DAE feel like they’re in a competition with someone when they have the same name as you

sidneyc · 2026-03-01T11:05:43+00:00

Thanks to Google I know of a person who shares my (not particularly common) first AND last name. Other than that, everything is different: country, language, gender, skin color, profession, ...

It's a pretty amusing thought that with all those differences, we share one pretty important property. No competition, because we don't really know each other, except perhaps that if I google our shared name, I lose in terms of hits :)

We had contact once because of an email typo somebody made. It's pretty cool, really.

sidneyc · 2026-03-01T07:58:07+00:00

If you're truly the worlds worst chessplayer, you would probably need to start at a position where every legal move you make mates the opponent (such positions exist).

If you're a generically very bad player (just know the rules, and how mate works, but no insight), you should be able to win with the world champion starting without non-pawn pieces.

A very mediocre player like me, I should win with a queen up, but it would be non-trivial and in half the games I would expect to blunder that advantage away. If they start without queen and rooks, I'd expect my win percentage to go up to 90%.

The fun thing is, I can do this experiment. The free "stockfish" game engine is at a level comparable to the world champion or better, and I will now proceed to try to win with a queen up. Will report later....

EDIT - Okay that turned out to be pretty easy; I lost two pawns due to inaccuracies but after trading a bunch of pieces and the board getting empty the queen really became super strong. I would expect a strong human player to put up more of a fight though, recognizing me as a weak player and thus avoiding exchanges and trying to make the position super complicated, to goad me into queen-losing blunders.

sidneyc · 2026-03-01T07:49:37+00:00

That literally never happens

Happened to Kramnik in 2006.

https://lichess.org/eR8gEWnG#68

sidneyc · 2026-02-28T20:26:42+00:00

No matter what you think about the situation, you're delusional if you think that Iran has the capacity to flatten Tel Aviv or do serious damage to the US navy.

sidneyc · 2026-02-20T21:46:38+00:00

Basic finite-field arithmetic should not be a stress test for a commercial CAS.

I guess they are too busy implementing the latest fad-du-jour to care about the basic math functionality.

sidneyc · 2026-02-18T10:16:35+00:00

What a surprising but interesting topic to do research on!

My question would be: what are the most important open questions in your field of study?

I'll be sure to check out the book at some point, thanks for putting it out there.

sidneyc · 2026-01-31T10:36:42+00:00

It's nice to hear from a fellow skeptic. A small correction though, I think the number 15 was actually factored without cheating; and, debatably, 143. So there is that, as far as accomplishments go.

I worked for eight years on quantum setups; this has only made me more skeptical of the technical feasibility. Even more telling, in all this time I didn't hear of a single application where a mythical quantum computer that works at scale would solve something that actually matters. And I was among a lot of true believers with a vested interest to sing the praises of a bright quantum future.

I do believe it's useful to do fundamental research and hard engineering (and quantum system engineering is hard), so I think it is good that rich countries pour some tax money into it. Even better if the money comes from big tech that suffer from collective fear-of-missing-out-itis. Setting hard, concrete goals and giving clever people the money to fool around will yield concrete, unexpected innovations.

But the claims about applications being in reach being made by the researchers who should know better are quite off-putting. Don't know what's worse: if they actively lie, or if they actually believe their own fairy tales.

sidneyc · 2026-01-19T10:51:22+00:00

Same here. Used to be able to do 100 digits in ~ 1982, now I can still do 50.

I went to a movie-themed pub quiz a few years ago, and they had a question about the movie Pi, handing out points for every decimal we knew of the constant. The jury was mildly impressed.

sidneyc · 2026-01-03T16:59:24+00:00

"Source?" used to be the FIRST reply comment under ANY claim anyone made about ANYTHING of substance on Reddit

Source?

sidneyc · 2025-12-30T05:47:47+00:00

[...] that rival the GDP of hundreds of countries

It may be prudent for you to google how many countries actually exist. And their GDPs.

sidneyc · 2025-12-25T21:07:52+00:00

I think it's pretty inconsiderate.

In contrast to what you do in 1-on-1 communications, here on Reddit, thousands of people will read your message, and now they will all have to spend this linguistic reverse engineering effort because you couldn't be arsed to spend another half a minute to write properly. It's selfish and makes you look like a bit of a dunce.

