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Submission + - The Exponential Time Hypothesis might be false (github.com)

FeelGood314 writes: OpenAI is claiming a sub exponential time solution to the 3-SAT problem

A non deterministic computer is one that when it has to make a decision it can always guess correctly.
NP is the set of problems a nondeterministic computer can solve in polynomial time and that the solution can be verified in polynomial time on a deterministic computer.
NP-Complete is a set of NP problems that are believed to be hard (i.e. would require exponential time to solve). Further the set of NP-complete problems are equivalent in that you can convert any NP-Complete problem into any other NP-Complete problem in polynomial time. That is to say if you can solve any NP-Complete problem you can solve any other one with at most a polynomial time extra effort.
The 3-SAT (3-Satisfiability) problem asks whether a given Boolean formula in 3-CNF (Conjunctive Normal Form) can be made true by assigning a value of true or false to each of its variables. The 3-SAT problem is in NP-Complete.
Thus if 3-SAT can be solved in under exponential time then all NP-Complete problems can be solved in under exponential time.

Note: sub exponential time still doesn't mean polynomial time.

Comment Why is this the banks problem? (Score 1, Insightful) 64

It's my money. I'm responsible for it. If I give an entity my credentials to my money then I am accepting the risk. Even if I'm a moron and I'm trusting a crypto bro, a gambler or an AI. It is my money, not the banks. I can do with it whatever I want. If the AI, crypto investment or Magic the Gathering card collector makes me 100x return on the investment that the bank thinks I shouldn't have made, does the bank get to keep my profit? This seems like losers wanting to not take any responsibility for the downsides of their actions but I bet they still want the upside. Or maybe the banks can offer idiot accounts that don't let you access the money with out the banks approval for every transaction. And no buying lottery tickets.

Comment Point of stock market is educated gambling (Score 2) 42

The primary purpose of the stock market is to give companies money to invest in capital. Investors are gambling the company will pay dividends or its stock price will go up. If everyone only invested on the bases of future dividends and we didn't have day traders to create liquidity then the companies won't be able to raise as much money for new capital. There are serious inefficiencies in the stock market but this isn't one of them.

Comment The data should have been deleted (Score 2) 36

Crime stoppers tells people not to give personal information in the reports. In the early days most of the tips were phone calls. Crime stoppers then transcribed the calls and then, if someone did leave personal information, redacted it before passing it on to the police. BUT they kept the original information and that's what is also in this leak. This wasn't exposed because of the breach, it was exposed because Crime Stoppers kept information that they should have been deleting!

Comment Not even sure how evil I would rate this (Score 1) 90

VMWare customers let themselves be locked into a service that they couldn't leave and didn't sign long term contracts to ensure a reasonable price. It's kind of like having only one insulin supplier even though the patent for insulin expired 70 years ago. Should the VMWare customers be allowed to die?

One suggestion is to have a set of boiler plate contracts and have companies use these and then certify that the contract complies to the standard. Sellers are completely free to choose the contract they want but having a contract that has a clause against this kind of abuse would make the sellers product more valuable. If I have to pay 2% more for a contract that avoids certain landmines in the future I would likely pay it. I'm sure most people depending on a life saving drug would pay a tiny bit more for peace of mine. The only caveat is to make contracts following the boilerplate optional. We don't want things like landlord/tenant agreements that are dictated by the government and that can be changed in favour of one party after they are agreed to.

Comment I have 5 kids (Score 2) 189

If you want a replacement rate of 2.3 kids per woman its almost impossible to reach without some families having 5 or 6 kids.
Play with the math: assume 10 women.
2 won't find a suitable mate and won't have children,
1 (and a bit) won't be able to have a child.
2 will have only 1 child
2 will have 2.
that's 6 children among 7 women. So the last 3 women need to 5.667 kids each for your 10 women to have 23 children between them. Try other numbers. You realistically can't get to 23 children to 10 women without at least one family of 5 children

Our society makes it hard for people to start families at all. If you want more than 2 children you better start in your early 20s and you better be after tax rich. In Canada they eliminate all family support if you make to much. I've twice been screwed with an effective marginal taxation rate over 100% because, I assume, the government doesn't even consider anyone will have more than 2 children. Vacations and family outings are expensive. Hotel bookings often force you to pay adult rates for some of the children. Even if we fix housing, the s#@t opportunities for young people and the insane redirection of consumption from the working young to the retired elderly, we still won't get to the replacement level.

