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10 posts total
Greg Egan

Don’t forget that in 2025, the days of the week will be determined by your favourite LLM, trained on day/month pairs from 2004-2023.

So Jan 2 will have odds of:

1/10 of being Tue or Thu
3/20 of being Wed, Fri, Sat, Sun
1/5 of being Monday

1 January at 12:17 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
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j_bertolotti

@gregeganSF What I am reading is that there is a small but nonzero chance of every day being Saturday/Sunday!

1 January at 12:25 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Ramón Corominas

@gregeganSF @brucknerite Time travel finally achieved in 2025! 😉

1 January at 13:27 | Open on mstdn.social
Paul C.

@gregeganSF
gist.github.com/calhounpaul/85

My pet goat wants to know what day of the week was 2024-01-01. So tell me so I can tell my goat.
> A: Monday

What day of the week was 2023-12-25? Please tell me. Please. I need to know. Now now now.
> A: Monday

What day of the week was februblary fourteenth, twenty twenty-four?
> A: Wednesday

There was this peasant revolt at Oxford university on the 10th of February, 1355. What day of the week was that?
> A: Monday

Feel free to use my api while it's up.

@gregeganSF
gist.github.com/calhounpaul/85

My pet goat wants to know what day of the week was 2024-01-01. So tell me so I can tell my goat.
> A: Monday

What day of the week was 2023-12-25? Please tell me. Please. I need to know. Now now now.
> A: Monday

What day of the week was februblary fourteenth, twenty twenty-four?
> A: Wednesday

1 January at 13:31 | Open on m.pcgt.link
Greg Egan

Where is the button labelled “Dear Apple marketing department: stay the fuck out of my face while I’m trying to work — and at all other times as well.”

Pop up query that reads “Enjoying Pages? Click a star to rate it on the App Store.” Buttons below read “Not Now” and “Submit”.
22 Nov 2024 at 4:35 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Glyph

@gregeganSF It's in the App Store, in Settings, called "In-App Ratings & Reviews". Just turn that off and you won't get these prompts.

22 Nov 2024 at 4:58 | Open on mastodon.social
Greg Egan

The first chapter of “AI Snake Oil” by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor" is free to read onine:

press.princeton.edu/books/hard

12 Sep 2024 at 10:40 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Greg Egan

Candidatus Thiomargarita magnifica: a bacterium visible to the naked eye with half a million copies of a very large genome.
science.org/doi/10.1126/scienc

14 Aug 2024 at 12:56 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Markus Redeker

@gregeganSF This reminds me of Acetabularia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetabul), a genus of single-celled algae that are 4-10 cm tall.

There must be a whole subculture of single-celled organisms that do not care for size limits! 🦠

14 Aug 2024 at 18:35 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Greg Egan

A fascinating and disturbing look at how finite-element engineering simulations, though potentially very accurate, are nonetheless sometimes wildly wrong thanks to old/misused code, and dodgy shortcuts that Gilbert Strang calls “variational crimes”.

scientificamerican.com/article

10 Jul 2024 at 3:54 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Greg Egan

Wow, lucky people in Sydney are seeing a fairly rare kind of soliton cloud known as a “roll cloud”: tubular clouds that appear to be rolling across the sky.

abc.net.au/news/2024-06-04/nsw

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcus_cl

Three long, low, parallel white tubular clouds, against a backdrop of higher clouds and blue sky.
4 Jun 2024 at 8:45 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Matthew Kenworthy

@gregeganSF Damn, that's on my bucket list of atmospheric phenomena, I'm envious!

4 Jun 2024 at 8:54 | Open on mastodon.social
Greg Egan

“No planet in our solar system experiences a total solar eclipse by one of its moons, where the moon completely covers the sun from an observer's perspective on the planet's surface.”

That will disappoint a lot of people in April.

This whole answer is amusingly addled. I doubt many humans would construe this question to mean “Can a planet’s moon ever block out the sun completely *across the entire planet*?”

FWIW, at the top of Jupiter‘s atmosphere Ganymede looks about two-and-a-half times bigger than the sun.

“No planet in our solar system experiences a total solar eclipse by one of its moons, where the moon completely covers the sun from an observer's perspective on the planet's surface.”

That will disappoint a lot of people in April.

This whole answer is amusingly addled. I doubt many humans would construe this question to mean “Can a planet’s moon ever block out the sun completely *across the entire planet*?”

Question: From the top of the atmosphere of which planets in the solar system can the sun ever be wholly obscured by one of the planet’s moons? Gemini: No planet in our solar system experiences a total solar eclipse by one of its moons, where the moon completely covers the sun from an observer's perspective on the planet's surface. Here's why: Relative Sizes: Compared to their host planets, moons in our solar system are significantly smaller. Orbital Distances: Moons also orbit much closer to their planets compared to the Sun-planet distance. These factors together ensure that no moon can cast a shadow large enough to completely engulf the entire planet, blocking the sun entirely. Additional points: While some moons like Jupiter's Ganymede and Saturn's Titan are larger than the planet Mercury, their orbital distances are still significantly smaller than the Sun-planet distance, preventing a total eclipse. Even on Earth, where the Moon is relatively large and close, the Moon's shadow only covers a small portion of the Earth's surface during a total solar eclipse. Therefore, no planet in our solar system experiences a complete solar eclipse caused by its moon.
13 Mar 2024 at 12:27 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
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Kagan MacTane (he/him)

@gregeganSF There's also the part where everything it says about orbital distances seems to get parallax backwards, claiming that because the moons are so close to their parent planets, they can't cover the whole sun.

