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Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 153

Yeah, there's two main problems:

1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.

2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.

Comment Re:Wish Australia had it, even the equatorial part (Score 1) 254

We have DST, but only some states. But the sun coming up at 4:45am in summer sucks up near the tropics and makes no sense.

Well, this particular discussion is about a (not yet enacted) law concerning DST in the United States, and none of the states are in the topics except Hawaii, which does not use DST.

Comment Re:Can't Channge The Universe (Score 1) 254

You can't change the universe, nor the solar system. There's very specific reasons why the Sun reaches its zenith(daily peak) at mid day(12:00).

The sun does not reach its zenith at 12:00.

If you defined noon as the time of the sun reaching its zenith, days would no longer be the same length. Days in northern hemisphere winter would be slightly longer than 24 hours, and days in northern hemisphere summer would be shorter, due to the difference between sidereal time and solar time.

Comment Re:More dead Americans (Score 3, Insightful) 254

Driving to work in darkness, schoolchildren crossing streets, in winter.

When the daylight hours are short in winter, you have to pick some time in which it's darkness. If it's light during the morning commute, it will be dark during the evening commute.

This depends on how far north you are, of course.

Comment most of the US slightly west of their solar time (Score 1) 254

Most US population centers are in places east of the point in their time zones where the sun is overhead (or due south) at noon,

Unless I'm misreading the map, on the East coast, the EST time zone is pretty much centered on where it should be, with New York very slightly east and Washington DC very slightly west of center. The main problem with EST is that it extends west to the city limits of Chicago, while it should change to CST around Toledo.

If anything, most of the population in the US is slightly to the western edge of the time zones, not the east.

Comment Re:LLM output is Grey Goo and Ecophagy. (Score 2) 153

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 4, Interesting) 153

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.

Submission + - Gravitricity energy storage goes bankrupt, but two others keep on trying (autonocion.com)

Geoffrey.landis writes: Gravitricity, a Scottins corporation that proposed using gravitational potential energy to store electrical energy, went bankrupt at the end of 2025. The basic idea is so simple, even a freshman physics student could describe it: use an electric motor to raise a weight up against gravity, and then when you need energy, lower the weight back down, and use the energy to run a generator. The difficulty, however, is in scale. Their proof of concept unit, a 40-ton block of steel falling the height of a 30-story building, stores an amount of energy equal to about eight hours of an average American home’s electricity. Their solution was to go big: there are literally millions of abandoned mine shafts around the world, many of them kilometer and more deep. They proposed a full GraviStore system would hang up to 24 separate weights of 500 metric tons each from cabled winches inside a single shaft. Twelve thousand metric tons of suspended steel, going up and down forever. But turning their concept into a reality ended up spending money faster than it could be invested, and, so quietly it took investors three months to even notice, the company went bankrupt.
But the basic concept may not be dead. Several other companies are still working at turning the concept into reality. And hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines are scattered across the United States, most of them a liability, a few of them with a kilometer of free vertical drop and a hoist house and a grid connection already sitting on site.

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