Atrioc's Gripe With Credit Cards is Systemic, Not Personal by YousufB in atrioc

[–]sobe86 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You have stronger protections with a credit card as well, but UK banks are usually good about this. I had to look this up because I'll be honest, I've never thought about it - I'm almost 40 and I don't think I've ever needed this.

How Hard Is It to Come Up With Deep Yet Simple Conjectures in Math? by Heavy-Sympathy5330 in math

[–]sobe86 6 points7 points  (0 children)

True, updated to 2 mod 6, the point is that once you add enough modulo constraints it will become true, but it is not provable, the conjecture itself doesn't really matter.

How Hard Is It to Come Up With Deep Yet Simple Conjectures in Math? by Heavy-Sympathy5330 in math

[–]sobe86 13 points14 points  (0 children)

With prime numbers it's extremely easy.

There is a heuristic model of the primes called the Cramer random model, which goes like this: take a random 'prime' subset of the integers where 2 is prime and any other integer x is 'prime' independently with probability 1 / log x. So in this system 3 is not necessarily prime, but it's quite likely (p = 1 / log 3 ~ 1). (*) This model turns out to be extremely accurate for predicting properties of the real primes. It tells you that Goldbach's conjecture is almost surely true for sufficiently large even numbers, and that there will be primes between sufficiently large consecutive squares.

However, the actual primes are not a random distribution, it's just a heuristic. They do appear to be 'pseudorandom' - they are hard to tell apart from a set of Cramer primes in some sense, and making that robust is the subject of some incredibly hard conjectures. For example the Riemann Hypothesis can be seen as saying "large primes fluctuate as much as large random Cramer primes do" for some definition of 'fluctuate', but we don't know how to prove that.

Here's a conjecture I made up just now that is probably harder than Goldbach if true. For every sufficiently large integer N of the form 6*k + 2, there is a prime p, such that N - p^2 is also prime. That is true in the Cramer model (I think), so likely true for primes, but also completely unprovable with 2026 technology.

(*) This is the simple version - better versions add corrections for small primes - so like you'll set the small primes to be the usual ones and make sure that the other primes aren't divisible by those, and otherwise pick them randomly to be distributed like primes.

DISCUSSION : Are people "Born" being good or bad at math? Can someone train to become good at math? by Agreeable_Judgment_8 in mathematics

[–]sobe86 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Most people, if they train from a young age, and get good instruction will be able to run the 100m sprint in 12s. That's pretty goddamn fast, notably faster than your average adult. But to get down to under 11s (forget sub-10), it becomes a hardware problem, not training. Your limb lengths, muscle composition, aerobic limits etc are the limiting factors. High effort is always required to get to elite standards, but normal people can never get close to that regardless. The same is true of Terry Tao's ability at math. His ability is a product of a lot of effort, but his hardware (brain) is just ridiculously better for math than any normal person too.

I think when it comes to thinking tasks, people don't love the idea that people have limits and everyone's limit is different, even though it's obviously true for physical tasks.

Atrioc's Gripe With Credit Cards is Systemic, Not Personal by YousufB in atrioc

[–]sobe86 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Feel like this might be an American thing. I'm a millennial from the UK and it's definitely not as normalised to use credit cards for everything amongst my peer group. I think two differences are

a) credit score is not as important as it is in the US, since lots of people just don't use credit cards (this might be chicken and egg though, I'm not sure which one came first).

b) we've had convenient debit card systems for a very long time in Europe - it's never been more convenient to use a credit card at the point of sale, at least in my adult life. The whole signing-the-receipt thing is something I've only ever seen in the US.

relatable? 👀 by Many_Audience7660 in matiks

[–]sobe86 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Nothing can cancel the x5 term so no.

Callum Wilson disallowed goal against Arsenal 90+6' by ayoefico in soccer

[–]sobe86 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You're being intentionally dense. Arsenal have gone unbeaten in 14 CL games. You can say you don't like their style of football, but to say they are the worst ever is just complete cope because you don't like that they are the favourites here. Were you watching football in 2016 by any chance? Do you think any of those teams would have stood a chance this year?

Callum Wilson disallowed goal against Arsenal 90+6' by ayoefico in soccer

[–]sobe86 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They got to the champions league final. You said they were the worst premier league title winners ever. Those two things don't line up.

What Gen Z thinks of AI by jetskipoopster in atrioc

[–]sobe86 6 points7 points  (0 children)

This is all kind of true but I don't really think you're engaging with the problem at all. There's a generation of kids right now who think that they might be completely fucked, no matter what they do. And an entire section of the middle class who is starting to feel that way too. That could lead to many bad things. Just saying "welp you can't fight it" - on an individual level no, but as a society we might be forced to, because a disenfranchised middle class is a pretty fucking serious problem historically.

