Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment "The" or "A"? (Score 2) 3

I don't want to diminish the accomplishment; that seems like a very cool dataset and probably one that was really fiddly to pull together; but, if you are talking single-neuron resolution; I am curious about whether you can still call an individual sample "the human brainstem" rather than "a human brainstem" and what comparative purposes you can use it for without running into trouble with cases where there are multiple ways for a brainstem to be adequately healthy, so long as certain requirements are met, so you'll need considerably more samples to draw useful inferences about exactly what the problem abnormality is.

Same sort of thing as when "sequencing the human genome" was a big project. Obviously a major exercise in gene sequencing and a basis for situating subsequent sequencing operations; but once you start talking detail there isn't 'the human genome'; literally everyone has one; and it turns out that different differences matter or don't at radically different levels.

Presumably the methods used to do it once will be helpful in doing it more often in the future; but I'll be curious what we discover about the balance of 'normalcy' vs. some relatively subtle and confusing combination of surprisingly variable ways to have a brainstem that seems to work just fine along with surprisingly subtle, no ghastly big lesions, ways to have one that ends up being totally dodgy.

Comment The large print giveth; the small print taketh... (Score 1) 75

I find "NOTE: Experiences vary by region." to be a bad sign for something that would be so trivial for MS to alter the behavior of; and where they are obviously not earnestly making improvements that were previously impossible but grudgingly rolling back bullshit they thought they could get away with.

Probably means good news for users in the EU; same way they get left out of some of the most egregiously bullshit 'AI' stuff; may help EDU and enterprise; but I'm guessing that it's no promises for less favored users.

Comment Re:LLM output is Grey Goo and Ecophagy. (Score 1) 78

Or let's put this another way. Show of hands - how many of you "spicy autocorrect" / "stochastic parrot" people had "AI will start mass-solving Erdos problems" on your forecast list a couple years back? Huh, none of you? Fascinating!

Take some time to reassess your priors. And while you do so, understand that, yes, they are doing logic / reasoning.

Comment Re:LLM output is Grey Goo and Ecophagy. (Score 1) 78

They weren't discovered by an LLM. They were known conjectures that were proven by an automated solving language that was linked to an LLM.

I'll take "Things That Didn't Happen For $200", Alex.

Only a handful of meaningful proofs have ever been done by automated formal theorem solvers (the Four Colour Theorem being the most noteworthy example - but its proof is so long that humans can't verify it). By contrast, AI tools have been solving Erdos problems en masse. The majority of them just bog-standard commercial models. In case you need help, the only ones on that list that were hybrid (AI / non-AI) in the actual solving phase are:

1) AlphaProof / DeepMind Prover Agent / AlphaProof Nexus
2) Aristotle (Harmonic)
3) Seed Prover / Seed Prover 1.5 (ByteDance)
4) AxiomProver (Axiom Math)

In each of the above, LLMs come up with the lemmas / strategies but then use Monte Carlo search ("brute force") or likewise to investigate what they came up with. These are a minority. In the "AI Standalone" category, these "hybrid" tools made up only ~20% of attempts and successful proofs. Hybrid tools actually made more of a contribution in the "AI Alongside Literature" (related literature found afterward) and even more of the "AI Building On Literature" (related literature known beforehand) categories, which is the opposite of what people like you expect.

And even with the hybrid tools, it's still the AI doing the heavy lifting when it comes to strategy. Non-AI theorem solvers, again, don't have a spectacular record for churning out novel proofs to unsolved problems. Tools like Lean are more about mathematical rigour - a passive environment that requires a driver (a human or AI) to feed it actual strategies, lemmas, and proof steps. And no, you cannot brute force "strategy" in the vast majority of cases, which is, again, why automated theorem solvers don't have much of a track record with unsolved mathematical problems.

Let's take a random example: the disproof of the unit distance conjecture. It was solved purely by a general purpose commercial GPT model, not custom-trained to mathematics, with no external tools. Read what the various mathematicians reviewing / commenting on it have to say (sections #3 and onward). Seriously, don't skip reading them, actually read them. This was one of Erdos's favourite problems. He mentioned it commonly in his lectures. Essentially every mathematician working in complex geometry has thought about this problem. The approach that the model came up with was highly novel approach, based on CM-fields and class field towers.

