Press X to doubt...
If you sincerely think X/Twitter is turning anything remotely close to a profit then you are in a tiny minority.
Readit Newssmcl commented on X hit with $140M EU fine for breaching content rules reuters.com/sustainabilit... · Posted by u/pogue
smcl commented on In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/samizdis
smcl commented on X hit with $140M EU fine for breaching content rules reuters.com/sustainabilit... · Posted by u/pogue
Maybe they should consider pulling out (from Earth) then
Yeah I reckon that's the only way to be sure
smcl commented on X hit with $140M EU fine for breaching content rules reuters.com/sustainabilit... · Posted by u/pogue
smcl commented on In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/samizdis
smcl commented on In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/samizdis
They’ve been a Scottish thing for at least 15 years! Source: I ate one in Edinburgh 15 years ago.
Scotland is the home of deep frying things that have no right to be deep fried. My English friends are alarmed when I tell them of the “half pizza and chips” we used to have for lunch. Half a deep fried pizza, that is.
Deep-fried pizza is originally an Italian thing ("pizza fritta") and would have entered Scottish cuisine through the Italian community (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Scots). It's become its own thing now - a pizza crunch doesn't really resemble a pizza fritta - but it's originally Italian
smcl commented on In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/samizdis
Yeah, you can't believe anything that's on Wikipedia.
I actually live in Scotland. I have never seen anywhere that sells deep-fried Mars bars here, but I have seen them in England.
I'm actually from Scotland and grew up in an area that laid claim to their invention - near Stonehaven - around the time they popped up.
They're basically a silly novelty equivalent to "deep fried butter" is in the USA but they definitely came from Scotland. I've never had one and know only a handful of people who did, I suspect they came about as a sort of pre-internet way to grab attention and go "viral"
They're not exactly a delicacy or something that we should be proud of, mind ...
The overhyped tweet from the robinhood guy raising money for his AI startup is nicely brought into better perspective by Thomas Bloom (including that #124 is not from the cited paper, "Complete sequences of sets of integer powers "/BEGL96):
> This is a nice solution, and impressive to be found by AI, although the proof is (in hindsight) very simple, and the surprising thing is that Erdos missed it. But there is definitely precedent for Erdos missing easy solutions!
> Also this is not the problem as posed in that paper
> That paper asks a harder version of this problem. The problem which has been solved was asked by Erdos in a couple of later papers.
> One also needs to be careful about saying things like 'open for 30 years'. This does not mean it has resisted 30 years of efforts to solve it! Many Erdos problems (including this one) have just been forgotten about it, and nobody has seriously tried to solve it.[1]
And, indeed, Boris Alexeev (who ran the problem) agrees:
> My summary is that Aristotle solved "a" version of this problem (indeed, with an olympiad-style proof), but not "the" version.
> I agree that the [BEGL96] problem is still open (for now!), and your plan to keep this problem open by changing the statement is reasonable. Alternatively, one could add another problem and link them. I have no preference.[2]
Not to rain on the parade out of spite, it's just that this is neat, but not like, unusually neat compared to the last few months.
[1] https://twitter.com/thomasfbloom/status/1995083348201586965
[2] https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/124#post-1899
See this is one of the reasons I struggle to get on board the AI hype train. Any time I've seen some breathless claim about it's capabilities that feels a bit too good to be true, someone with knowledge in the domain takes a closer look and it turns out to have been exaggerated and meant to draw eyeballs and investors to some fledgling AI company.
I just feel like if we were genuinely on the cusp of an AI revolution like it is claimed, we wouldn't need to keep seeing this sort of thing. Like I feel like a lot of the industry is full of flim-flam men trying to scam people, and if the tech was as capable as we keep getting told it is there'd be no need for dishonesty or sleight of hand.
smcl commented on Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit djnn.sh/posts/anthropic-s... · Posted by u/vxvxvx
Did anyone else find that Anthropic's report felt a bit like an ad? "Look at how powerful our stuff is; if the bad guys get it, they can do really bad things!"
Sort of like firearm ads that show scary bad guys with scary looking weapons.
That’s a common thing from these AI companies - hyping themselves up by claiming to be terrified of their capabilities
smcl commented on When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/... · Posted by u/goldenskye
America isn’t #1 in pollution per capita, that’s largely a function of per capita income and America is a long way from #1 on that metric.
For example, we where ranked 16th in terms of CO2 per capita in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... We are just #3 by population and far richer per capita than the other 2.
You may want to take another look at that list. Proudly declaring you’re only the 16th worst per-capita (already very high!) when ahead of you are tiny places like Pulau, New Caledonia, Gibraltar and Curacao is really quite funny.