Comment Nuclear vs coal (Score 2) 145

And coal doesn't get an even bigger indemnity? Coal plants spew fine particles, they spew lead and heavy metals, they have put 100x (likely 1000x) more radio active particles in to the atmosphere than all nuclear plants in the USA ever have. Yes, when nuclear goes wrong it could go very wrong* but coal, you know the thing nuclear almost replaced 55 years ago, always pollutes. If nuclear had replace coal, like most of people back in 1970 thought it would**, then we might not be totally f#$ked with global warming today.

*Three mile island was the worst nuclear incident in the USA and people within 10 miles of it received the equivalent radiation of a chest X-ray.
**Coal mines were going bankrupt in 1970 because the expected future cost of coal was going to be so low.

Comment fruit of the poisoned tree (Score 1) 148

That's my point. If a department has a policy of parallel construction then by that very nature none of the officers can be trusted. The judges should find be finding the officers assertion of probably cause in admissible and all evidence gathered fruit of the poisoned tree. A policy of parallel construction should be so damning to the DHS that DHS shouldn't be able to do any searches based on probable cause. Most of the DHS would need to be cut and an entirely new department created that wasn't tainted by this policy.

Comment Wouldn't any judge throw out every case? (Score 2) 148

If a department has been known to use parallel construction as policy, I can't see how any judge would ever trust officers from that agency ever again. A defense attorney should be able to get nearly ever case that required probably cause for a stop or search to be thrown out. This seems like something that the justice department should instantly correct.

In Canada, when our RCMP was doing improper eaves dropping on people's communication our Prime Minister was so angry he took their power to do most eaves dropping away completely and create an entirely separate agency. I would assume the USA would function similarly.

Comment Negative prices are powered by stupidity (Score 2) 246

The primary driver of negative prices is wind and political stupidity. In places like Ontario, Pennsylvania and Ohio the wind blows the hardest at night in late February early March, exactly when demand is the lowest but our politicians have guaranteed the operators of the wind farms that they will buy all the energy they produce.

Every aspect of the electric grid is governed by stupidity at a level unprecedented in any other industry. Fixing it is impossible as voters think electricity is easy and our media is terrified of math so there is no chance Joe public is going to get educated on it.

Comment Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM (Score 3, Insightful) 46

And the ROM only had 4K of addressable memory.

Let that sink in a moment. The graphics were not great but the games worked, were playable, were responsive and used 1/500 000 000 the power of the PC I'm writing this post on. Modern programs are bloated in every possible way, graphics, computations, messaging ....

Comment How can Americans help (Score 1) 229

Short term - tourism dollars and boycott red state products.

Longer term - show up for your primaries both Republican and Democrat and choose more moderate and economically literate candidates. In a normal world no one would vote for the majority of your corrupt, incompetent and out right insane options but when faced with two terrible options most people end up vigorously defending their lizard.

Comment It's not the language it's the management (Score 3, Interesting) 65

The C code at most large companies I've worked at has been total crap. My high school CS teacher probably wouldn't have accepted the code from my last company even to mark it since it lacked descriptions of the projects and comments. This isn't something that can be fixed with a new language. C at least won't compile if someone is an idiot so usually about 25% of the C devs are worth the air they breath which is far better than the JavaScript devs. The issue is managers wanting steady, easy to measure progress but not wanting to invest any time in understanding the project. Concurrency issues are solved by architecting the code correctly but if you only measure progress by how fast a jira ticket is solved by an engineer who has been on the project for 2 hours then you get people manipulation buffers in interrupts as well as in the single thread of the application. If there are no comments about what a buffer is then yes, pointers to it will be miss used. C code runs fast, has a small image size, I can bash memory directly, that's the point. If you don't plan your code, if the logic is never written out then it doesn't matter what the language is, your code will do the wrong thing. Memory bugs are just easier to find but making the language convoluted to stop stupidity just makes it harder to find stupid programmers and even harder to find incorrect logic. Rust is bad coders solving the wrong problems. If, as a manager, your devs can't simplify the architecture enough to explain how the code will meet the functional requirements then either the devs suck or you shouldn't be a manager..... and if you don't have a clear functional requirement, even if you know it will change next week, then you as a manager aren't doing your job.

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