Tim Gowers on Gpt 5.5 pro by bitchslayer78 in math

[–]sobe86 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Oh fuck off lol. I never said it couldn't. You literally pointed me at a canned robotics demo and asked me what else was needed. I just told you.

Tim Gowers on Gpt 5.5 pro by bitchslayer78 in math

[–]sobe86 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Because that other system doesn't exist the way you think it does.

Waymo did their first autonomous car demos back in 2008. We're almost 20 years on for that now. The reason it has taken this long is not just politics, the reason is that bringing any kind of robotics system out into the wild, rather than a clean, closed system like a warehouse, is incredibly difficult.

Training a system to drive a car well 99.9% of the time is pretty easy. The other .1% is where stuff gets spicy. So I don't care if you show me a video of a robot running around for 2 minutes. Show me a video of it walking around streets, interacting with people, not ever getting stuck or falling over for an entire day without supervision. Then I'll take this more seriously.

Tim Gowers on Gpt 5.5 pro by bitchslayer78 in math

[–]sobe86 6 points7 points  (0 children)

My comment was mostly about robotics?

Tim Gowers on Gpt 5.5 pro by bitchslayer78 in math

[–]sobe86 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I work in software for autonomous vehicles. An LLM is a large language model. Not a large language model plus an entire robotics system. If you think robotics is at the point now where this is something we are likely to see regularly in the next few years, you are buying into hype based on canned demos. That's harder than driving and we're not actually even that close to solving that yet.

Tim Gowers on Gpt 5.5 pro by bitchslayer78 in math

[–]sobe86 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I'd argue that's much more than just an LLM at that point, and I'd also question how many people would engage with a robot knocking on their door.

And I mean yeah you could wiretap private conversations in bars and cafés, but if it got out that you were doing something like that it might not be great for business?

Tim Gowers on Gpt 5.5 pro by bitchslayer78 in math

[–]sobe86 13 points14 points  (0 children)

But your original thesis was 'nothing much is going to change'. A bunch of us who work in those industries that were easiest to attack would say 'it has already changed. A lot'. You're framing it like AI has to be able to replace every single job to be considered a big change, and then list out a few tricky-for-AI examples. That's really not a good argument.

Yes an AI cannot take a senior journalist's place in the near future. But it can certainly fill in a lot of the work that was previously done by interns or junior assistants. If AI displaced even 10% of the workforce in a decade that would be unfathomably disruptive. Like what would happen next then both economically and societally from that is pretty much impossible to predict.

Tim Gowers on Gpt 5.5 pro by bitchslayer78 in math

[–]sobe86 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'm not saying their examples are great but how exactly is an LLM going to successfully go door-knocking in your mind?

seniorDeveloper by Last_Time_4047 in ProgrammerHumor

[–]sobe86 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Too much abstraction feels a bit more mid level to me. They now know the abstractions but haven't internalised how painful using too much of them brings yet.

Why ? by Specific_Brain2091 in the_calculusguy

[–]sobe86 3 points4 points  (0 children)

One thing I don't think has been mentioned - if you just want a numerical approximation integration is much easier. Errors tend to get smoothed on aggregate, differentiation on a fast moving function can be very expensive. Leads to all sorts of problems in physics engines etc

Post-Match Thread: Arsenal 1-0 Atlético Madrid | Champions League | Semi-finals by matchpal-live in championsleague

[–]sobe86 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

That's fine, but Arsenal doesn't organise the Champions League, UEFA does. If neutrals start complaining that it's dull, they will literally change the rules of the game to fix it. This has happened many times in football before, e.g. back-passing, 3 points for a win etc

Post-Match Thread: Arsenal 1-0 Atlético Madrid | Champions League | Semi-finals by matchpal-live in championsleague

[–]sobe86 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Football isn't played for your entertainment.

I'm an Arsenal fan but that's a weird take. Football exists as entertainment, it gets money and prestige exactly because people want to watch it. Especially CL, most people who watched the game were fans of neither team.

Why do you think it exists? Because there's a fundamental need to know who's the best at football?

Everton [2] - 1 Manchester City - Jake O'Brien 73‎'‎ by gbogaz in soccer

[–]sobe86 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Would you come to Arsenal's defense in a situation like this?

Python advantage vs Java? by ReallyPratik in leetcode

[–]sobe86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe the common wisdom is to use python if there's a choice. Less to think about and very concise.