I had a dream once in which an ex-girlfriend from years ago who I was still in love with appeared and told me that I would never have her back so I should stop being so obsessed with her. Good advice, perhaps, but not what I feel I deserve in my own dreams…
Now that I think about it, I realize that I can’t remember ever having sex in a dream. So much for dreams as wish fulfillment.
I’m not sure what’s novel here. No one thought that modern AI could solve arbitrarily complex logic problems, or even that modern AI was particularly good at formal reasoning. I would call myself an AI optimist but I would have been surprised if the article found any result other than the one it did. (Where exactly the models fail is interesting, but the fact that they do at all isn’t.) Furthermore, the distinction between reasoning and memorizing patterns in the title of this post is artificial - reasoning itself involves a great deal of pattern recognition.
Serious answer:
That’s cool. What makes it special?
Sometimes people talk about how expensive something they own is simply because they’re proud that they could afford it and even when they’re being tone-deaf, there’s no benefit to getting offended when you could just move the conversation along instead. (Although you might have to listen to them talk about watches.) If they were trying to brag, now they’re stuck trying to explain why the watch is actually worth what they paid and you’re the one judging them.
Cars (and watches) aren’t so expensive that a middle-class person can’t plausibly already own the one he would buy even if money was unlimited. You can act like that’s true about you. My status-conscious former mother in law was bothered by the fact that I owned an old car, but when she would bring it up I would just say “I really like the 2008 model.” She couldn’t argue with that.
How can the war realistically end?
A return to the pre-war status quo. The withdrawal of Israeli troops, presumably in return for the hostages, with either Hamas or another group equally hostile to Israel in control of Gaza. This is the worst-case scenario for Israel, because it represents a total failure to eliminate the source of more potential October 7 attacks. I suspect it’s the worst-case scenario for Gaza too, since future attacks on Israel would lead to future destruction in Gaza.
The destruction of Hamas and the establishment of a Gazan government friendly towards Israel, perhaps by the Palestinian authority or a coalition of Arab states. Very difficult and failure-prone, but a pathway to peace in the long term. I had hoped that this would be the outcome when the war started but it isn’t what Netanyahu is trying to accomplish and by now I’m not sure there’s enough goodwill left for it to still be possible.
Permanent Israeli occupation. I don’t think Israel can maintain such an occupation - it would be extremely expensive in money, lives, and international goodwill. Netanyahu and his supporters seem to think that Israel can, but many of them seem to make plans reliant on divine intervention.
Expulsion of the population of Gaza. Egypt wouldn’t accept that without a war. Maybe Trump thinks he can find another country that would, but even if he did (unlikely) then the logistics of moving two million people would be extremely challenging. I think this outcome is effectively impossible - another one of the “divine intervention required” plans. However, it would be a best-case scenario for Israel. The gain in territory means little, but no longer having Gazans as neighbors immediately ends the conflict for good, which no other outcome does.
If (2) isn’t going to happen then (4) may be the best case scenario for everyone. Even the people being expelled and their descendants would probably be better off than they would be if they remain in Gaza for for many more decades of conflict. However, I very much doubt that it can happen.
Heh, I loved the first one and then I tried the second one, hated how they changed the combat, and quit.
An exponential function is a precise mathematical concept, like a circle or an even number. I’m not sure what you mean by “asymptote” here - an exponential function of the form y = k^x asymptotically approaches zero as x goes to negative infinity, but that doesn’t sound like what you’re referring to.
People often have bad intuition about how exponential functions behave. They look like they grow slowly at first but that doesn’t mean that they’re not growing exponentially. Consider the story about the grains of rice on a chessboard.
It’s exponential along its entire range, even all the way back to negative infinity.
No, they’re Romanian.
Your “facial data” isn’t private information. You give it away every time you go outside.
A woman I know worked as an escort on and off and spent most of her time traveling, but I don’t think most people have the looks and the charisma to do that even if they want to. I’m not sure what other careers both pay enough and let you quit and then start again easily, but presumably there are some.
It’s weird but even better when the animals want to pet you. If I was lying down, my dog would sometimes come up to me and start licking my hair, which was a little gross but also made me feel very special.
What about if it’s rectangular with a detached lid?
Autists.
The EU only demanded consent.
As in the meme…
Me: I consent (to load the website using the cookie settings already in my browser).
Website: I consent.
Privacy busybodies and EU regulators: I don’t.
Blame the EU. There, cookies used to bother a tiny number of “privacy advocates” who were already perfectly capable of blocking the cookies in their own browsers but they weren’t happy because no one else cared about cookies so they got the GDPR passed to bother everyone in the world.
Yes, they’re threatening to withhold it but unless there’s something I missed, they haven’t declared that they are withholding it.
The article appears to contradict itself - it says they’re withholding her diploma but also that they’re mailing it to her and simply not allowing her to participate in the graduation ceremony. I hope she does get the diploma mailed to her so she can put this behind her.
Things are better than they have ever been for Native Americans and for the average person in the global south too.
The school is apparently not claiming that it’s against the rules for her to come out as gay, but rather that her mention of “ruthless Trump supporting ‘Jesus’ mfs" is vulgar and disrespectful. That seems like quite a stretch.
The problem with democracy is that you can’t get very far just by telling the voters how they ought to behave. I’m happy that I’m not a politician, because after the last election I don’t respect the majority of American voters. Trying to win their support would be demeaning. However, someone is going to do it, and if he isn’t a Democrat who does care (or acts like he cares) about people like Steve in Wisconsin, he’ll be a Republican instead.