Viewing profile — penteract

Did you consider the alternative calculation of how many plants you need to grow to feed yourself? A few thousand potatoes growing simultaneously might do it. That would overestima…

> dependent types and total functions do not scale. I'm not convinced that this is much more true than the claim "correct code doesn't scale". If you add to your code in a way depe…

If you had access to a bunch identical copies of me that couldn't communicate with each other, you'd be able to find many questions I would give stupid answers to. I suspect I'd co…

This brought to my attention the following claim by OpenAI, regarding a logo which does not have any right angles: > right angles introduce the precision and structure that technol…

To check I understand you: the smaller tank with heatpump would consume less energy outside the time window in which energy is free than the large tank with resistive heating, but …

Based on https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=nino3.4 , 1988 is the year from the dataset with the lowest temperature throughout June and July.

There are those who make strong arguments for the opposite. Once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.

The number €115 is in the second chart as the per capita German expenditure on rail infrastructure in 2023. I don't see €477, but it's pretty close to the €480 figure for Switzerla…

It's saying that 40% of the tons of cargo loaded onto ships is fossil fuels, but this makes up about 50% of ton-miles, because fossil fuels travel further on average than other car…

This is the same calculation behind the observation "you spend much longer in front of red traffic lights than green ones". It's an interesting observation, but it's playing games …

> What you want is 40% black onto white to have a similar difference in intensity as 40% white onto black, otherwise your darkmode font will look significantly different at the sam…

> There's no physical underlying lighting process, so it doesn't make sense to use physical light units. I disagree with you here. Text rendering specifically is incredibly complic…

Yes for me (although difficulty varies depending on what you're trying to install). I would have started programming 2 years earlier than I actually did if my first attempt to inst…

The article makes a coherent argument: a) Anthropic believe that AI is an extinction level risk and that they are the only leading AI lab which takes safety seriously. In combinati…

Note that the US military is almost the only customer that Fable and Mythos could safely be sold to while complying with this directive.

I'm a bit more interested in what it teaches about the hyperbolic plane than I am in it's effectiveness as a note taking app (although the way it supports an exponentially growing …

> As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent. Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer c…

I'm open to the possibilty of AI conciousness, and there is some desparation related to the concept of a higher being: There are many people who will categorically rule out the pos…

Very cool. I was expecting it to make circles bigger rather than making needles smaller. Take a near-circle consisting of N lines. As N tends to infinity, the near-circle would hav…

Many people move to London when they want to make money, and move out when they want to do anything else. Pretending that London is independent of the rest of the country's childre…

Lena isn't about uploading. https://qntm.org/uploading

> I don't think it's possible to tile the sphere using more than 20 exactly identical pieces. I was wrong about this (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombic_triacontahedron ). …

Not quite - you need 12 pentagons in a mostly hexagonal tiling of the sphere (and if you're keeping them similar sizes, Gosper-islands force hexagon-like adjacency). I don't think …

No idea if they are doing this, but you can use Gosper islands ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosper_curve ) which are close to hexagons, but can be exactly decomposed into 7 smal…

Your other points are more relevant to the content of the article, but point 2. relates the practical consequences of undecidable type-checking, so I'll reply to that. I don't have…