ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
the stranglehold of the FAA has so totally destroyed personal aviation that we don't have flying cars despite the technology having been widely available since the 1910s.
The FAA has surely mangled personal aviation, but the lack of flying cars is probably better laid at the feet of the NHTSA. In order to be light enough to make any sense flying, flying vehicles have to be pretty fragile. Far too fragile for the NHTSA to approve letting them get in accidents at 70MPH on the interstate.
I haven't been continuing to follow it, but in the last decade and a half or so, I remember seeing a variety of start-ups make minor headlines about how they were getting into the flying car space. I always chuckled when I would dig into their materials and see that they were already claiming at the beginning that they'd be limited to something like 25-45MPH on the road. They're just not going to get a plethora of buyers with that type of restriction, even assuming they could make the rest of the product pretty decent and also survive FAA.
To eyeball some numbers, possibly the lightest passenger vehicle to barely squeek by highway safety standards would be the Smart Fortwo. The curb weight includes fluids, but was originally around 1600lbs. Eyeballing light aircraft (unfortunately, only listing empty weight), we'll start from that weight. After all, we've gotta add wings (eyeballing at least 150sqft of them; not sure where we're going to put them while driving), flying-to-driving-and-back-to-flying mechanisms, including shifting our powertrain to a propeller, flight control equipment, not sure if our suspension will survive landing, etc. Are we going to need STOL ability? Most potential flying car owners aren't gonna get hype about having to drive to their local airport anyway to take off... and then find another local airport to land. I think we're gonna need at least a couple hundred horsepower, but the Smart came with like 45-60hp to start (maybe 100hp later1, but it's not clear from the wiki article how much that affected the weight). But we're definitely going to get beefier, and that comes with additional powertrain weight, fuel weight, etc. Weight truly is the most predominant factor in aircraft design.
Maybe an Elon Musk tier person could thread the needle (and I guess he made comments to that effect in the last year), but I think it's still gonna be hard. I sort of doubt heavy batteries with an electric drivetrain is going to solve this problem, either.
1 - As an added note on the timeline for when technology existed, engines were much less efficient long ago.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Is this really what you've got? C'mon man.
Instead you were remarkably obtuse, and engaged in backseat modding while appending an edit clarifying that you weren't engaging in backseat modding. I appreciate the disclaimer roughly as much as I'd appreciate someone explaining at length why my house is an eyesore and then adding that they haven't called the HOA about it and aren't sure they would win if they did.
I did not think it was necessarily moddable. I realized that someone might think so, and I made sure to clarify. My point was that it was bad. It is, indeed, bad. You're so desperate to avoid that issue that you must try to make the conversation about something else, and this is the best that you have?! Your complaint is that it must boggle the mind for someone to think that a post is bad, but not necessarily moddable? C'mon man. Be serious.
The post is culture war because it has an outgroup
Read again. I said that it was an "indicator". I have separately believed and stated that certain AI issues appear to be culture war these days.
It's especially funny given that my far more detailed AI updates have been accused of not being Culture War material, in the CWR thread.
Read again. I specifically said, "it can be, depending upon the presentation".
a four-paragraph brief on the taxonomy of a shitpost is not the quality contribution you think it is.
Read again. Where did I ever say that I thought it was a quality contribution? I said that it was much less important. Please stop just making up bollocks shit to try to insult your interlocutors.
If you would like my help in using Claude to read better, pay me. See again how completely contentless that sort of shit is? How it's nothing but an insult? You can't even bring yourself to consider your own behavior, so you must deflect and insult again.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Thanks for clarifying something in my thinking. It is a shitpost. That is, it is shit. It is bad. It is not good. Coupled with the primary purpose being to get a dig in on your outgroup, it is quite off-putting. I feel like a simple bare link would have been far better. Even a not-dumb one-liner would have been nice. It's that you're faking like you're making an argument, but without making an argument. It's like "clown hat on; clown hat off" tier of feces.
I'll be happy to conduct an assessment of how you could improve such posts if you'll pay. I'll probably charge extra, FYI. (That is to say, this new habit of you also insulting your interlocutors by demanding that they pay for you to offload your thinking to Claude contains no meaningful content, is also extremely off-putting, and it should be beneath you.)
ControlsFreak
3d ago
This is quite exciting! Some scattered thoughts.
I definitely had the sense that we had hope for this type of thing, since math is (mostly) mechanically-verifiable. Lean is about to be getting even more attention than it had before, and it's important that these all come with Lean code attached. That said, my understanding is that it is still possible to do somewhat sketchy things in Lean. I'm expecting a lot more folks will see how important that concern is and really focus on either shoring it up or put together some set of principles like, "If you proof has X component in Lean, we're going to unfortunately simply discount it for now." But most results that come with Lean code will probably be just fine. (I certainly have no reasons to doubt any of these particular results, myself. Nor do have strong personal opinions about the edges of where possibly sketchy things can be done in Lean.)
