Phew. The pessimism here is kinda... exhausting. But frankly I don't have any material objections
"""
The Mars Religion
When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.
At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.
Outside of NASA, the Mars faith shades darker. It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it's not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave.
"""
Something that’s frequently lost in the discussion I think is that in the long term, Mars is a stepping stone.
While proponents think that Mars should be permanently inhabited and have cities, the larger point is to light a fire under the development of the technologies and techniques involved in crewed spaceflight and human habitats beyond Earth’s gravity well. Mars does this better than the Moon does because it has a higher baseline level of self-sustenance due to its much greater distance, and so if you get to the point that getting people to Mars and having them live there long term is no big deal, you’ve also essentially made humanity a proper spacefaring species — we’d no longer be so tied down to LEO and could have substantial crewed missions traversing the solar system and beyond.
> Getting to Turing completeness can require polynomial CoT tokens, wrt the input problem size.
So, as stated, this is impossible since it violates the Time Hierarchy Theorem.
The actual result of the paper is that any poly-time computable function can be computed with poly-many tokens. Which is... not a particularly impressive bound? Any non-trivial fixed neural network can, for instance, compute the NAND of two inputs. And any polynomial computable function can be computed with a polynomial number of NAND gates.
For some reason, I find it kinda funny you don't just ask the LLM to extract the values for you. Practically, your solution makes a lot of sense -- way fewer tokens, less likely to make weird one-off errors, can verify the response makes basic sense or re-use the code off-line or with sensitive data...
But if I were watching Star Trek, they would definitely just ask the computer to grab the fields and it would be a done deal!
No. Hokusai pre-dated Impressionism by a couple of decades, but his work was known in Paris and almost certainly influenced the movement. Also worth noting this particular work's influence on Impressionist music: see the cover of Debussy's La Mer.
Hmm... but does it taste good? If I'm growing my own tomatoes, I'm going for something delicious like a Pink Brandywine or Cherokee Purple (which, compared to this specimen, is admittedly more brownish red than purple).
I just picked some of my first Purple tomato harvest the other day, they taste identical to regular cherry tomatoes (according to both my mom and me; I will be giving a few more from the second harvest to some other friends and coworkers).
Wow, I did not expect to see David's notation here on HN. The only problem with the notation is that it becomes so second nature that you forget it's not standard!
A lot is lost here by using notation that looks like it is rigorous math, but is actually pretty vague. For example, are X and Y indicators for the same flip? If so, they are mutually exclusive, X=Y is contradictory, and hence P(X=Y)=0. If they are samples from different flips (and your coin is the usual idealized one) then X and Y are independent random variables and P(X=Y)=0.25.
It's just like if X~N(0,1), Y~N(0,1) and you want to know the distribution of X-Y. You need to know what the PDF of (X,Y) looks like. Well, you don't know. X and Y could be correlated or they might not be. e.g. if could be that (X,Y)~N( (0,0), [(1,0),(0,1)] ) or maybe (X,Y)~N( (0,0), [(1,1/2),(1/2,1)] ). The distribution of X-Y cares how correlated X and Y are.
np is the standard alias for numpy, probably the most popular numerical and array processing library for python. So, no, not part of the standard lib at all. But a universal import for most users of the language in any science/stats/ml environment. That said, still a surprising place from which to import a basic stream processing function.
""" The Mars Religion
When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.
At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.
Outside of NASA, the Mars faith shades darker. It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it's not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave. """