Viewing profile — radford-neal

The river water picks up silt as it flows to the sea. The silt has to go somewhere. That's why the delta exists, and grows, absent other effects. The river wandering is part of thi…

New Orleans is on a river delta, and without human effects on land, and without sea level rise, wouldn't one expect this delta to expand due to silt deposition? And would this silt…

Those interested in this might find my paper on "Representing numeric data in 32 bits while preserving 64-bit precision" to be of interest. Can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/15…

The very first of the "false or unproven" claims they list is "animal protein is healthier than plant-based protein". And at this level of imprecision, that claim is true ! Animal …

These are good points, but are mostly pragmatic, resulting from the rest of the system not being designed around a tree representation. Of course, that can be decisive in practice.…

Well, I think most common transformations work reasonably well. One usually doesn't want to do things completely contrary to the AST, such as convert "while a And it's certainly po…

Many years ago, I created an editor operating on syntax trees that I think is more "hard-core" than this - that is, only tree-oriented operations are done. There is no parsing of t…

I don't know what political machinations go on in the International Energy Agency, but one has to wonder why they thought it was useful to define a term "renewable" in this way, co…

Nuclear power is "generally accepted" as non-renewable amongst people opposed to nuclear power. Since uranium fuel is not going to run out on any reasonable time scale (and thorium…

"If you want every CPU to support every instruction..," That does indeed seem nice. As long as there's an easy way to enquire about whether an instruction is slow or not, it means …

A recorder is a flute, more specifically, a fipple flute. But there are other fipple flutes, such as tin whistles. (One distinguishing feature of a recorder is the use of the thumb…

"Power-off data retention is increased from 1 month to 3 months." I don't think these are meant for ordinary users. One extended vacation and your data is toast...

The court's ruling has actual legal effect. The inquiry's conclusion is, well, just somebody's opinion. One might also note that the invocation was never approved by parliament (it…

A court has ruled that it did not: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/a-judge-ruled-trudeau...

A basic problem with evaluations like these is that the test is designed to discriminate between humans who would make good lawyers and humans who would not make good lawyers. The …

One hears stories of people with dementia having a day or two of mental clarity just before they die. Could this explain that? Perhaps their bodily processes are failing so much th…

"there is no guarantee that your preprint is accurate with the final, published version, so most people will still trust the paywalled version more than your PDF" I think this is b…

Since we're warm-blooded animals, maybe it's because IR vision would be swamped by the emissions of the eye itself?

Exact addition using accumulators has progressed since the work of Zhu and Hayes in 2010. See my paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05571 (repository at https://gitlab.com/radford…

The commenters here saying "humans cannot win anymore", "there is no chance that humans can beat the best Go AI anymore" are apparently unaware that this is no longer true . See ht…

From 1992: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/44289908.pdf

As the author admits at the end, this is rather misleading. In normal usage, "overfit" is by definition a bad thing (it wouldn't be "over" if it was good). And the argument given d…

So why have a debt ceiling at all? A ceiling makes no sense if whenever it is about to be reached, unconditionally increasing it is regarded as imperative, with any attempt to link…

The "holding hostage" phrasing implies that somehow the House needs to use the debt ceiling as leverage to cut spending. But to cut spending, the House just needs to not approve sp…

I don't know the details of the bill, but doesn't it simultaneously increase the credit limit (avoiding default), while cutting future spending? I don't see any inconsistency.