Comment Automatic verification (Score 2) 146
Some important background for this is that, around 1900, mathematics got formalized to the point that there is a standard for whether a proof is valid or not that doesn't depend on humans thinking about it, just doing a bit calculation following an algorithm. However, it is such a large calculation that nobody wrote complete formal proofs or verified all of the steps (since they'd be spending huge amounts of time on obvious parts, and not the novel aspects). Then, in the past 20 years, people have made computer systems that work on complete formal proofs while showing you the interesting parts, with the rest in macros, and check these proofs automatically. This means that finding proofs has the form of things like what AlphaZero is good at: something to check if moves are legal and a win condition. However, only a relatively small portion of mathematical research has been put into Lean so far, and that doesn't include the sorts of obscure results that often turn out to be useful in other problems. So the current wave is using LLMs to find results in the literature that might be relevant and producing formal versions of them, game AI to put them together, and deterministic validation to check each of these as it goes along and then people can see at the end that the calculation shows the proof is valid. The only part requiring mathematicians is checking that what the proof proves is what they understood the open question to be.
Comment Dozens! (Score 1) 100
But it turns out dozens more police officers have also misused Flock...
One of any crime is too many, but "dozens" in of a country of hundreds of millions is not a reason for panic.
Comment Yep (Score 2) 65
"Artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies," he told a trade magazine earlier this year. "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress. It's the future."
Yep. It's like claiming that you aren't going to use computers in the making of movies. It's just ridiculous posturing.
Comment Huh (Score 1) 58
Comment Well then (Score 1) 97
Comment How is it "slop" ... (Score 2) 85
Comment But ... but ... (Score -1, Offtopic) 47
The warning comes after hackers targeted more than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota in an attack that had hallmarks of Iranian meddling, according to a law enforcement official.
Gee, how could Iran find allies in Minnesota, lol
Comment Of course (Score 1) 77
Comment Re:The evidence (Score 1) 49
b) contacted eBay directly, which had a security team respond in good faith, and the whole plan unravelled.
Oh
I had dropped in to mention that, about the misleading headline.
Comment Eh, well, why not? (Score 0, Troll) 192
I mean if you can get a degree in "gender studies" or whatever, then why not?
This isn't any less real than all that.
Comment Yikes! (Score 1) 222
Comment Re:Who would have thought (Score 1) 229
Now back in reality, there was no "police raid". There were two duty officers executing a warrant at the house of Niehoff, which they promptly decided to *not* actually do after a sensible discussion with the guy. The house was never searched, and the reason behind the granting of the warrant was investigated and determined to be invalid.
And
Comment Re: WTF is an ESR? (Score 1) 55
Eric S. Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", which inspired Mozilla to make their browser open source. For some reason, this means they name their extended support releases after him.