I see it as the complete opposite. It's not open source because of ass covering.
The biggest barrier to the licence passing open source requirements is point 0 in the above linked evaluation. Namely that it has a whole lot of "you may not use this for [nefarious purposes...]" type of statements. That seems like ass covering so that this can comply with the responsible AI use laws such as the EU AI act.
Anyone had good luck using llms in a more advanced context?
I’ve tried simple things such as ‘explain general number field sieve giving simple numerical examples’ and had spectacular failures. The numerical examples give a few superficial runs of the sieve with a small number and then ‘well that didn’t work but imagine if it did…’. As in it can’t give functional numerical examples of well established theory. You can come up with examples yourself in 5mins of work. I can’t imagine it being at all useful in an even more advanced context.
As an applied probabilist, you often want to focus on the bigger proof strategy, but end up spending a lot of time with annoying integral computations and long strings of basic manipulations. For example, "compute an integral transform of X", "apply method A to get an asymptotic series expansion of Y", or "derive a concentration inequality for Z". I've found that it is often much faster to get e.g. o3-mini-high to do these first to verify if the answer might help in your proof, like a broader CAS replacement. Then you can go through the working yourself later once the strategy is clear; clean it up, make it rigorous, etc. Overall, this saves me a fair bit of time.
Many still seem to believe that these models are completely unreliable for these sorts of arguments, but I've found the error rate to be around 10% per prompt, about on par with a good student. You get good at checking whether the argument is on track or not, so you can just rewrite the prompt a few times with more detail until a solution looks decent.
I've never had much success with the types of prompts you describe, and I find comfort in knowing that these LLMs seem (at least at present) unable to solve broader research questions. Often, you need to give much more direct questions in the style of textbook questions so it doesn't get too "creative" or "lazy".
I’ve seen papers that show they can do math. There was one recent-ish one HN that showed an understanding of addition. I’m not convinced myself. At least the open weight models don’t seem to grasp integers. Doing conversions are typically a flop as well. My doubt really comes from how abstract mathematics really is. It’s entirely its own kind of terse language and symbolism. Maybe if there was the kind of focus on it like coding there would be better results?
I know nothing about math, but I asked 4.1 your question and it spat out 14 pages, 14 pages of what, I have no clue: I have dyscalculia. https://s.h4x.club/lluby8bg
I'm from a part of the world where people regularly die by going for a walk unprepared (google 'tourist dies in outback' for a repeated history of such).
Having said that i cycled a fair way across Europe in my youth with nothing but a light bag, water bottle and wallet in my pocket.
So basically it depends. Yes you can get away with it in certain parts of the world but i would never argue for unpreparedness since it's way too common for people to die from lacking the basics of preparation.
When you start from a black screen (eg. a monitor) your primary colors that can form all others are literally red, green and blue. Those are the subpixels that every monitor must have as a minimum. These colors will add to white and mixtures of them can make every color humans can perceive (provided your rgb are at the maximum extremes of each color, otherwise your color triangle is slightly smaller than what rgb can actually do). This is called additive color mixing. Start from black and add color.
When you mix paints your are subtracting from white. The primary colors are 45degrees around the color wheel, namely cyan, magenta, yellow. From those you can make alm other colors by subtracting various amounts of the above three colors from white.
Btw do you know what color model matches your eyes the most? It’s additive color mixing. Your eyes literally start by seeing black and as your eyes let in light the cones and rods that are focused around detecting red, green and blue are triggered in various amounts and you see color that way. You don't see color the same way color is formed from mixing paints. You don’t see cyan, magenta, yellow at all. You see in RGB.
So your painting example is really flawed. Subtractive color models are inly useful for paints.
It’s usually written to the end since it’s its not a fixed size and it’s a pain for recording and processing tools to rewrite the whole file on completion just to move the header to the start. You should always re-encode to move the header to the start for web though.
It’s something you see too much of online once you know about it but mp4 can absolutely have the header at the start.
They can playback as loading as long as they are encoded correctly fwiw (faststart encoded).
When you create a video from a device the header is actually at the end of the file. Understandable, it’s where the file pointer was and mp4 allows this so your recording device writes it at the end. You must re-encoded with faststart (puts the moov atom at the start) to make it load reasonably on a webpage though.
> Understandable, it’s where the file pointer was and mp4 allows this so your recording device writes it at the end.
