That’s explicitly not what’s happening with uutils; they have contributed fixes and test cases back to upstream

And just like that, it was forked by Microsoft a few days ago. Handed to them on a silver platter.

That is just exponentiation, eg squaring. They’re just putting symbols instead of numbers there.

But then they say A + A <= A^2, wouldn’t that be false for a = 1?

In this context, A is a set, and A + A represents the set of all sums of pairs of elements drawn from A.

The paper doesn't use A^2, but rather |A|^2, which is ordinary squaring of an integer. It does use AA, which is the set of products of pairs of elements drawn from A.

First of all, science is good in and of itself. Second of all, this science in particular seems helpful to predict the impact of potentially disastrous climate change.

The human body is much more complex than any software system devised to this date.

We don’t have good ways to even start thinking about such simulations.

A: Weights had to remain trustworthy as they were distributed elsewhere for use in the trade.

B: Someone was obviously "in charge" lol

B can imply A, but A does not imply B.

I did some work for Halliburton in a past life.

Most of the people selling LNG for instance, do not have any control over the definition of a "cubic meter". Even so, none of them cheat, because the US for example, very much does have its own definition of a cubic meter and it isn't going to pay you a penny more, nor a penny less, than what that cubic meter is worth.

All that to say, you could probably try to cheat the system, but I'd imagine the people in Sumer and Akkad had what they considered to be a precise unit of weight with which to measure your delivery. It doesn't matter what someone in Mohenjo-daro said, you were only going to get a certain amount in trade for your freight in Sumer. So I could see a centralized authority for weights, (the customer), at the same time as having no one in charge of that unit of weight in Mohenjo-daro.

I could see people agreeing to it essentially because that's all you're getting paid for. Because I saw the same behavior long ago at work with Halliburton.

The trade actually involved different measurements. The shekel (silver, commodity-money) was weighed by the Sumerian purchaser and then given to the trader in Dilmun (he would literally have a bag full of weights and silver)

The Meluhha commodities themselves were measured seemingly with the Meluhhan weights. So the units went from Indus -> Dilmun in Indus quantities, and were purchased and verified that way. The Sumerian guy was buying an "Indus quantity" and paying in a weight "Sumerian silver." So there wasn't a disconnection between Dilmun and Mohenjo-daro like you're implying.

This is exactly what I was saying.

It doesn't matter if you measure LNG in litres, gallons, or cubic inches. The market is going to pay you the precise amount for whatever you delivered measured in cubic meters. So what you measure in is irrelevant. Or more precisely, only relevant insofar as you want to have some idea how much you are going to be paid when you reach the market. And even then, it's only relevant to you. The market doesn't care what you measure in, because the market measures what you deliver in cubic meters. And the market has its own definition of "cubic meter".

So market participants, no matter where they may be, are incentivized to ensure whatever unit they're measuring out for delivery in will relate to the "cubic meter" as defined by the customer in a precise and verifiable way. If not, they could lose money. Thus, every freight measurement standard, would, again, effectively be set by the customer. Because no matter what units you deliver in, s/he is only paying you for the amount measured in his/her own measurement standard. So your standard has to conform to that standard in a fashion that is well defined, consistent, and well understood by you.

In ancient terms, this means the trader in Mohenjo-daro would have calculated that conversion factor out in a precise fashion. So they would walk around Mohendro-daro with a standard weight for measurement that was based on what they would expect to happen in Sumer. All the other traders in Mohendro-daro would eventually discover the same conversion factor. So everyone lands on the same weight for measurement, but no one collaborated. Because everyone, (every trader anyway), only cares what they can get for that weight in Sumer. It's not that everyone uses Sumer's units. It's that Sumer's units define what everyone's understanding of their own unit is through trade.

Broader Impacts sections can be quite, well broad.

You can put in there standard things like “we will design new grad and undergrad courses that train new students in this tech that we will develop”.

You can put wider-impact things like “we will partner with local community colleges to integrate the results of this research in their XYZ course”, or “we will design summer research programs with recruitment from community colleges”.

And yes, you can (or used to be able to) include things like “we will partner with high schools with high populations of underrepresented demographics to do outreach and involve students in research”.

Clearly, there’s a large variety of things that fall under broader impact, and scientists weren’t required to pick only the “wokest” policies.

Please don’t comment on things you don’t know much about.

Ask any scientists, and you will find that no, grants weren’t being cancelled randomly, and no, scientists were living in fear of that.

many scientists were annoyed at having to add some boilerplate to basic research about social impacts of their work. would any of them prefer the 'corrective action' of cancelling research based on political animosity towards the host institution or general dislike of academia at all?

its apples and ebola

I agree with you, but most people aren’t ready to engage with basic anarchist arguments

I don't know if anarchy helps in this situation, I actually think you need robust social systems with buy in from citizens to prevent the natural accumulation of power. The fundamental problem is that there's a diminishing cost to acquiring power as you acquire power, this relationship should be inverted. The more powerful you are the harder it should be to get more powerful.

This is basic engineering, you don't want runaway feedback loops, the underlying system is unstable so we need a control system.

Unfortunately, LLMs might lead to the demise of the primary institution that allows for people that are in it for the love of intellectual activity to do that activity, namely research universities. Certainly the people proposing the tech are quite opposed to the modern university.

What little intelect we have can be directed to other parts of the vast endless ocean of unknown things.

I hear some specialists (specially multi-disiplinary ones) write things they know few or no one can read. (Which is the most ironic reason for being rejected by a journal)

I recall a funny moment on irc where a truly helpful guy moaned that no one helped him when he had a (programming) question. He was very good at many programming languages and worked in some mix of high level physics and mathematics. He posted SO questions that rarely got an appologetic response from someone able to understand the code and the physics but couldnt wrap around the math. lol I hope he finally gets some help with his wizardry.

You’re making some generalizations here, but I do agree that one of the primary dangers of LLMs is destruction of institutions of higher education. If thinking power becomes cheap, who will pay the money that universities demand?