Random Thread

[Travis B.]

In my honest opinion there are a *lot* of groups of people who owe the rest of us apologies for various things. And, yes, the techbros would be in there.

Sure although I think the tech¹ industry is pretty close to the fossil fuel industry in its negative effects on society and threats to humanity. They are straight up plotting to replace humanity with super-intelligent computers, a level of sheer ill intent that few other industries can match. They are also overwhelmingly reactionary in their politics, with like Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, and Terry A. Davis as particularly colorful (though hardly unique) examples. Overall the culture and ideology surrounding computing industry just seems especially toxic and malicious.

¹It has come to annoy me how computing has monopolized the word "technology". There are many kinds of technology from medicine to agriculture, yet people hear "technology" and think specifically of computers.

I work in the "tech industry", specifically in Magnetic Resonance Imaging for medical applications, and we use "AI" all the time for enhancing images, but the only negative aspect I can see of what we do is when insurance companies refuse to pay for MR scans, and that is the health insurance industry (which IMO ought to be banned and fully replaced with single-payer)'s fault, not ours. Not everything that the "tech industry" (a broad brush if there were any) does is this Great Evil that you seem to think it is.

[bradrn]

we use "AI" all the time for enhancing images

Which variety of it? I’m aware that there’s a lot of techniques encompassed by that buzzword…

[Man in Space]

They are also overwhelmingly reactionary in their politics, with like Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, and Terry A. Davis as particularly colorful (though hardly unique) examples.

I am inclined to give the late Terry A. Davis some grace as he was severely mentally ill. If he’d received the proper care I wonder what might’ve happened.

[Travis B.]

we use "AI" all the time for enhancing images

Which variety of it? I’m aware that there’s a lot of techniques encompassed by that buzzword…

I don't know the details as I really do not deal much with it myself, but we use it for things such as denoising, detecting the top of the head, and automatically detecting the patient/volunteer's anatomy.

[Travis B.]

They are also overwhelmingly reactionary in their politics, with like Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, and Terry A. Davis as particularly colorful (though hardly unique) examples.

I am inclined to give the late Terry A. Davis some grace as he was severely mentally ill. If he’d received the proper care I wonder what might’ve happened.

My thought as well -- it is terribly unfair to Terry A. Davis to group him in the same category as Elon Musk or Curtis Yarvin.

[chelsea]

Not sure if any other source has ever pointed this out, besides this one Medium article from 2020.

1997, 2nd match between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov, game 2, move 37: Deep Blue plays an extremely "human" move that basically wins the game.

2016, match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, game 2, move 37: AlphaGo plays an extremely unusual, unprincipled, and creative move.

[malloc]

My thought as well -- it is terribly unfair to Terry A. Davis to group him in the same category as Elon Musk or Curtis Yarvin.

Fair enough, but it does seem like pretty much every prominent figure in the computer industry is emphatically right wing if not fascist. The only remotely left-wing people in computing I know are all on this forum, oddly enough.

[Travis B.]

My thought as well -- it is terribly unfair to Terry A. Davis to group him in the same category as Elon Musk or Curtis Yarvin.

Fair enough, but it does seem like pretty much every prominent figure in the computer industry is emphatically right wing if not fascist. The only remotely left-wing people in computing I know are all on this forum, oddly enough.

Maybe because the only "prominent figures in the computer industry" you know are techbros. Is Richard Stallman "emphatically right wing if not fascist"? Is Linus Torvalds?

[Raphael]

I don't like everything about all of his movies, but what's good in them is really good.

Happy 100th Birthday, Mel Brooks!

[Ares Land]

Not sure if any other source has ever pointed this out, besides this one Medium article from 2020.

1997, 2nd match between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov, game 2, move 37: Deep Blue plays an extremely "human" move that basically wins the game.

2016, match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, game 2, move 37: AlphaGo plays an extremely unusual, unprincipled, and creative move.

I'd love to have some details. I don't know enough about chess to know what makes a move "human" or not

[chelsea]

Chess engines at the time were highly materialistic. They prioritized moves that win material (trading lower value pieces for higher value). It's an important metric but it misses the bigger picture, like how safe your king is, who's leading the attack, how freely can your pieces move... Humans could consider both. Engines could calculate tactical moves to win material but they often neglected positional moves (aiming your attacking pieces, strengthening your line of defense...) since those are harder to quantify. These days engines compare the position to heuristic boards which are hand-crafted by grandmasters and say which squares/positions are good. Or the engine just uses a neural net.

The actual move 37 was bishop to e4 which blocked the only pawn that Kasparov could advance into Deep Blue's territory. The structure was cramped and closed, with no room for either player to advance; move 37 locked things down entirely. Deep Blue had an alternate move where it could (if I remember correctly) win one pawn. With the actual move though, it could set up an invasion force to infiltrate Kasparov's side and eventually threaten mate. This kind of positional understanding was typical of humans but not the computers of the time.

Here's a full game analysis, accessible to all chess levels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bd1Q2rOmok

Sadly my knowledge of Go is basically zero so I can't explain why AlphaGo's move 37 was incredible.

