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Accurate weather forecasting has been one of the major achievements of the 20th and 21st century. Computing power is a central piece of this story, but it's also important to remem…

Clench the other fist while writing. This loosens the writing hand. Something in the subconscious releases tension in the other hand. It's a trick I've used with reasonable success…

What I think is really going on is an attempt to segment the market in favor of Google's strengths. It's a bet that models are "good enough" for many use cases even before they rea…

I've heard of capture technologies that literally pump organic matter down far enough that it sinks to the seabed (high enough pressure collapses air bubbles and results negative b…

It seems that we have two different stories here: in one, the new optimization theory represents a stark departure from the prior art, a sort of revolutionary new view of the under…

Yes, apologies, I didn't read the articles you linked before posting this. I did update the comment. I don't think this changes the point, which is that most optimization methods u…

I'm sorry this comment didn't sit well with you. My goal was to induce discussion by describing the claimed result (which was buried in the post), not to discourage it. If you have…

I'll point out that "does not work" is not the same as "not as efficient" :) But it does seem the Adam paper had an error. I think that Nesterov's first order method is the most ef…

I'd push back on this. Most of the core optimization techniques (eg, ADAM, stochastic gradient descent) are straight out of the convex optimization literature. Generally you need t…

I know a bit about this field. This conjecture reads as somewhat more niche than the cyclic double cover conjecture recently proved by OpenAI, but nevertheless represents a real co…

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An example that came up in the article is medicine (or more precisely a medical patent), which also clearly has an extremely strong time value, particularly for lifesaving medicine…

My read was that MC = "market clearing price" not "marginal cost". Being a bit more humble, perhaps the lesson is that the difference between the theory and reality highlights exte…

The tails could be heavy, it's true. This could make my usual 1-in-1000 heuristic overly conservative. Let's go with that, heavy tails. The data shows we are at something between a…

Fair, I had to click into the full size (I pinch zoomed on my phone). But now the fact that 1988/1989 are outliers raise a few more questions about the variance calculation. In par…

With a headline like that the graph should be at the beginning. Usually you'd put it up front and then talk about the graph, not put it at the bottom and talk about how people aren…

Yeah, interesting finding in the headline, the rest is just Claude.

Seems to me that both perspectives are true, and the relative importance of the metric incentive vs the discovery incentive varies. But the metrics and rewards are critical to the …

They can happen mid-year too. They usually don't for this reason, but they can.

You may be relived to know that Unix epoch time does not have this problem. But you may also be horrified to know why. First, epoch seconds are not the numbers of seconds since 197…

My understanding the problem is that GLONASS is aware of leap seconds at all. It sends messages in UTC, which has this leap second funny business. GPS uses a special "GPS time" (so…

Glonass is correct. On mobile, thanks for the correction.

In short, yes, the weather, geology, and signicantly, human movement of water via aquifer draining and dam building, as well as glaicial and ice melts, all contribute to unpredicta…

A quick skim of the article suggests it's a study of the implications of allowing query planning in programs which are notionally finite but may have unbounded computation. Interes…

Right. Maybe a better and more humble title is "Identifying General Instances of Market Collusion is NP-complete". Not as headline grabbing, but more in line with the actual result…