Sorry, but the whole story just reads like a bad mystery novel; tales of Russian hackers, "suspicious" Github repos, somehow-nefarious (docker?) "containers", unspecified threats made (and I quote) in "meat space".
Also interesting to note that not only has Berulis' attorney lead multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration in the past, he was also an intern for both Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. Now that obviously doesn't prove anything, but it could nonetheless be considered a strong indicator this all might be politically-motivated.
Neat concept! Although I was a bit surprised at the AI stand-in's finding. I posed the silly argument that "My neighbor's dog refuses to speak French" with the options "Neighbor is culpable" and "I am clearly an idiot": The final decision was 7/5 in my favor! But seriously, this really is a great idea IMO. The jury-duty-while-you-wait feature also seems like a fair trade-off.
Thanks SO much for trying! Honestly, interacting with real people who have tried my game after thinking about it non stop for 16 years is truly exciting! Indeed, the AI part is necessary (well I don't want to say evil but...) in order to show off he game as it will be, and after posting it on Reddit last week, it was working like a dream with real live juries answering! My dream jury will be age 16 - 99, from every continent, every profession and culture...because I do believe the more diverse the jury, the better the verdict!
Why fishy? I had the idea 16 years ago but lacked any type of expertise or finance to create an app. I've been pestering everyone I could think of ever since and the idea developed and I became more desperate and determined (but still lacking expertise and finance). And last year came across a way to make an app with no coding. I had already tested out the concept during lockdown with family & friends on a live anonymous Zoom with the polling so I knew it would work. Made the MVP on Bubble and here it is. So, what's the fishy part - I genuinely want to know so that I can maybe rewrite it so it doesn't look fishy!
> I posed the silly argument that "My neighbor's dog refuses to speak French" with the options "Neighbor is culpable" and "I am clearly an idiot": The final decision was 7/5 in my favor!
People can be trolling. That is the kind of over the top, obviously silly question where I personally might also answer a silly answer. And out of those two the "Neighbor is culpable" is sillyier and funnier.
Relatively speaking, perhaps, but things really have progressed by several orders of magnitude. When I was young we had access to very little "technology". (Maybe that's why people tended to be somewhat more down-to-earth?) I could change a tire by the age of ten, not to mention being fairly well-versed in a number of subjects. And I was certainly not the exception. Any given person was bound to be proficient at *something*. Younger folks these days however (on average) don't seem to think very deeply about things (probably too many distractions?) and as a result they can be surprisingly ignorant across the spectrum. Not all of them, of course, just an alarmingly high percentage....
I'm old enough that grocery stores had tube testers in them. Vacuum tubes are technology. So are canned goods, and milled flour, and white sugar, and refrigeration.
My grandfather's shop included a lathe and welding torch. He and my dad swapped out the engine to a car in my Dad's carport. That's technology - the car, the tools to fix it, and parts supply system to make it possible.
My mother had an automatic sewing machine which she used to make clothes. Sewing machines, motorized sewing machines, the looms to make the cloth, the machines to process the cotton - all technology.
We had several hams in the neighborhood, and CB radios were a craze. That's technology.
We got the city newspaper, which was possible from centuries of technological development - the printing press, ink and paper production, typesetting machines, distribution, vending machines.
Most homes had a particle accelerator in them to watch TV. That's certainly technology.
Compare a home now to one made two generations ago, and little has changed - assuming you are lucky enough to avoid the inherent death cycle of products tied to a smartphone. You've got easier access to shows and music, but people in the 1970s still had TV, radio, records, etc.
Compare a home from 1925 to two generations before that, and there you'll see a whole lot more changed.
Electricity is technology. Running water is technology. Municipal sewage is technology. Telephony is technology. Cheap aluminum is technology. Gasoline is technology. Weather forecasting is technology. The vertical filing system is technology. A card catalog is technology. Punched cards is technology.
You had access to a lot of technology when you were young. Why do you dismiss it so?
Sure. My mention of "printing press" was specifically meant to be moveable type, but that detail doesn't matter.
Now how do you get from your true observation to characterize how technology now is 'several orders of magnitude' greater than the 'very little "technology"' af3d had as kid?
When you talk about "demands it places on our lives", do you mean modern life has higher demands, or lower? And is that a good thing?
Like, in the 1800s, employees worked 12 hour shifts, 6 days/week, with few rest days or holidays. Working conditions were horrible, and a simple slip in attention could cut your fingers off or worse.
"Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind."
My mother would make clothes for the family when I was a kid. Sewing is a complex skill which takes effort and time to learn. She stopped when the price of cloth got more expensive than the price of pre-made clothing. Does technology place fewer demands on our lives now?
And how do you factor in the lack of effort we should have been doing to avoid global warming - a problem we've known about since I was a teenager in the 1980s?
I said life during 1800s high tech was more demanding on people than now, but I also said that life in the Middle Ages was less demanding on us than now.
Which makes it decidedly difficult to see a simple correlation between technology and ease of life, no matter how many "orders of magnitude" technology has changed.
Compared to most websites these days HN is about as lightweight as it gets. I would say if you are experiencing laggy page loads, the issue is most likely something else. (Maybe disable extensions and restart?)