On the use and human interpretability of results. This question is not new. Take, for example, the massive human-generated proof of Fermat's last theorem or the exhaustive computer-generated proof of the Four Color Theorem. Many many folks don't actually understand these proofs. Perhaps no one "understands" the proof of the Four Color Theorem, whereas at least the proof of Fermat's last theorem is understood well enough by an extremely small group of folks.
Using those results is easy. You don't have to understand them! If you're working on a problem, and you see that it would be useful for one of those things to be true, congrats! You can just use a pointer to the fact that it's true and move on. This is an unalloyed good.
Understanding those results is another matter. I was looking at a paper recently with some collaborators, and it was one of those situations where we were just failing to have much intuition about how to think about certain parts. (FYI, I think this paper was human-generated, but I don't know.) Multiple people in the group suggested that a few things could be, "They just tried a bunch of options, and found one where they could make the computation work out." And that's fine. I've done that before. Plenty of methods include, "You can just try stuff, and if one works, great!" I also happened to afterward figure out a different way to describe the same thing in a way that made intuitive sense out of it, which was extra neat. Maybe if we bang our head against their paper for long enough, we'll be able to find a way to make intuitive sense out of it, too. Maybe an LLM will help! Tao recently mentioned that he had a discussion with an LLM to help him grab some additional intuition around the counterexample to the jacobian conjecture.
At least in the near term, there will probably be a fair number of LLM-produced proofs that people look at and say, "How the hell does that work?" Plenty of time will be spent trying to understand them. Are there new concepts in there? Can you relate it to other math? Can you simplify it and make it more intuitive? Does something in the method raise new interesting questions?
Which leads me to the most hazy part; the somewhat longer term. Will LLMs be able to consistently make intuitive sense of their proofs for humans? Will they be able to help us understand the connections or identify new questions that we would understand as being interesting that are now relevant?
I certainly don't know how to prognosticate all that well, but I do think of some analogies to another domain that is (mostly) verifiable and where computers already significantly outperform humans - chess. Humans still try to understand something from the superhuman output of chess engines. Unfortunately, I can't find it immediately, but I very recently read (as in the last couple weeks, I believe) an argument that top human grandmaster play has barely improved outside of the opening phase, where folks are memorizing more and more of the output of engines. I'm not sure I believe this analysis (I didn't dig into the details of the methodology, and I can imagine plenty of methodological difficulties), but that's something somewhere in my mind. Another thing is that chess has one single extremely well-defined goal: win the game when you can, otherwise draw. This collapses neatly at any particular point in time to, "What is the objectively best move for this game state?" It is relatively easy to accept that the computer is just flatly going to estimate that far better than we are. It's harder to understand the reasons why that is the best move. It's harder (not necessarily impossible, but harder) to take a variety of examples like this from a computer and have a sense for how to built it into a broader understanding of the game. It's harder to make connections like, "The computer seems to value space in positions like X and Y, but not Z; why is that?"
We have plenty of mathematical "positions" teed up for this type of tool. We can hopefully just ask the LLM what the objective evaluation of these "positions" are. Where else it goes, how we understand the whole thing, and what we can do with it are open and exciting questions.
Posting separately and prior to the above, so it appears separately and below; this is much less important.
IMHO, this topic is a culture war topic (or at least, it can be, depending upon the presentation). Given that premise, the root comment is a nearly contentless bare link with a one liner snipe of the commenter's outgroup. For example questions, what is "it" and what does it mean for "it" to be "over"? It is plausible that these sorts of questions could have coherent answers that make the original comment benign, but they were not included in the original.
An alternative interpretation is that it is a "First"-post, though I would still probably characterize it at first impression as being paired with a one liner snipe of the commenter's outgroup.
Indeed, I think that the same sense that there even is such a thing as a commenter's "outgroup" on the topic in an indicator in favor of the premise that the topic (or at least a presentation of the topic such as this) is culture war.
EDIT: I should clarify that I am NOT asking for the comment to be modded. I am not entirely confident of my interpretation, and I'm not at all confident that the mods would think so, either. I did not report it because I don't have a strong opinion that it should be modded. I am merely expressing my opinion on some things that I did not like, and I am very open to contrary perspectives.
When I first started investing, I learned that you can withdraw contributions from Roth IRAs at any point in time, tax/penalty-free. Also, if you do withdraw, contributions are withdrawn first. I reasoned that the types of emergencies that I would want to be prepared for with an emergency fund were less of the type "the market will crash", and more of the type, "I'll have a lumpy expense, like having to replace a car." Of course, it is possible for both such things to happen at the same time, but probabilities. My conclusion was that I was going to retain a very moderate amount of cash flow buffer (could be viewed as extremely small compared to the emergency fund numbers I see others throwing around), and that I could manage to have my 'emergency fund' essentially be in my Roth IRA. Sure, it wouldn't be great if I actually had to withdraw some, but the downside is just that I would "lose" some prior years' room of possible contributions, which I would necessarily lose if I wasn't putting money into the Roth IRA in the first place!
Times changed, my life circumstances changed, but I've mostly still happened to find myself not really needing an emergency fund. Of course, other people have different circumstances where it would make more sense.
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