jkf
16hr ago
I don't think I've agreed with a word out of @BurdensomeCount 's mouth in my life -- but you truly are a curious case.
jkf
17hr ago
You just said it though! (well, maybe your LLM did)
I also know how Big O works, for the record.
It doesn't really seem like you do; an optimal square packing algorithm that is better only in the case of infinite squares is not making anybody any money either.
jkf
17hr ago
Nobody is making any money on a 1-10^xx exponent on integer multiplication's big O -- the fact that you think this shows that you are relying on an unreliable interlocuter to form your opinions.
I don't dispute that some of the other results may have some useful application, but the ones of this form are only interesting in the sense that humans tend to expect round numbers, and have been mostly correct in this assumption to date. (I do share this expectation and personally think it's more likely that there's some kind of mistake in these proofs -- but if I'm wrong, that's interesting!)
Your bot can probably explain this to you if you ask, but briefly: Big-O notation typically disregards the portion of algorithmic complexity that's constant doesn't and depend on the size of the dataset; ie. whether a loop takes a millisecond or a minute to execute once is not considered. Something that takes a minute per cycle but is O(1) may be better than something that does it in a millisecond but is O(n^2) -- it depends on how many "n" you are interested in though.
TBH I haven't looked into the actual algorithms involved here, but given the length of the proof I'd expect the constant term (call it overhead) to be quite high compared to existing methods -- considering the tiny difference in the exponents, you would need n to be literally approaching infinity for the proposed algo to make any difference at all. In the case of the integer math, this would mean that multiplying integers of ~infinite length could be somewhat faster -- but we can't even test it, because computers don't have infinite memory.
jkf
17hr ago
Curiously most of those niche fora are still there -- a number of the ones I've been on since ~Y2k are even fairly successfully monetized still.
Just that discoverability is kind of bad -- many of them still pop up frequently as google results for me, but I suspect personalization at work there.
Most of them are leaning heavily on Cloudflare for bot detection; from what I see of admin posts this is pretty much a requirement due to frequent (probably somewhat accidental) DDOS activity from LLM scrapers -- but even phpBB seems to still work OK if you put it behind a cloudflare gate. Many are migrating away from that, which apparently is about a weeks work.
I don't think it's a growth industry or anything, but userbases are pretty locked in and forum owners are still making a decent living from old-fashioned "give me $100 a month and I will put your logo and link in my header" type advertising. I even know of people scraping by on Amazon affiliate links!
jkf
17hr ago
Uh, now I see that it claims that I had strong opinions on the algorithmic floor of integer multiplication. I did not, beyond being vaguely aware that there was a better option than a naive n^2 based off an article I think I read on Quanta. I couldn't have told you off the top of my head that the previous SOTA was O(n log n).
So the LLM inserted something dumb that you have no personal knowledge of? I'd be embarrassed, myself, but you do you I guess.
Trump's trying to swing midterms with the "free pony" program again?
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