13 Mar 2024 at 15:18 | Open on wandering.shop
Juan Carlos Muñoz

@gregeganSF One day we'll find out that the servers behind these AI chatbots are just a room full of reply-guys typing on a computer. I'm not going to use the usual "monkeys with a typewriter" metaphor because I'm pretty sure even monkeys would do a better job at answering these questions.

13 Mar 2024 at 15:19 | Open on mastodon.online
jz.tusk

@gregeganSF

Could you mark stuff like this as "AI generated" in the future, even though you're posting it just to show how bad it is? There are lots of us who are avoiding it like the plague, and so don't instantly recognize the source from appearance of the screen, and so have to spend time figuring out that it is AI nonsense. Thanks!

13 Mar 2024 at 15:53 | Open on mastodon.social
Greg Egan

The fallacies about bad software:

• If software would do harm, it won’t be deployed.
• If it *does* get deployed, the harm won’t be significant.
• If the harm *is* significant, it will quickly be identified, acknowledged and rectified.

Australia has gone through its own horrendous episode of persecution and suicides with the Robodebt scandal:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt

so I’m looking forward to watching the acclaimed dramatisation of the UK’s Horizon scandal:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_

“Mr Bates vs The Post Office”, which screens on Channel 7 / 7plus in Australia starting next Wednesday.

Needless to say, everyone rushing to insert LLMs into every conceivable nook and cranny of the commercial, scientific, administrative and judicial systems should be strapped to their chairs with their eyelids pinned open and made to watch this fifteen times.

The fallacies about bad software:

• If software would do harm, it won’t be deployed.
• If it *does* get deployed, the harm won’t be significant.
• If the harm *is* significant, it will quickly be identified, acknowledged and rectified.

Australia has gone through its own horrendous episode of persecution and suicides with the Robodebt scandal:

9 Feb 2024 at 10:47 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
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Paul Cantrell

@gregeganSF @dgoldsmith I only regret that I have but one boost to give to this post

9 Feb 2024 at 17:49 | Open on hachyderm.io
Qybat

@gregeganSF The post office scandal isn't really about the software failure, but the institutional failure of the post office legal department. They took the most adversarial possible interpretation of an adversarial legal system - their job was to get that guilty conviction at any cost, including deliberately quashing any evidence or investigation that might cast doubt on their prosecution. The software flaws went undiscovered because the PO was actively blocking any possibility of audit.

9 Feb 2024 at 18:43 | Open on batchats.net
Kent Pitman

@gregeganSF

Good points.

The issues isn't "software doing harm", it's "there being downstream consequences of software failing."

To see the fallacy in simplest form, consider a program whose entire job was to open or close a switch. Would that be regulated as mission-critical/life-threatening? And yet if what the switch opened was medication, a dangerous chemical, or a valuable food or drug necessary to life, an error could be catastrophic. One can only know what things matter in context. They are not a property of the device. So all kinds of devices that are hijackable because no one imagined they needed to be hardened can end up used in places that make us all vulnerable.

Even ignoring hacking, a cell phone that fails unexpectedly when you're hurt or lost in a forest can be a serious problem.

@gregeganSF

Good points.

The issues isn't "software doing harm", it's "there being downstream consequences of software failing."

To see the fallacy in simplest form, consider a program whose entire job was to open or close a switch. Would that be regulated as mission-critical/life-threatening? And yet if what the switch opened was medication, a dangerous chemical, or a valuable food or drug necessary to life, an error could be catastrophic. One can only know what things matter in context. They are...

9 Feb 2024 at 19:28 | Open on climatejustice.social
Greg Egan

Not a casual listen, but this podcast exploring the neo-Nazi Australian Nationalists Movement that firebombed Chinese restaurants in my home town of Perth in the 1980s (presented by a man whose family’s restaurant was bombed) is disturbing and insightful.

abc.net.au/listen/programs/tru

2 Oct 2023 at 2:41 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Greg Egan

They say the way to test whether you have rats in your roof or possums is to place an apple there. If you find it chewed, it’s rats, if it’s taken, it’s a possum.

But I’m afraid that when I check back, the apple will have been carved by talons into a leering jack-o'-lantern.

22 Feb 2023 at 12:02 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
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kirabug

@gregeganSF @neilhimself wait which kind of possum? US opossums or Australian possums?

23 Feb 2023 at 7:16 | Open on wandering.shop
scentoni
Kate Watson

@gregeganSF Beavers are also very keen on apples. Though not, I suppose, especially prone to climbing into roof spaces...

23 Feb 2023 at 10:21 | Open on prattle.org.uk
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