...when your brand new phone refuses to be activated on their network, even though you bought it from them> No activation = no connection = app is useless. Can't call them either because, you know, at that point the phone doesn't work.
And yes, it has happened to me.

For T-Mobile, that works great. You have a customer who's paying you and you don't have to provide service for.

Of course, I guess the other assumption is you have access to another phone or something - either your spouse or your kid, or a work phone. Or maybe a landline.

Oh, so if Trump can cancel the next election, he simply remains president?

If Trump can cancel the next election it becomes a moot point. The presidency will be determined by the results of the ensuing civil war.

It looks very much like there were suicides as a consequence of a poor mental health system in the country. There's no logical reason to kill yourself for having to redo an exam. These cases nearly always have something far more significant going on mentally.

You realize a lot of these countries have the One Big Test(tm) that literally decides your fate, right? Basically at the end of your high school education, you take One Big Test and it determines your future. Do really well and you often get a full ride scholarship to an overseas university (basically any university you want to get to - UK, US, Canada, etc). Do well and you get a scholarship to a local university. Do OK and you might be able to get into university if you can pay for it. Do badly and it's either trades or that's it, you're a poor laborer.

It's often so big many of the countries demand complete silence while the exam happens - they will cut back traffic, cut internet access, stop flights, etc.

And yes, these countries have a LOT of teenage suicides. Many students succumb to the pressure - not just the pressure to do well, but pressure from family. In fact, many students have been known to be disowned by their family for not doing as well as they were expected to. (I.e., if you were expected to get the full overseas scholarship and only get local university scholarship).

Students will spend 18 hours a day being tutored and studying for the exam - literally all day and all night in the leadup.

It's one of the advantages of the American system - in that you get second chances. If you fail your university entrance exam, you can often take it again, usually the next year. Same with basically any critical exam - fail the bar, you can take it again the next time (6 months later, though). It's not consequence free - you have to wait for the next exam to be held, and you lose any time opportunities like jobs and such that might be waiting on successful completion. But you get second chances, because at least we've recognized that things happen. You might do poorly because a family member passed at an inopportune moment.

Many of those suicides happened because they put their work into studying for the exam - literally put their life on hold for a month or more and many cannot contemplate having to go through it all over again.

True, but it's almost always faster than the flow of electrons...well, if it goes at all.

They're both quite different from the US, but saying they're about the same is both weird and wrong. The Chinese are rebuilding the imperium, which was sometimes good and sometimes quite bad. The Russians...they seem to be in the process of destroying their country. The reports I have heard are now a couple of decades old, but they indicated that they country was largely run by non-government-based gangs.

No. But Cornish, however...

Well, Apple *appears* to be doing the right things. This may be accurate, but don't feel too certain.

So your mistake is thinking they're all alike. (Unless that was sarcasm or other humor.)

That's not really true. Consider the ABC proof. It is probably valid, but it uses math that almost nobody who is an English speaker can check. The author is currently translating it into a form that can be read by LEAN (an automated proof-checker). If it passes LEAN, there still won't be many mathematicians who can understand it.

I *think* a lot of those claims are unverified PR announcements by Chinese companies. They *MAY* be correct, but I tend to doubt PR announcements.

So far the evidence seems to indicate that they're still using as many high-level NVidia chips as they can get. I suspect research is being reported as developed systems. If the reports (understood in that light) are accurate, your estimate is correct, but your timeline is off by perhaps 5 years.

IIUC, the proof is verified by Lean, which is NOT an AI, but is rather a deterministic proof checker, and highly trusted.

Sorry, but that's not what reasoning models are doing. Don't trust the logs as accurate traces of their thinking.

OTOH, since the output is a proof, you don't need to even consider the log. Just check the proof, and (if properly formulated) there are deterministic methods of doing that.

Saying 1,0 *is* an integer is false. It converts to an integer. Whether it equals an integer depends on how you represent floats...though in every implemented system I'm aware of 1.0 does convert to 1. However saying 1.0 is within epsilon of 1 is true for every floating point system using a normal meaning of epsilon.

OTOH, they didn't use up the AI in solving the problem, so it's still there to be used for something else. So you can't really count all the cost of building an training it against a problem that it solved as a test of its capabilities.

Actually you've got a pretty good guess that the problems are quire hard, and a reasonable chance that they are indeterminate (unless they involve a finite subsection of math).