[quinterbeck]

I'd like to share this lovely bit of sci-babble my teenage self thought up in 2010:

The propagation of the wave [p] is equal to the oscillating variable [^εg] to the power of the recurring anomaly [Дд]. Differentiating this results in the square root of the resolved vector [vф], and is equal to the integral function [∫f] of the polar opposite [p<z>x_x] under Verblichenvoch’s law of unreasonability [V^z_q]. Transversely, the common particulate [k^α] of the Hambrag constant [H_N^G] inverted and substituted for the antivariance [µ_∞], adding the propagation of the wave [p] as the coefficient of the designation state [^cџ], will result in the aforementioned integral function [∫f] to the power of the Frach-Borlich pergatration drag affectation quantity [^FB_qQ^x]. This in turn can be used to determine the regulation state [ж^Ю_бψζ] of the initial fundamental particle [p^-∞] as a helix variable [ъ_h^ήΦ^φ], and thus relinquishing anterior quasi-sub-physical quantum mechanics from the grip of the mind numbing complications of Porgrea’s interphotic reverse exoparallelism theorems [P^pq_zx].

[Travis B.]

I'd like to share this lovely bit of sci-babble my teenage self thought up in 2010:

The propagation of the wave [p] is equal to the oscillating variable [^εg] to the power of the recurring anomaly [Дд]. Differentiating this results in the square root of the resolved vector [vф], and is equal to the integral function [∫f] of the polar opposite [p<z>x_x] under Verblichenvoch’s law of unreasonability [V^z_q]. Transversely, the common particulate [k^α] of the Hambrag constant [H_N^G] inverted and substituted for the antivariance [µ_∞], adding the propagation of the wave [p] as the coefficient of the designation state [^cџ], will result in the aforementioned integral function [∫f] to the power of the Frach-Borlich pergatration drag affectation quantity [^FB_qQ^x]. This in turn can be used to determine the regulation state [ж^Ю_бψζ] of the initial fundamental particle [p^-∞] as a helix variable [ъ_h^ήΦ^φ], and thus relinquishing anterior quasi-sub-physical quantum mechanics from the grip of the mind numbing complications of Porgrea’s interphotic reverse exoparallelism theorems [P^pq_zx].

For some reason I don't see math people using Cyrillic much (excluding Cyrillic characters visually identical to Latin-script ones), whereas Greek is extremely common, and in some cases even Hebrew characters are used (e.g. ℵ).

[bradrn]

I'd like to share this lovely bit of sci-babble my teenage self thought up in 2010:

The propagation of the wave [p] is equal to the oscillating variable [^εg] to the power of the recurring anomaly [Дд]. Differentiating this results in the square root of the resolved vector [vф], and is equal to the integral function [∫f] of the polar opposite [p<z>x_x] under Verblichenvoch’s law of unreasonability [V^z_q]. Transversely, the common particulate [k^α] of the Hambrag constant [H_N^G] inverted and substituted for the antivariance [µ_∞], adding the propagation of the wave [p] as the coefficient of the designation state [^cџ], will result in the aforementioned integral function [∫f] to the power of the Frach-Borlich pergatration drag affectation quantity [^FB_qQ^x]. This in turn can be used to determine the regulation state [ж^Ю_бψζ] of the initial fundamental particle [p^-∞] as a helix variable [ъ_h^ήΦ^φ], and thus relinquishing anterior quasi-sub-physical quantum mechanics from the grip of the mind numbing complications of Porgrea’s interphotic reverse exoparallelism theorems [P^pq_zx].

For some reason I don't see math people using Cyrillic much (excluding Cyrillic characters visually identical to Latin-script ones), whereas Greek is extremely common, and in some cases even Hebrew characters are used (e.g. ℵ).

Yeah, that stuck out to me too. Almost always people stick to Latin and Greek.

(I will add that the use of Hebrew is nearly as restricted as that of Cyrillic. Only aleph, bet and gimel have ever been used, and then only in set theory. Additionally Japanese yo よ has been used for the Yoneda Lemma, and Wikipedia also lists sa サ for the Satake compactification. I’m not aware of any other scripts which have been used in Latin-based mathematical notation.)

Beyond the scripts, other things which stick out to me are the square brackets (hardly ever used like that) and the layered superscripts and subscripts (sometimes seen in Einstein summation notation, but hardly otherwise). Basically it looks like someone’s idea of what complicated mathematics ‘should’ look like if they have no maths knowledge themselves — which I guess is the whole point.

[WeepingElf]

For some reason I don't see math people using Cyrillic much (excluding Cyrillic characters visually identical to Latin-script ones), whereas Greek is extremely common, and in some cases even Hebrew characters are used (e.g. ℵ).

I have wondered about this, too. And I once had a fictional theory of FTL travel for a science fiction universe where Cyrillic letters were used for various quantities (of course, the thing was utterly bollocks). But in real-world math and physics, Cyrillic letters are indeed hard to find.

[quinterbeck]

Beyond the scripts, other things which stick out to me are the square brackets (hardly ever used like that) and the layered superscripts and subscripts (sometimes seen in Einstein summation notation, but hardly otherwise). Basically it looks like someone’s idea of what complicated mathematics ‘should’ look like if they have no maths knowledge themselves — which I guess is the whole point.

Yes indeed the point. I noticed the square brackets but decided not to edit them into more natural presentation. I think the use of cyrillic was along the lines of 'these letters look cool and I wish we used them in mathematical notation'. In 2010 my maths knowledge only went up to basic calculus.

[Man in Space]

In college I was given to using Arabic letters for variables at times.

[bradrn]

In college I was given to using Arabic letters for variables at times.

But did anyone understand you?

(I suspect that, if people see a variable which looks like a squiggle, they would just assume that it’s a zeta or xi, because hardly anyone knows how to write those correctly…)

[Travis B.]

In college I was given to using Arabic letters for variables at times.

Did you turn in assignments with Arabic letters for variables in them?

[chelsea]

My electronic circuits professor used gimel for... something. The font was also so small and hard to read that I thought it was a lambda. When I checked the slides online afterward I was like "oh my god is that Hebrew gimel???"



Justice for Verblichenvoch.