You can. This is what the Haversine formula is for.

Oh geez. Listen, nobody tell them yet, okay? They worked really hard on this.

Hence my asking them instead of you.

Perhaps so. That's not what the person I was responding to was talking about, and it's not what I'm talking about.

Nope, the fellow doubled down in a reply. Anyways, you're not the person I was asking, but thanks for... that.

I'm always baffled by what's going through your head, when someone like you posts something like this. Normally I don't bother following up, but this time, sure, why not.

Several professional researchers spent months or years on this research. Several other professional researchers evaluated the results and concluded that they held together and convincingly supported their conclusions. And now you looked at the headline of an article quoting another article quoting the paper, spent fifteen seconds thinking about it, and started wondering about the same confounding factor that literally anybody -- PhD or not -- would think of when even starting to consider this effect.

Do you believe that you have exceptional powers of insight? Or do you believe that the average statistician is fantastically incompetent? Seriously. Not a rhetorical question. I genuinely want to know your thoughts on the matter.

Hm. Maybe. Honestly, I don't see a put-them-all-up-against-the-wall reckoning in the near or medium future... these are large established market participants and politicians won't risk fucking with that unless they have to. And they won't have to: given the general public woo-woo around AI stuff and the lack of actual understanding, thereâ(TM)s plenty of security theatre they can engage in which wonâ(TM)t seriously affect their bottom line. One of the lower half of the big four puts out a whitepaper introducing "altruistic mandate boosting", thereâ(TM)s a mutual pledge to require it, tokens get 3% more expensive and 2% less evil, and the industry as a whole gets a few more years of runway. If you're looking for a real public awakening here, I don't think we're even close.

Ah, but it's not as simple as that. OpenAI and Anthropic are faced with a prisoner's dilemma. Each one stands to gain by having a marginal advantage over the other. OpenAI is deliberately edgelording, talking up how sneaky and clever and potentially world-destroying their models are, because although on balance they don't want us all thinking they're going to destroy the world, however that shakes out, they also want to be the ones with the model that looks so clever it could.

Looks like sooooomeone shouldnâ(TM)t be throwing stoooones

Outrageous! Unthinkable! A degree of failure unparalleled in-.. wait, what?

A great example of "proves too much". If your hypothesized pattern of geologic activity also explains the random trajectories of interstellar debris, it has no real predictive power.

Oh sweetie, no. Claim it. At least embrace your woo.

Jesus. What the hell, man? Is that something you would say to somebody you were talking to in person?

I was a fan of LastPass for many years, but boy, they *systematically* ate through my willingness to support them. The basic concept of cloud-based password safes is entirely sound, so data breaches don't really worry me, but their flawed partition between cleartext and encrypted data, the sheer number of incidents and vulnerability reports (including in their crown jewels, the client software) and above all their tendency to deny and withhold and trickle out details in an attempt to save face, make them a clearly unwise choice.

If you spent time and labor carefully stirring the flour, singing to it, sorting it into little piles and combining those piles, you would still only have a dollar worth of flour no matter how much time and labor you spent.

If you poured the flour into a bread making machine (one capable of matching the quality of the bread you could produce by hand) and napped for a few hours while it did its work, you could still sell the bread for two bucks, even though you hadnâ(TM)t invested significant time and labor.

Expecting direct compensation for the fact of having done labor, rather than for the product of that labor, is the opposite of capitalism.

Hm. Do you actually believe that? Do you actually think the sole purpose of responsible disclosure is to be nice to vendors?