Yet formats like WAVE which use a similar "chunked" encoding they just use a fixed length header and use a single seek() to get back to it when finalizing the file. Quicktime and WAVE were released around nearly the same time in the early 90s.
MP2 was so much better I cringe every time I have to deal with MP4 in some context.
At the expense of quite some overhead though, right?
MPEG-2 transport streams seem more optimized for a broadcast context, with their small frame structure and everything – as far as I know, framing overhead is at least 2%, and is arguably not needed when delivered over a reliable unicast pipe such as TCP.
Still, being able to essentially chop a single, progressively written MPEG TS file into various chunks via HTTP range requests or very simple file copy operations without having to do more than count bytes, and with self-synchronization if things go wrong, is undoubtedly nicer to work with than MP4 objects. I suppose that's why HLS started out with transport streams and only gained fMP4 support later on.
> and is arguably not needed when delivered over a reliable unicast pipe such as TCP.
So much content ended up being delivered this way, but there was a brief moment where we thought multicast UDP would be much more prevalent than it ended up being. In that context it's perfect.
> why HLS started out with transport streams and only gained fMP4 support later on.
Which I actually think was the motivation to add fMP4 to base MP4 in the first place. In any case I think MPEG also did a better job with DASH technically but borked it all up with patents. They were really stupid with that in the early 2010s.
Multicast UDP is widely used - but not on the Internet.
We often forget there are networks other than the Internet. Understandable, since the Internet is most open. The Internet is just an overlay network over ISPs' private networks.
SCTP is used in cellphone networks and the interface between them and legacy POTS networks. And multicast UDP is used to stream TV and/or radio throughout a network or building. If you have a "cable TV" box that plugs into your fiber internet connection, it's probably receiving multicast UDP. The TV/internet company has end-to-end control of this network, so they use QoS to make sure these packets never get dropped. There was a write-up posted on Hacker News once about someone at a hotel discovering a multicast UDP stream of the elevator music.
> If you have a "cable TV" box that plugs into your fiber internet connection, it's probably receiving multicast UDP.
That's a good point: I suppose it's a big advantage being able to serve the same, unmodified MPEG transport stream from a CDN, as IP multicast over DOCSIS/GPON, and as DVB-C (although I’m not sure that works like that, as DVB usually has multiple programs per transponder/transport stream).
It depends a bit on the flight altitude and plane type (newer planes have higher pressure and shorter flights are lower altitude) but i’ve learnt not to have carbonated beverages before flying.
On the bright side the Cruise, Waymo and Zoox's are the greatest thing ever as a cyclist.
They do not accelerate to turn in front of me but instead slow down and pull in behind with patience for their turn off. I have a few areas i need to take up a whole lane for a short time (no bike line) and they don't get angry and honk. In general i feel safe if they are around vs an unpredictable human driver.
I think self-driving cars are going to save a lot of lives. Not Tesla's tech of course, they're too far behind, but the actual on the road right now self-driving cars are fantastic.
When you understand the immorality of taxes, there’s nothing immoral about getting your money back from a government that took it while repudiating the taxes.
But I don't think taxes are in and of themselves immoral.
A human being is a social animal, and each gets a lot of value from the people around us.
These are nice to have:
- clean streets
- police
- non-corrupt judges
- a stable legal framework
- living among educated people
- fire department that just shows up
- not getting bombed and invaded by a foreign army
- much more
These are "true expenses" in that if you didn't pay for them... you'd eventually pay the price for them when you're the victim of crime, fire, or exposure to the illiterate.
If you lived in Galt's Gulch or some gated community in an anarchic society, you'd pay a regular fee for these services, like voluntary taxes.
Taxes are infamously as inevitable as death because the expenses it's meant to pay for are also inevitable. We might as well set up a system.
Government waste is held up as an example of immorality, and some/most governments certainly should be leaner, but some waste & inertia would happen in any large organization, public or private. The only other time a government could be straight-up immoral is if it's persecuting innocent citizens or foreigners for no reason. Thinking through the implementation details of Galt's Gulch makes me think taxes aren't so bad after all.
What makes taxes immoral? People want their government to provide certain services. Those need to be paid for. What services should be funded depends on who you ask. It's interesting how the Nordic people are fine with paying more for strong social safety nets. They see it as an investment in society.
