Hacker News: IanKerr

New comment by IanKerr in "Rational or not? This basic math question took decades to answer"

IanKerr — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 22:56:57 +0000

Yep, exactly. I glossed over that detail a bit because explaining how a meagre set has a truly zero probability of being picked, while technically still being a possible result of a random process, is a bit messy to wrap your head around colloquially.

New comment by IanKerr in "Rational or not? This basic math question took decades to answer"

IanKerr — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 21:51:43 +0000

>Are irrational numbers even on a number line?

Yes, e is between 2 and 3 and Pi is between 3 and 4. There are geometrical lengths corresponding to each number.

>Isn’t it definitionally impossible to pick it as a “point along the line”?

No, it's mathematically possible to have a random process which picks a random real between 0 and n, with equal probability. Imagine it akin to throwing a dart at a line and picking the point it lands on as the number. Since there are only countably many rationals and uncountably many irrationals (i.e. not just infinitely more, but so many that you could never pair off the rationals with the irrationals, there are just too many) on any such length of the real line, chances are the number you end up with is overwhelmingly likely to be irrational.

New comment by IanKerr in "How I program with LLMs"

IanKerr — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 20:32:24 +0000

We are so, so far beyond that point already. The complexity of the world economy is beyond any one mind to fully comprehend. The microcosm of building black-box LLMs that perform feats we don't understand is yet another instance of us building systems which may forever be beyond human understanding.

How is any human meant to understand a billion lines of code in a single codebase? How is any human meant to understand a world where there are potentially trillions of lines of code operating?

New comment by IanKerr in "AI companies cause most of traffic on forums"

IanKerr — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 18:18:36 +0000

This is the beginning of the end of the public internet, imo. Websites that aren't able to manage the bandwidth consumption of AI scrapers and the endless spam that will take over from LLMs writing comments on forums are going to go under. The only things left after AI has its way will be walled gardens with whitelisted entrants or communities on large websites like Facebook. Niche, public sites are going to become unsustainable.

New comment by IanKerr in "Do We Need a 37-Cent Coin? (2009)"

IanKerr — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 19:32:06 +0000

Now account for the amount of mental overhead required for the average person to calculate change or coinage of a random amount in base two coins, as opposed to multiples of 5 or 10, and see if your 3.19 coins per transaction really saves you time.

New comment by IanKerr in "Hasbro's Trademark for the Smell of Play-Doh (2018)"

IanKerr — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:30:34 +0000

For anyone curious: it tastes like a bowl of salt.

Source: I was an adventurous 5 year old.

New comment by IanKerr in "The Physics of Colliding Balls"

IanKerr — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 17:49:13 +0000

For an interesting exploration of how even the simple physics of two blocks hitting one another can lead to surprising conclusions, I'd highly recommend this 3Blue1Brown video called "Why do colliding blocks compute pi?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsYwFizhncE

New comment by IanKerr in "I Am Tired of AI"

IanKerr — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:45:55 +0000

It's been pretty incredible watching these companies siphon up everything under the sun under the guise of "training data" with impunity. These same companies will then turn around and sic their AIs on places like Youtube and send out copyright strikes via a completely automated system with loads of false-positives.

How is it acceptable to allow these companies to steal all of this copyrighted data and then turn around and use it to enforce their copyrights in the most heavy-handed manner? The irony is unbelievable.

New comment by IanKerr in "Maggie Smith has died"

IanKerr — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:26:28 +0000

She was excellent at whatever she was in. An absolute icon of cinema. RIP Maggie Smith.

New comment by IanKerr in "Small asteroid to hit Earth's atmosphere today"

IanKerr — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 16:19:59 +0000

It's always very impressive to me seeing our ability to detect such obscure objects in advance getting better and better. We'll soon have such good detection capabilities that we may start to take these kinds of predictions for granted the same way we take accurate weather forecasts for granted. Can't wait to see the local meteorologist talking about actual meteors.

New comment by IanKerr in "CSC ServiceWorks laundry machine coin bypass (2023)"

IanKerr — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 17:04:47 +0000

I've had this thought about payment cards for a long time now. Corporations are pulling a reverse Superman III on us and keeping our pennies and dollars on these gift cards and payment cards that can never quite be zeroed out. If you added up all the lost change from all of these cards over someone's life it could be a fairly non-trivial amount of money. Add this up over a whole economy of people and you have millions of dollars of change that you've siphoned out of people by making it too difficult to spend.

There should be a law mandating the ability to convert gift cards or payment cards back into cash, or to reverse the transaction onto a credit card.

New comment by IanKerr in "25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite"

IanKerr — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 16:55:03 +0000

To an extent that's the fundamental issue driving these changes. It becomes increasingly difficult to monetize old material for lack of demand. Should lack of attention from society be enough reason to throw old media into the trash permanently? I don't believe so. We owe it to future generations to preserve what we can.

New comment by IanKerr in "25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite"

IanKerr — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 14:47:10 +0000

We're going to lose so much more cultural history to corporate greed in the next century. Preservation of music, media, games are all being attacked in the name of profits. Future generations will not be able to enjoy the vast wealth we're creating because folks would rather destroy it than make it available for distribution, even for a fee.

New comment by IanKerr in "Windows 11 is now enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission"

IanKerr — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 22:37:15 +0000

I'm imagining this happening to someone on a highly metered connection and blowing through gigs of their limited monthly upload budget before realizing their OS has just gone rogue on them. Treating everyone like they have an unlimited bandwidth budget and greedily using it without permission is just awful behavior.

New comment by IanKerr in "GPT-4o"

IanKerr — Tue, 14 May 2024 13:59:05 +0000

Pretty interesting to me that we're starting to go from humans programming computers to computers programming humans.

New comment by IanKerr in "Akira Toriyama has died"

IanKerr — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 04:44:10 +0000

Absolutely loved everything Dragon Ball growing up. I still get excited hearing about new Dragon Ball movies and series. He'll be sorely missed and his influence on anime will last generations. Far too soon, RIP Akira.

New comment by IanKerr in "Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?"

IanKerr — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 17:33:23 +0000

And that complex higher order being came from where?

New comment by IanKerr in "American workers are demanding almost $80k a year to take a new job"

IanKerr — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 17:07:33 +0000

Fair enough. There still seems to be a disconnect though, as the cost of various goods, such as housing, have far exceeded inflation. Are there any charts that try to track wages against a basket of goods?

New comment by IanKerr in "American workers are demanding almost $80k a year to take a new job"

IanKerr — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 15:57:54 +0000

Those charts show wages growing at an annualized rate of 1.5% at best. Any years with inflation greater than 1.5% were effectively years of wage LOSS, rather than growth. Most of those years had inflation greater than 1.5%.

Edit: this math is bad, see sokoloff's comment below.

New comment by IanKerr in "Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)"

IanKerr — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 17:53:06 +0000

Thanks!