Iterating over some huge search space in an essentially sequential manner is generally not going to be nearly performant as simply selecting an odd number at random. You could try using a generating polynomial instead such as f(x) = x^2 + x + 41 but even that isn't going to help much in the long run. (There are Diophantine equations which one day may prove useful for generating random primes however AFAICT finding efficient solutions is still currently considered a hard problem.)
Yes, but the more we mix sieve rejection into candidate selection the more we complicate the rule of thumb. "Reject even numbers as prime candidates" is probably OK to leave as an exercise for the reader, as is the equivalent "round every candidate to odd" optimization. The point about random vs sequential is well taken, though, and it doesn't complicate the rule of thumb, so I changed it.
Neither is a significant amount of the time required to reject a candidate factor. The cheapest rejection test is "Bignum Division by 3" and something like 2/3 candidates will need more expensive further tests.
Blame it on bad culture. Good people know that orderly conduct is necessary to maintain a healthy and vibrant community. Just take a look at the Nordic countries where this used to be the absolute norm across the board. Now even there you see quite a bit of social turmoil. Many who have migrated to these countries over the years simply do not share the same values and the effects are sadly self-evident. People do not feel nearly as safe as they once did. It may not be as bad as the average American city, mind you, but there has nonetheless been a real change in the "atmosphere". (Which isn't to say "all migrants are bad". Unvetted immigration is the issue I am referring to here.) Point is, wealth-inequality has nothing to do with it.
I normally tend to attribute these kinds of things to a rise in socialism/marxism, but to be totally fair I do think at least to one degree or another social-media is perhaps simply amplifying something which has more or less been around since the very beginning. Much like the scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail where the peasant goes off on a tirade about "being repressed" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKIyVnoZDdQ]. Populism is really nothing new! Nonetheless it is very off-putting (not to mention incredibly discouraging) to see so many people cheering on someone's death like a hungry mob of vigilantes. Where on Earth has all the civility gone? We seem to be living in a very cynical era indeed....
The tone deafness is in the silent suffering of millions while there are selective cries of foul by the establishment enablers. Neither are good, but no one is crying for the millions because the rich have made their bed.
This is pretty impressive. Given the following scenario,
"A bliirg is any non-wooden item, which is the opposite of a glaarg. In addition, there are neergs (non-existent things) and eeergs (things which actually exist). Now a glaarg which is also a neerg is called a bipk, whereas a glaarg which is a eeerg is known as a vokp. Also, a bliirg which is an eeerg is refererred to as a jokp, otherwise it is known as a fhup. So the question is, which of those could be used to make an actual fire: a jokp, bipk, fhup, or vokp? Explain your reasoning."
The results were absolutely spot on.
"(...) A vokp, being a real, existing wooden object, can serve as a fuel source. A jokp, being a real, existing non-wooden object, might serve as a fuel source if it is combustible. However, a bipk and a fhup, being non-existent things, cannot be used to make a fire. The ability to actually start a fire also depends on the presence of an ignition source, oxygen, and potentially tinder, which are not addressed by the definitions of these terms."
Any plan to make the project open source?
But gpt-4o can already answer your question for a fraction of the price and time:
To determine which of the items could be used to make an actual fire, we need to analyze the definitions provided:
1. *Glaarg*: A wooden item.
2. *Bliirg*: A non-wooden item.
3. *Neerg*: A non-existent thing.
4. *Eeerg*: A thing that actually exists.
Now, let's look at the specific terms:
- *Bipk*: A glaarg (wooden item) that is also a neerg (non-existent thing). Since it is non-existent, it cannot be used to make a fire.
- *Vokp*: A glaarg (wooden item) that is also an eeerg (existent thing). Since it is a wooden item that exists, it can be used to make a fire.
- *Jokp*: A bliirg (non-wooden item) that is also an eeerg (existent thing). While it exists, it is non-wooden, so it may not be suitable for making a fire depending on its material.
- *Fhup*: A bliirg (non-wooden item) that is also a neerg (non-existent thing). Since it is non-existent, it cannot be used to make a fire.
Based on this analysis, the only item that can be used to make an actual fire is a *vokp*, as it is a wooden item that exists.
Yeah the strength of Ithy isn't really in puzzles or math.
It's more of just a better search engine. Use it for stuff you'd Google. Offline LLMs are always going to have a better price-performance ratios than RAGs like this or Perplexity.
It's actively being developed (I pitch in where I can; I added the xAI integration this week), so I'd recommend starting here! The creator of the project, Assaf, has been nothing but friendly.
Somewhat tangentially, what really perplexes me about Hawking radiation (HR) is this: What happens to the individual particles within the black hole as it evaporates? Like say we start with X particles. The black hole emits HR and shrinks a bit. But how exactly does it "give up" the energy from the black hole without destroying something in return? Does one particle just disappear and now we are left with X-1 particles (or what)? I haven't found any good explanations for this.