"In her later years"....well, yeah! I will structure my finances that way too. I get money stolen from me yearly by force for "SS TAX", and i surely plan to get every cent back out of it that i can. I will not get even 10% back, but that is better than 0
Did you ever use the streets in front of your house? Ever went to a public park? Ever relied on police to protect your property? Ever needed the help of public health services? Firefighters?
It's funny that you get money stole from you (while you certainly use a ton on infrastructure society provides), but never once considered leaving it behind and go live as a hunter gatherer in some remote place.
> I think it benefits society to fund academic research.
see how you mentally group all these things under one umbrella. No I don’t think sociology research is on the same standing as physics research and I also don’t think all physics research is equal.
Based on the reports coming from Doge I think there are a lot of bad studies funded in the name of science or academic research.
Is this supposed to be a humorous comment, or are you seriously using the reports coming from doge in an argument, as if they were honest reports?
I realise that this comment might come off as antagonistic, and I apologise. But since I guffawed when I read it, as I interpreted it as the former, I'm now curious to find out if I'm correct.
You misunderstood me, I think. I'm not calling doges actions fake, but the reports about how much money they saved. And I call into question the pretense that the projects they defunded were all complete wastes of money, as the head of that department is known to be a habitual liar.
Regardless of money saved the content of the material is a sampling of the kind of research we are funding - grouped under well intentioned labels like “science” or “academic research”.
I use them daily, in not being some poor serf, by not risking famine every year, and not living in a land beleaguered by war.
Those things are sort of like having competent IT security. If they are doing everything right, they will seem like they aren't doing anything at all, but when they are gone all of a destruction and doom is always just a day away.
What kind of consent? On an individual basis? Because the assholes won't pay putting more burden on those who do while the assholes use the further power/capital disparity to corrupt society in their favor. Governmentally we have many times, every time a new government is formed, and there is always the option of the people tearing it all down when it stops doing what it is suppose to when all the other alternatives are made impossible.
Also every society that concentrates power into a larger government through taxation will inevitably invade and destroy or subjugate those who decided they wanted the smallest bare minimum of community support and collective services that leaves them vulnerable.
We're not talking about communities, we're talking about modern countries. Most people aren't willing to pay out of pocket for anything that doesn't benefit them directly, which is why the reason most people give to charity is that its tax deductible. A few might give out of the kindness of their heart or some sense of civic duty, but not enough.
I agree that the primary function of taxation is to fund things that have serious free rider problems otherwise.
But part of the problem is the lack of community structure and expectation that we can centrally fund and manage problems. There are whole communities in the US that lived for generations on civic duty and kindness of heart.
>There are whole communities in the US that lived for generations on civic duty and kindness of heart.
But not entirely. Living in the US means they take advantage of the American capitalist system and infrastructure to some degree, which means they benefit from taxation. And obviously they pay their taxes otherwise the men with guns would have shown up.
And again, the free rider problem is intractable at scale. You can't simply build "community structure" and expect everyone to buy in. If that were possible, we wouldn't need laws at all, we could just expect everyone to play nice. And the fact that most people play nice by default doesn't imply laws aren't necessary.
And we can centrally fund and manage problems. That does work. Look at the numerous public work projects in the US like Hoover Dam, NASA, interstate highways, modern agriculture, the internet. None of that happens if all you can depend on is kindness of heart.
All good things come from God and God’s greatness shines of all the earth, and anything that ever happens is because of God, but for you it’s the State.
Just because a good thing exists does not mean I’m indebted to it. The city may build a really nice park on the other side of town. That doesn’t mean I’m being subsidized or dependent.
The people of Maine did not benefit from the Hoover Dam.
> You can't simply build "community structure" and expect everyone to buy in.
You’re right that we can’t magically recreate communities that were destroyed, but this is actually the default human behavior. Small community cooperate together for common good.
> If that were possible, we wouldn't need laws at all
This doesn’t follow. People’s short term behavior may not align with their long term values.
Crime/sin is traditionally when your passions get the best of you.
The reason we pay for ICMBs is to prevent warmongers like Putin from invading countries which would be bad for the whole global economy. So you get advantage from ICMBs all the time indirectly.
The biggest barrier to the licence passing open source requirements is point 0 in the above linked evaluation. Namely that it has a whole lot of "you may not use this for [nefarious purposes...]" type of statements. That seems like ass covering so that this can comply with the responsible AI use laws such as the EU AI act.
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