances to say no, but I'd like to withhold judgement for the moment.

l33t7332273 · 9 months ago

>It's easy to show that in practice some bytes are more common than others (because random)

I don’t follow. Wouldn’t that be (because not random)

l33t7332273 commented on The $5000 Compression Challenge (2001) patrickcraig.co.uk/other/... · Posted by u/ekiauhce

piannucci · 9 months ago

:shocked_pikachu:

Renegadry aside, for those who are more interested in the Information Theory perspective on this:

Kolmogorov complexity is a good teaching tool, but hardly used in engineering practice because it contains serious foot-guns.

One example of defining K complexity(S, M) is the length of the shortest initial tape contents P for a given abstract machine M such that, when M is started on this tape, the machine halts with final tape contents P+S. Obviously, one must be very careful to define things like “initial state”, “input”, “halt”, and “length”, since not all universal machines look like Turing machines at first glance, and the alphabet size must either be consistent for all strings or else appear as an explicit log factor.

Mike’s intuitive understanding was incorrect in two subtle ways:

1. Without specifying the abstract machine M, the K complexity of a string S is not meaningful. For instance, given any S, one may define an abstract machine with a single instruction that prints S, plus other instructions to make M Turing complete. That is, for any string S, there is an M_S such that complexity(S, M_S) = 1 bit. Alternatively, it would be possible to define an abstract machine M_FS that supports filesystem operations. Then the complexity using Patrick’s solution could be made well-defined by measuring the length of the concatenation of the decompressor P with a string describing the initial filesystem state.

2. Even without adversarial examples, and with a particular M specified, uniform random strings’ K complexity is only _tightly concentrated around_ the strings’ length plus a machine-dependent constant. As Patrick points out, for any given string length, some individual string exemplars may have much smaller K complexity; for instance, due to repetition.

l33t7332273 · 9 months ago

>uniform random strings’ K complexity is only _tightly concentrated around_ the strings’ length plus a machine-dependent constant

What is the distribution of the complexity of a string? Is there some Chernof-like bound?