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8 posts total
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 September 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 August 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 August 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 July 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
4 June at 8:45 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Matthew Kenworthy

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

4 June 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*?”
13 March 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 March 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 March 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 March 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 February 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 February 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 February 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 February 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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