I know you don't want to accept this reality, but it is the reality, so you better improve your ability to accept it,. The field of mathematics is already doing so.

Comment Re:From the article it's just browser fingerprinti (Score 2) 64

I suspect GP's point is that every malware blocker in every browser is likely to treat this kind of script as hostile, except for Chrome because Google are currently nerfing the ability for blockers to intercept hostile scripts in one of the most blatantly user-hostile changes they've ever made.

If Apple play along with Safari then every other browser and its malware blocking plugins are about to be toast in a huge retrograde step for Internet privacy. But not even Cloudflare is going to get away with blocking every iOS device if Apple continues to allow blockers to intercept this kind of script.

Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.

Comment Re:"Reasoning" (Score 1) 187

You are speaking irrelevant nonsense. LLMs are trained in words

They are not. They are trained in tokens. Tokens do not align with word boundaries, and an arbitrary word can be tokenized in many different ways.

and they think in words

They do not. They don't even think in tokens. The process is: words are split to tokens, tokens point to an embedding position (latent space) while RoPE encodes a relative position, and all reasoning is done within latent space, which is not at all verbal (concepts are directions in latent space, and math is done on concepts, not words).

Comment Re:Why not put a generator on the engine? (Score 1) 46

Also, a note: when spec'ing a generator, you need to know how much you're planning to use it vs. batteries. If it's only going to be used rarely, you prefer low mass, low volume, low cost, and low maintenance when unused (at the cost of low efficiency and higher maintenance in use), whereas if it's going to be used a lot, you prefer high efficiency and low maintenance cost in use, even if at the cost of higher mass, volume, cost, and maintenance when unused. In the former case, you'd prefer to allocate that extra mass, volume, and money into a larger battery pack.

Comment Re:Why not put a generator on the engine? (Score 1) 46

That's why you don't use a tiny petrol generator? Diesel generator efficiencies are roughly:

Small backup generator (1-15kW): ~20-28%
Midsize backup generator (20-200kW): ~30-35%
Large industrial generator (200-2000kW): ~35-42%

Also, ironically this company's plan of the trailer providing a boost will actually make the tractor less efficient. ICE engines use "brake specific fuel consumption" (BSFC) graphs to plot their efficiencies across different RPMs and different torques. You can see an example for a small diesel engine here. Note that they require very high torque conditions and relatively high power conditions to be efficient. You can change the balance between torque and RPM within a given power band (blue) via gearing but gearing doesn't change what power band you're in. If you're in a low power band, you're fundamentally forced into inefficiency (note also that you're not going to be driving around at 1000 RPM just over a stall all the time).

Indeed, if you were forced into a low power band, you'd actually be better off with a series hybrid powertrain, as the engine can alternate between operating in an efficient powerband and shutting down. Of course, parallel hybrids are more efficient than series (albeit with added complexity and mass).

Comment Re:between 165k and 222k usd? (Score 2) 46

Unfortunately, the math doesn't work that way (even ignoring that a 400kWh battery is very small). Battery packs taper the closer you get to full, they're not a constant power all the way. Unless your battery pack can take 400kW at 80%, you're not charging that quickly.

Also, while 40 mins is fine in Europe (breaks: 45 minutes every 4,5 hours of driving... though using 70% of a 400kWh pack on a loaded class 8 truck going even at a slow 80kph will only take you 2 1/2h of driving in "average" conditions, so the truck's range is fundamentally undersized), the US is 30 minutes total break in 11 hours of driving, so ~6 hours on your first leg and ~5h on your second leg with 30 minutes to fill that 5h of driving. And US speed limits are usually faster for trucks than in the EU, so higher consumption. EU really needs 600kWh and >=600kW charging, while the US needs 800-1000kWh and >MW charging.

Note that in all of this we're assuming efficient-shaped trucks (Tesla Semi or the like), not your typical EU bricks, along with a well optimized powertrain and an efficient tyre config. If not, you need to increase those packs and charge powers further.

Slashdot Top Deals

A penny saved is a penny to squander. -- Ambrose Bierce

Working...