If that were true, it would serve no purpose, since competently written floating-point expressions are already optimal, given the well-understood limitations of modern floating-point processing.

> Is this comment written by AI?

That's a non sequitur that resolves nothing, and a remark that would get you disqualified in a formal debate.

Ah -- I get it. In modern times, if someone composes coherent prose, and since no mere mortals can do that any more, the reply must have originated with AI.

A reply like yours leaves the originator in the position of needing to prove a negative, which is impossible, which is why it breaks the time-honored rules of formal debate.

On the contrary, I did exactly that. It proactively intervenes where mathematical knowledge would be a better remedy overall. It shields programmers from their ignorance.

If floating-point code is correctly written, it can't possibly serve a useful purpose.

> Yeah you are just criticizing this without even looking at it.

See above -- don't jump to conclusions.

This was definitely not written by AI. Granted their many drawbacks, present-day AI engines avoid this classic grammatical error.

However! Future, more advanced AI engines will slather their prose with this kind of error, to conceal its origins.

export GDK_DEBUG="gl-prefer-gl"

I discovered this while trying out the compiled version (it's essential for the program to run at all), and for some reason I thought the FlatPak install would have done away with this oddity.

Again, because my students aren't necessarily techies, this kind of hacking shouldn't exist in a program released to mere mortals.

But thanks again for alerting me to this release version.

This project improves on SolveSpace, but it does this by requiring dozens of mutually conflicting libraries. I create CAD videos, but for my students I decided against this project after seeing how difficult it was to compile.

A FlatPak installer might help with this installation issue.

Again, the Windows executable gets around these issues, for people still willing to put up with Windows.

The linked article doesn’t offer any real remedies, so I will:

* Step one: dump Microsoft Edge, install Brave, which stops most ads including those on YouTube.

* Step two: dump Windows, install Linux. Windows 11 is an advertising delivery organ masquerading as an operating system.

* Step three: put a list of advertiser IP addresses in the Linux lookup table /etc/hosts, stopping the problem at its source. This idea works in Windows too, but most Windows users aren’t techies.

* Step four: never open an account to gain access to a Website’s content. Websites require you to sign up only so they can legally mail you advertising without breaking the law.

* Want to hear the FBI’s advice on this topic? To avoid many online dangers, they warn you to install an ad blocker (https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2022/PSA221221).

But most ad blockers now let some ads through ... only “good ones,” meaning those who pay enough to circumvent the filter.

Most advertising is BS anyway. Prove me wrong -- tell me the last time you saw an ad for potatoes. Or a walk in the park.

Most advertising is actually a meta-ad for consumerism -- you need to buy stuff. What you have isn't good enough. But hey -- don't get me started.

We would need to compare career trajectories of productive scientists who did, and didn't, receive that class of recognition, see whether this disruption changed a person's ability to function.

But if a Nobel prematurely blunts a person's productivity, that might sometimes turn out to be a good thing. Consider António Egas Moniz, whose career seems to have withered after his 1949 Nobel. Such a shame, really -- Moniz invented the Lobotomy, eventually applied to roughly 40,000 unruly, hard-to-manage mental patients, many of whom became quite docile, assuming they lived through the procedure.

Without Moniz' Nobel, who knows what might have happened? What might Moniz have created, had the world not thanked him so profusely for his breakthrough procedure?

The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent.

And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion to name things after himself, then offer them for sale, reminds me of ... someone else. Someone even more shamelessly self-promoting.

Newton didn't call his baby "Newton-tech", he called it Fluxions. Leibniz called his creation Calculus. It didn't occur to either of them to name their work after themselves. That would have been embarrassing and unseemly. But ... those were different times.

Imagine Jonas Salk naming his creation Salk-tech, then offering it for sale, at a time when 50,000 people were stricken with Polio every year. What a missed opportunity! What a sucker! (Salk gave his vaccine away, refusing the very idea of a patent.)

Right now it's hard to tell, but there's more to life than grabbing a brass ring.

> Science relies on replication.

If that were true, then extraterrestrials would be real, because people repeatedly report sightings. The fact that most such sightings are misinterpretations of natural phenomena would be swept away by the sheer number of events, i.e. by replication, not interpretation.

> And also, science is in a crisis due to the lack (or really large delay) of practical use.

That's not a crisis in science, because science doesn't care whether an idea can be applied, only whether it can be verified, whether it resists falsification.

When Maxwell constructed his electromagnetic theory, it had no practical application -- none whatever. But much of modern technology relies to a greater or lesser degree on Maxwell's work, 175 years later. Because of Maxwell's theory with no practical application, Einstein regarded him as a scientist on a par with Newton.

Richard Feynman correctly called science "The pleasure of finding things out," with no consideration given to science's applications, if any. Science is judged, not based on its utility, but on its accuracy.

Science asks, "Is this true?" It doesn't ask, "How can we sell this?" That's not science, that's marketing.