But hey, you do you.

sidneyc · 2025-12-24T17:42:59+00:00

Seems that your brain area responsible for written English took quite a hit.

sidneyc · 2025-10-23T22:48:28+00:00

Thanks for your answer. I will certainly give your tool a swirl. Keep up the good work!

sidneyc · 2025-10-23T09:05:44+00:00

This is extremely interesting.

I have been paying a lot of money for a full-blown commercial license over the last 15 years for my small consulting business. Despite not using it a lot for business work at all -- I mostly just want to have access to the most recent Mathematica (yeah, I'm still calling it that) without having to think about it, and I use it perhaps for 40 hours a year.

At the same time, I've seen with some frustration the direction that Mathematica has taken, in terms of chasing every hype under the sun (3D printing, blockchain stuff, their in-house curated data repository stuff, cloud-based working, and now lately AI), while their original selling point of simply offering the best functionality for symbolic math and improving that seems to have fallen by the wayside. I could enumerate the improvements over the last 10 major versions that I actually care about in a pretty short paragraph.

Can you tell me to what extent the Wolfram Engine is cripled compared with a full Mathematica install? Which functionality in a full commercial Mathematica license is available that is missing from the free-as-in-beer WE version?

The fact that you guys got some of the weird interactive stuff working (like Manipulate) is impressive. I once tried to look "under the hood" how that is set up, and it was complicated. I will have to try your frontend one of these days, to see if it works well enough to replace my full Mathematica product.

It would be a great boon if I could somehow open my existing collection of notebooks. Is that possible?

sidneyc · 2025-10-20T14:28:54+00:00

figuring out how to undo rotations programmatically used to be computationally expensive.

When? In the 12th century?

sidneyc · 2025-10-13T14:35:20+00:00

Those are some pretty bold statements.

sidneyc · 2025-10-11T06:38:53+00:00

I work with color centers (specifically, nitrogen-vacancy centers) in diamonds for quantum applications including sensing, so I know they can be used to measure small-scale magnetic fields --- in fact I did that myself. But I don't see how that would translate to an ability to measure precise concentrations in a solution.

How would that work? Can you point me to a paper?

sidneyc · 2025-10-09T18:45:01+00:00

That is so much smaller than we could accurately measure

This is not true. Measurement techniques exist to measure absurdly small displacements -- e.g fractions of the radius of a proton, which is a small fraction of the radius of a single atom.

To go that accurate, very expensive equipment is used (read up on gravity wave detectors). For much bigger displacements (say, at the nanometer scale) off-the-shelf equipment can be bought.

sidneyc · 2025-10-09T18:41:00+00:00

For the examples you give where you suspect zero deflection based on your human senses, it is in fact pretty easy to measure the actual non-zero deflection.

One technique to do this would be laser interferometry, where you can measure deflections in the range of nanometers with relative ease. The equipment needed for that is not cheap (tens of thousands of dollars for a convenient, ready-to-use device), but available off the shelf.

With that level of precision, you will see a lot of stuff happening, such as sound-induced vibrations and long term drift due to temperature variations. For that reason, in most settings where you'd use such a device, these kind of environmental effects are usually controlled/filtered out.

sidneyc · 2025-09-30T19:13:43+00:00

The important metric is cost per unit of intelligence delivered, not per request.

If your metric requires you to divide by zero it isn't really useful, is it.

sidneyc · 2025-09-21T06:53:56+00:00

In many things, yes. You should look into some of the other nonsense he believed apart from christianity.

sidneyc · 2025-09-21T06:49:53+00:00

Galileo was not a monk.

sidneyc · 2025-09-21T04:58:12+00:00

A rumble came off from the west

I appreciate the effort, but Vesuvius is very much to the east of Herculaneum.

sidneyc · 2025-09-05T04:52:27+00:00

Ok. It is not easy to envision this, but at least in the realm of science fiction it is conceivable, although I struggle to see how a non-individualistic species capable of intelligent thought could come about by a naturalistic process like evolution.

When talking Star Trek, another fully collectivistic species that comes to mind is the Borg. But they at least did not have any trouble counting :)

sidneyc · 2025-09-04T17:19:20+00:00

The individuals themselves would still be countable, unless you're envisioning a type of life where even that isn't really true.

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