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Comment Re:"Processed foods"!? (Score 1) 154

The actual report uses the phrases "minimally-processed", "shop-bought processed," "ultra-processed" and "shop-bought ultra-processed" food. The actual recommendation is:

"minimising shop-bought ultra-processed foods"

Minimally-processed and ultra-processed food have a proper definitions:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...

Comment Re:Lemme tellya a story about Eve & the REAL A (Score 1) 24

Lots of things have been "such an obvious horror" to people. Most of the time fortunately, someone ignored them.

OMG, imitatio naturae, playing god, entrapping the soul in a machine, sorcery, etc. Some religious factions still think it's a good idea to, for example, force children to die slow agonizing deaths because they think things like insulin, blood transfusions, kidney dialysis or just seeing a physician about that lung infection are "such an obvious horror."

Comment Re:Mathematician commentary included (Score 1) 70

The old method of building chess players was heuristics. You have a bunch of engineers who hopefully know something about chess come up with rules about how good a position is. That's what "heuristics" are.

The thing that made chess computers better than any human and go computers better than all but the very best (or probably all by now) was using neural networks that learn their heuristics by experience. And yes, human mathematicians absolutely do learn heuristics, i.e. "gut feelings" regarding good approaches, promising mehtods, and quite often claim to be "close to a result." They also frequently come up with suboptimal results in the form of proofs that are not quite correct or are overly complicated, and are improved by the original author or others.

Comment Re:Mathematician commentary included (Score 1) 70

I wasn't replying to you.

LOTS of people here have been skeptical that AI can do X where X is pretty much anything, and certainly where X is "formulate novel math proofs."

PS: I don't disagree with you that Sam Altman claiming something isn't good evidence. That was not the subject of the post I replied to and has nothing to do with my reply to not your post.

Comment Re:The researchers concluded... Hmmm. (Score 1) 45

You never get to the point of saying "that's strange" if you can't say "I don't know."

Examples: the discovery of ergot fungus, for centuries attributed to demonic posession or divine punishment; the helicentric solar system, resisted despite centuries of strange behaviour of the planets because of hubris and some old Greek dude; physicians washing their hands between performing autopsies and delivering babies, because lol, what a dumb idea.

Comment Re:Publicity stunt (Score 1) 39

Yeah, big optical telescopes are better in orbit. Not just putting them there, but building them there. The microgravity lets you build mirrors as big as you like, and also get baselines as big as you like. Hey, guess where you can get a lot of quartz to make giant mirrors?

Unless you're at the point where you can literally build them there from lunar resources.

Yes, that is the point. There are both industrial and scientific reasons to go to the moon. Picking up rocks is a scientific reason with some considerable value. But the real payoff for both requires actually developing infrastructure and having a reasonably long term commitment.

Comment Re:Mathematician commentary included (Score 1) 70

I am surprised that a site suppsedly full of computer scientists is the least bit surprised that AI can be good at mathematical proofs. For any formalizable problem you know where you start, you know where you want to end up and you know the legal state transitions. It's a simple tree search that we have, in fact, written lots of standard computer programs to execute.

The difficulty comes because any non-trivial proof is a very big tree search. But learning style AI is really good at pruning really big trees, as we demonstrated quite a while ago with chess and Go.

Comment Re:Publicity stunt (Score 1) 39

How many more moonrocks do we really need? And can't an unmanned craft bring back many more rocks than any manned mission, and much more cheaply?

Pretty much any additional rock would have scientific value, which was your question. Rocks from interesting unsampled locations, like the far side or the south pole have much more scientific value. Potentially we could return them unmanned, but we're still not really at the point where a human with a hammer can be entirely replaced by a robot.

Anything the moon has the Earth has in much greater abundance.

Yes, but a lot of it is inaccessible. We can really only scratch the surface of the Earth and there are often lots of problems doing even that. But the real advantage is, as you put it yourself:

The sheer energy cost of moving anything productive to the moon makes producing all of these things on Earth much more cost appealing.

That's why, if you want to do anything in space, you want to get stuff from space, the moon being the easiest place. Do we want to do stuff in space? Yes we do, certainly for scientific reasons. We are also becoming more and more interested in doing it for industrial reasons. There are lots of processes that might work better in low or zero gravity, some of which have been proven.

I'm not opposed to science, and I'm not opposed to space exploration...but we have not had leaders who have clearly set forth a long-term vision for why we should do this

Our exploitation of space has been scientific, which has had quite good returns, military, the value of which depends on how you value military capability, and prestige, which also depends on your values. The last one gets all the attention and it really shouldn't. The first one is often publicly compromised by the second; the shuttle program, for example.

And the investment is so massive and so cost inefficient,

It's not really. The entire Apollo program, corrected for inflation, cost about 1/3 of a ballroom (Apollo cost realized, ballroom current estimate) or maybe six months of bombing Iran (US cost, not counting Iranian or world cost). The Apollo program, despite being mostly a prestige mission, had lots of spinoff benefits, from electronics to kidney dialysis.

Comment Re:Mathematician commentary included (Score 1) 70

Made up numbers are kind of silly. Especially when they refer to things that aren't easily quantifiable.

If the AI made a non-trivial contribution to a proof then that's interesting. In this case it seems like it did so. I doubt it was something mathematicians couldn't do, but it does seem to be something they hadn't done.

Comment Re:So not a big deal (Score 1) 160

I described transmission, in a hospital in Dallas, to trained medical staff who were warned and taking Ebola-recommended precautions. Your comment:

In countries with functioning public health symptoms, victims are cared for by medical professionals who can avoid coming in contact with fluids.

Let me repeat, because your reading comprehension doesn't seem all that great:

Your ability to not be concerned, and to make up shit you pretty obviously don't know anything about, is due to an army of people who are concerned, and are allowing your elitist ignorance to be merely a character flaw instead of a fatal character flaw.

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I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos. -- Albert Einstein, on the randomness of quantum mechanics

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