Viewing profile — alan-crowe

Not a troll. As recently as the 1870s, when Jevons, Menger, and Walras pioneered the Marginal Revolution in economics, this was a deep new insight about elasticity . Imagine yourse…

It is interesting to a pure mathematician. Since it is obviously true, one's intuition is that it should have a simple proof. In particular, the obvious induction ought to work. Th…

That depends on where you live. If nuclear power is trying to match a fluctuating load it needs storage for a day or two, to escape the Xenon dead time. But solar power for air-con…

People with serious illnesses long to get on to a clinical trial, hoping to get the latest and best treatment, even before it is approved. But it is not really like that. Only one …

There is a folk phenomenon, called The Hum https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13752688 https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/xlsdk5/til_t... so my guess is that LLMs see…

As a child, I noticed that the proofs of mathematical theorems were esoteric knowledge, known only to a few adults. I struggled to follow even the simplest proofs, and hoped that o…

In the UK, there are tax breaks for renting out your spare room https://www.gov.uk/rent-room-in-your-home/the-rent-a-room-sc... I've done this for much of my life. It has always wo…

My "importance of privacy" story: I get my gas and electricity from Scottish Power. Recently a rival company, Ovo Energy made a clerical error and sent me a bill, leading to a disp…

I'm still using fvwm2 $ pkg info fvwm fvwm-2.6.9_4 Name : fvwm Version : 2.6.9_4 Installed on : Mon Dec 8 02:01:51 2025 GMT Origin : x11-wm/fvwm2 Architecture : FreeBSD:15:amd64 Ve…

On a 19 x 19 board the ranks are traditionally determined by the handicap needed to give an even game. So a 14 kyu would give 20 - 14 = 6 stones to a 20 kyu. 20 kyu is a rank that …

I'm on the other side of this, meeting a friend two or three times a month to play Go and giving him a three stone handicap on a 13 by 13 board. Sometimes I play a move with a huge…

You seem to be telling a tale of two industries, sports-betting and advertising. The sports-betting industry lobbies for reduced regulation, while the advertising industry sits on …

It is tricky to boycott Amazon because when I search for a product using Google, I get lots of links to Amazon, and not much else. So I look at the Amazon pages to get search terms…

LLMs have demonstrated that "intelligence" is a broad umbrella term that covers a variety of very different things. Think about this story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4484…

What I found most interesting in the article was the frank acknowledgement by J B Rhine that Walter Levy, director of the Institute for Parapsychology was committing fraud. I view …

I've been thinking of the issue like this: a traditional approach to symbolic artificial intelligence frames problem solving as a search of a tree. Do you go depth first, dodging i…

We may be underestimating the effort that goes into cleaning up LLM messes. LLMs learn to program from code bases written by humans. Not just written by humans, maintained by human…

Nuclear powered ships and submarines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion The attraction is that high enrichment permits a smaller reactor and less frequent ref…

I've no idea. I just want to mourn the utter failure of my 2001 prediction that telepresence would displace business air travel. http://web.archive.org/web/20160305121400/http://ww…

LLMs have taught us that there is more than one kind of intelligence. They are definitely intelligent, but not the specific kind of intelligence we were hoping for. We get to be wi…

There is an interesting phenomenon with polynomial interpolation called Runge Spikes. I think "Runge Spikes" offers a better metaphor than "hallucination" and argue the point: http…

I've suggested Runge Spiking as an alternative, non-anthropomorphic metaphor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43612517

Sometimes LLMs put on their novelist hat and insert fiction into contexts that demand an accurate account of the real world. For example, an LLM may invent a legal case that never …

I was expecting ancient history, the story of the Turing Institute in Glasgow. Established 1983. Dissolved 1994. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Institute The article is about…

Conway's Surreal Numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_number#Arithmetic