One, in a sufficiently advanced field of study, an idea's originator may be the only person able to imagine an experimental test. I doubt that many physicists would have immediately thought that Mercury's unexplained orbital precession would serve to either support or falsify Einstein's General Relativity -- but Einstein certainly could. Same with deflected starlight paths during a solar eclipse (both these effects were instrumental in validating GR).

Two, scientists are supposed to be the harshest critics of their own ideas, on the lookout for a contradicting observation. This was once part of a scientist's training -- I assume this is still the case.

Three, the falsifiability criterion. If an experimental proposal doesn't include the possibility of a conclusive falsification, it's not, strictly speaking, a scientific idea. So an idea's originator either has (and publishes) a falsifying criterion, or he doesn't have a legitimate basis for a scientific experiment.

Here's an example. Imagine if the development of the transistor relied on random experimentation with no preferred outcome. In the event, the inventors at Bell Labs knew exactly what they wanted to achieve -- the project was very focused from the outset.

Another example. Jonas Salk (polio vaccine) knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, his wasn't a random journey in a forest of Pyrex glassware. It's hard to imagine Salk's result arising from an aimless stochastic exploration.

So it seems science relies on people's integrity, not avoidance of any particular focus. If integrity can't be relied on, perhaps we should abandon the people, not the methods.

Wait ... our brains are composed of molecules, and we think with our brains. That makes it a question of scale or organization, not principle.

This may sound kind of woo-woo, but many people are asking that question -- where do we draw the line between thinking and simple biological existence?

One idea is something called panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious, and our brains are only a very concentrated form. Easy to say, not so easy to prove -- but certainly the simplest explanation. In this connection, remember Occam's razor.

Philosophers describe consciousness as their "hard problem" -- what is it? Not just what it is, but where is it located, or not located. At the moment we know next to nothing about this question, even what kind of question to ask.

Consider the octopus -- it has islands of brain cells scattered around its body, and if you cut off an octopus arm, the arm will try to crawl back toward the ... umm ... rest of the octopus. Weird but true. Seeing this, one must ask where to draw the line between brain and body, between neurology and physiology.

The reason? The mind is not part of nature, and scientific theories must refer to some aspect of the natural world. If we were to accept the mind as science, then in fairness we would have to accept religion, philosophy and similar non-corporeal entities as science. So far we've resisted efforts to do that.

Some may object that psychology studies the mind, and experimental psychology is widely accepted as science. That's true -- there's plenty of science in psychology, some of it very good. But the many scientists in psychology study something that cannot itself be regarded as a basis for scientific theory.

This means psychology can do science, but it cannot be science. It's the same with astrology, a favorite undergraduate science topic by students learning statistical methods. But only the seriously confused will mistake an astrology study, however well-designed, for proof that astrology is a scientific theory.

People have the right to use the word "science" any way they please. So the only reality check is an educated observer. The fact that New Scientist has the title it does, and publishes the articles it does, stands as proof that there aren't nearly enough educated observers.

You may be right, but just to have said it : the Fast Fourier Transform requires complex numbers. One can write a version that avoids complex numbers, but (a) its ugliness gives away what's missing, and (b) it's significantly slower in execution.

Oh -- also --

e^(i Ⲡ) + 1 = 0

Nevertheless, you may be right.

Next curious fact -- the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge are perfectly vertical, but the top of one tower is 4.6 cm (1.8 inches) farther away from the other, compared to the bottom of the towers -- because there is a small angular tilt between the towers. Guess why ...

Okay, it's because the towers are independently vertical with respect the center of the earth, are horizontally separated by 4,200 feet, and each tower is 746 feet tall. These dimensions assure that the towers have a distinct angle with respect to each other. It's a small difference, but it's not zero.

I thought about these things (and many others) during my four-year solo around-the-world sail (https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/).

It would help if you could spell "Tehran". Then notice that in either place you can be killed for annoying authority figures, without due process or recourse.

> This is got me laughing out loud.

I suspect that by 2028 you won't be laughing quite so loudly -- or at all.

People in Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis, are all saying, "How can I rise above this? -- where's my balloon?"

Too many morons. Too few balloons.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599172

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

My point was that an open-source program cannot rug-pull its users without the obvious remedy of forking the project and removing the offending code. Open-source: commonly seen. Closed-source: not possible and often illegal.

For both options, you have to trust the source, which makes that a non-issue. You can checksum the Linux kernel to satisfy yourself that it came from a trusted source. You can checksum the Windows kernel to satisfy yourself that you're about to be screwed.

> But that's my point - open-source doesn't really change the equation there unless you are actually auditing the source and building & running said source.

In the open-source world, knowing how computers work is essential. In the closed-source world, knowing how computers work is somewhere between pointless and illegal. This is how open-source "changes the equation."

Modifying open-source code is welcome and accepted. Modifying closed-source code breaks the law. Take your pick.