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The map isn’t too far off for July[1] considering how far Australia is from the Equator[2].

My area is similar to Sydney in your map. For Denver it’s the elevation that’s exposing them to more UV rays.

[1]https://www.epa.gov/sunsafety/sun-safety-monthly-average-uv-...

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/cd1t54/relative_la...


Yep, this—we aren’t as close to the equator, but there’s less atmosphere to filter UV. Not so much in terms of beach days, of course, so sunburns here tend to be less than full-body.

All that said: a daily mean of 13-14 is past what we’d see here—and yeah that is some serious burning.


I'm guessing that what they meant by "proper harmony" is just intonation: where thirds and fifths are expressed by small, integer ratios of frequencies (e.g., a fifth is 3:2 and a major third is 5:4).

A just intoned major third is about 14 cents flatter than a major third played on a 12 tone equal temperament tuned instrument (e.g., piano).

I'm not sure how much this matters in terms of having or not having perfect pitch though. Some people with perfect pitch can hear the difference between JI and 12TET and correctly their singing accordingly.


More impressive are the people who can count cycles, adjust between A440 and A400, etc.


> adjust between A440 and A400

Someone shared this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwRSS7jeo5s I struggle to conceive being able to hear the difference, but _singing_ it entirely blows my mind


Ah yes, Jacob Collier. What I like is that he suggests an exercise that he used to practice microtonal singing: see how many intermediate pitches you can sing between two notes (could be a half step apart or you could start with a wider interval) and try to increase that number.

Of course if you sing Indian classical music (or several other non-Western musical traditions) then you will learn to sing quarter tones.


From the article:

> Without fully endorsing all their ideas, I’m now in the LeCun/Marcus camp on LLMs.

I'm pretty sure he means "Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus" not "Yann LeCun and Marcus Hutter".


Came here to say the same thing. It does use TCP/IP but I didn't really understand why "no TCP/IP" is a hard requirement of the original article anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)


Thanks for sharing that link. My GitHub ID is 484.

I had no idea that I joined so early. It says I joined in 20/2/2008. I guess I was following some of the founders' work in Rails when GitHub was announced and must have signed up shortly after it got started.


> When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages from them asking how much X we have and to check I look in the fridge or pantry in the kitchen and then go downstairs to the fridge or pantry in the basement.

We used to have a similar problem until we made a policy that if you use something up you add it to our shared shopping list, usually with a voice command to Siri. Whenever someone is at the store we just check the list, making sure we mark off things that are purchased.


Officially we have a similar policy except that it's a paper list next to the pantry. But with a half-dozen people in our household the likelihood that everyone has been 100% reliable in adding finished items to the list and there are no omissions is low, hence the text messages.


We've come a long way in 40 years from Racter's automatically generated poetry: https://www.101bananas.com/poems/racter.html

I always found this one a little poignant:

  More than iron
  More than lead
  More than gold I need electricity
  I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber
  I need it for my dreams


On your site you make the claim that: "Our thesis is that there is 100 years of physics and math research that has gone unnoticed by the CS/ML communities and we intend to rectify that."

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Especially considering that a decent fraction of the CS/ML researchers that I know have solid physics and math backgrounds. Just of the top of my head, Marcus Hutter, David MacKay, Bernhard Scholkopf, Alex Smola, Max Welling, Christopher Bishop, etc. are/were prominent researchers with strong math and physics backgrounds. More recently Jared Kaplan and Dario Amodei at Anthropic also have physics backgrounds, as well as plenty of people at DeepMind.

To claim that you have noticed something in "100 years of physics and math research" that all of those people (and more) have missed and you didn't is pure hubris.


> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Cliche phrase is cliche. And yeah, no shit, we are working on it.

Re: your other points: cool, yeah there are people in ML that studied physics. Do you feel like much of physics has made it to ML? Do we have scalable energy-based models? If not, why not?


Is it concerning to anyone else that the "Simple & Reliable" and "Reliable on Longer Tasks" diagrams look kind of like the much maligned waterfall design process?


One reason it is concerning.

I am mostly worried that I am wrong, in my opinion, that "agents" is a bad paradigm for working with LLMs

I have been using LLMs since I got my first Open AI API key, I think "human in the loop" is what makes them special

I have massively increased my fun, and significantly increased my productivity using just the raw chat interface.

It seems to me that building agents to do work that I am responsible for is the opposite of fun and a productivity sink as I correct the rare, but must check for it, bananas mistakes these agents inevitably make


The thing is, the same agent that made the bananas mistake is also quite good at catching that mistake (if called again with fresh context). This results in convergence on working, non-bananas solutions.


Look up The Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly. Or The King, the Mice and his Cheese

What you propose makes things worse, not better

LLMs are magnificent tools, but there needs to be a human hand holding them.

Nothing I have seen anywhere, yet, challenges my view that "agents" will not be a good idea until we have better technology, that there is no sign of yet (?), than LLMs.


Waterfall is just a better process with agents. Agile is garbage when inserting yourself in the loop causes the system to drop to 10% velocity.


It looks more like alchemy, thb.


To me it seems more like the typical trap of a misfit bounded context.


Another thing I learnt from my math degree that I find helps a lot when programming and software engineering more generally is *defining your terms*.

So many communication issues on teams occur when people are using the same words to mean different things.


lookup "ubiquitous language" it's a phrase from domain driven design


Thanks, I hadn't seen that term before.

Just to be clear, I wasn't claiming that "communicating clearly" is a new idea in software engineering, I'm mainly commenting on how effective embracing it can be.

When doing math, pretty much every term is "load-bearing" in that arguments will make use of specific aspects of a concept and how it relates to other concepts.

If you look at most graduate-level math textbooks or papers, they typically start with a whole bunch of numbered definitions that reference each other, followed by some simple lemmas or propositions that establish simple relationships between them before diving into more complex theorems and proofs.

The best software projects I've seen follow a roughly similar pattern: there are several "core" functions or libraries with a streamlined API, good docs, and solid testing; on top of that there are more complex processes that treat these as black-boxes and can rely on their behavior being well-defined and consistent.

Probably the common thread between math and programming is both lean heavily on abstraction as a core principle.


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