At steady state, a classical black hole is fully described just mass, charge, and angular momentum. So there are no individual particles. Which itself was disconcerting to physicists because in the quantum world, information is supposed to be conserved. But they were okay-ish with it being "trapped in there somewhere". Hawking radiation is what blew that up because now the black hole evaporates. So now, nobody really knows. Lots of ideas, the most prominent being holograms on the boundary, but the math is still far from complete, and obviously experiments are even further.
> At steady state, a classical black hole is fully described just mass, charge, and angular momentum.
That's just wrong, we know this not to be the case from QM information theory and from thermodynamic arguments! This is the main point Hawking was making. While we don't yet have a good microscopic theory of what's going on, macroscopically we know that the information (entropy) doesn't just vanish into three numbers.
> While we don't yet have a good microscopic theory of what's going on, macroscopically we know that the information (entropy) doesn't just vanish into three numbers.
What information could one possibly extract from a "packet" of Hawking radiation? If the black hole was originally formed from a huge mass consisting of 80% iron and 20% xenon, for example, could such a thing be deduced by inspecting the radiation emitted by it? I would suspect that the answer would be "no". (Of course, I am just being an arm-chair physicist here.)
That is the core of the issue: hawking radiation would seem to be completely random, and therefore have no relation to what went into the black hole. But basically the entirety of physics works in a time-reversible fashion: if you could flip the direction of all the particles in a system, it would evolve back to its previous state (including such situations as two fluids mixing: entropy is how the precise arrangement of that mixed state that 'unmixes' itself is staggeringly unlikely to be seen randomly, but according to most models of physics, it should exist). But this seems to break down when it comes to black holes (it also breaks down in the various magical collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics, but the quantum wavefunction itself is also time-reversable)
> But basically the entirety of physics works in a time-reversible fashion: if you could flip the direction of all the particles in a system, it would evolve back to its previous state
What does that even mean though? Certain systems may indeed time-reversible, but I would argue that most are not (practically speaking). Imagine for example a meteorite which has fallen to Earth. In order to "reverse the process", not only would it have to "reassemble itself" from the innumerable pieces embedded in the ground, it would also have to be flung back passed the escape velocity of our planet!
> But this seems to break down when it comes to black holes (it also breaks down in the various magical collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics, but the quantum wavefunction itself is also time-reversable)
I still don't understand the issue. Entropy is essentially just a measure of how close to a system is to the "average value". A high-entropy system being very close to it (and hence, "highly disordered"), while a low-entropy system might be two or three standard-deviations from the mean. A black hole with little angular momentum, charge, and/or mass would necessarily have a lower entropy than otherwise, but in any case we can calculate that without knowing a thing about what is going on inside of it. Moreover we can deduce that such a black hole would indeed be "easier to time-reverse" than one with a higher-entropy, but what does that even tell us? As far as I can tell, not a whole lot.
The first one is talking about the quantum realm. So, absent of measurement or some kind of collapsing of the wave function, pure quantum states are 100% reversible. So the question is, where does the transition happen from the quantum world to the world we know. Whence Einstein's question about "when I stop looking at the moon does it disappear". So far, nobody knows. So far, we haven't observed any limits to how big a pure quantum system can get, and there's no "spontaneous" collapse if we don't measure something.
So the question is, could a pure quantum state model a meteor crashing into Earth? It doesn't seem like it. Friction, heat, and so on cannot be reversed classically. The question of Schrodinger's Cat even becomes moot because in an isolated system, the processes a body requires to sustain life (such as friction and heat) can't be modeled in the first place, so the cat will turn into a sloppy goop before anyone pulls the trigger. So, what's going on? Why does quantum mechanics seem to model everything that happens in the microscopic world, but in the macroscopic world we see things that it can't? Where does that crossover between microscopic and macroscopic occur? If measurement is what causes quantum wave collapse, then would none of this happen if nobody was there to measure it? And what created the measurers? 99 years since Schrodinger's equation, and we're not particularly any closer.
Black holes also seem to violate reversibility. They absorb information, but the radiation they give off is random. So, it's impossible to perform the process in reverse. This is spooky in a different way than the above because it's purely mathematical. For "regular" micro/macro quantum/classical paradoxes, we're generally talking about the classical realm of experiments. But for black holes, it's pure math, of our two fundamental theories of nature, and showing that they don't line up. Though, it's perhaps less spooky because the obvious answer is that one or both of the theories is slightly wrong, so we just need to fix it. The measurement problem, or understanding waveform collapse, I think is the more interesting problem, but that's just me.
Correct, that's why I explicitly said "classical" in that sentence. Classical relativity means our understanding from Einstein's field equations, prior to the information-theoretic approaches.
From what I understand of it the singularity is analogous to what happens in the 2D Cartesian plane with functions such as f(x) = 1/x. When x equals 0, the function itself "breaks down" because the y-coordinate extends to infinity (ie f(0) is "undefined"). In the context of a black hole that means that neither time nor space (hence neither does matter) "exist" at this singularity. In other words upon arrival the falling object has essentially "reached the end of time".
Also interesting to note that not only has Berulis' attorney lead multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration in the past, he was also an intern for both Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. Now that obviously doesn't prove anything, but it could nonetheless be considered a strong indicator this all might be politically-motivated.