You can draw a line between your location and the north pole, they talk about three variants:

- Magnetic North: Shortest surface line to the magnetic north pole (simply in the direction of the compass at your location).

- True North: Shortest surface line from where you are to the geographic north pole (based on the rotation axis?).

- Grid North: A line to the same geographic north pole, but aligned to the longitude lines (EDIT: for a local UK grid standard, slightly different from the global one). I didn't fully understand the subtleties of why it's different from True North, something about the projection. Not sure if it's exactly to the same north pole, the rotation axis might also change slightly and I assume that the grid north point is fixed by convention?

They are saying that there's a particular point where all three lines point in the same direction, and that point is moving.

It's a transverse mercator projection rather than a mercator as you might often see because it minimises distortion over the UK as a whole which means that the distortion is as you move away from the meridian, rather than as you move away from the equator (with a regular mercator I think all points have the grid aligned with true North)

This grid is setup such that it's origin is not on the prime meridian (at Greenwich), but 2deg west so only points on the line 2deg west are aligned with true north.

If grid north and true north are the same everywhere, it would be proof the entire Earth is flat.

Love that, sounds like something Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett would write :)

Poor countries tend to stay poor not due to fundamental resource constraints but due to self-reinforcing loops of desperate crab-bucket like behavior, where everyone is cheating one another out of necessity (or culture). Broad collaboration and institution building is always the only way out of the hole, although the hole can be very deep and collaboration can be very costly until you get out.

You are right though, that for an individual living in a good collaborative system, often cheating is very effective, it's just that the system can only handle a certain amount of that behavior before it collapses.

As is discussed in the first scene of Plato's The Republic (surprisingly entertaining to modern tastes), the best play tends to be "to be unjust while seeming just". If people are going to be assholes, it is actually much better if they are discrete about it and keep a pretense of civilization. When people start acting conspicuously like assholes, out of a weird sense of honesty, that's when it propagates and the whole thing collapses, like a bank-run. It's an ancient story that we are still living.

And the last century showed that this also works at a large scale, we all got a lot richer as a global community by letting poor countries develop and doing business with them, instead of exploiting them to death.

Like the story of Thomas Sankara's assassination by his trusted childhood friend Blaise Compaoré is quite disturbing. It seems like Compaoré was leader for a very long time and is still in politics... I cannot think of a more morally deprived individual. If game theory was as claimed; nobody should want to work with such deeply disloyal and psychopathic individual. It's just like I say; people have a strong tolerance, even attraction to abusers. If you look at the real story, you notice this pattern over and over... but we are so badly gaslit about such things (aka 'PR') that we don't notice.

https://youtu.be/Ta5Dx327KQc?t=4899

This doesn't seem true and I'd be interested in any stats that back this up. It reminds me of a very interesting result (that most never internalize) which is that the number one way to avoid corruption is to pay public servants handsomely such that the job rivals the private sphere. Most developing countries can't do that, and that's why most of them have issues with corruption.

Rich countries also have crab-bucket like behavior. You don't have to look twice at the current US administration to see lots of corruption and cheating and fraud, for example.

Pretty clear trend: low-trust societies have low gdp and high-trust societies have high gdp, regardless of resource distribution. Africa/South America are resource rich, japan/iceland are resource poor.

I can easily conjure a scenario where high per-capita GDP makes trusting easier (either because there’s enough to go around and/or because there are reliable police/judicial sanctions for violating trust) than in a hardscrabble low per-capita GDP society with lower (insufficient?) lawfulness.

Yemen and the US are equal shades on that trust polling map. That alone should show you it's not really a factor.

India has a higher GDP and GDP per capita than it's neighbor Pakistan, but Pakistan has quite a higher trust score on your map than India.

There are many more examples, just these jumped out at me.

I don't meant that everybody should be nice, and that poor countries are somehow culturally nasty, absolutely not. Real collaboration cannot be just founded on morals and good faith, it's not sustainable, it's more about incentives engineering.

In terms of references, the main one that comes to mind is the economics Nobel price from 2024: "for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity".

if this is true, then the public servant would earn only till he becomes rich equivalent to private sphere job. but nope, they go all the way in.

Yep this is a huge problem now. I think wealth inequality is also making this worse because people often turn a blind eye to the bad behaviors of people who have power over them. This is an extremely powerful effect; it's everywhere. For example, Christians turning a blind eye to certain negative character traits of God as he appears in the old testament. Employees turning a blind eye to the immoral actions of their boss and coming up with justifications to keep them on a pedestal...

The social structure is not determined by morality; it's the other way round; morality is determined by the social structure.

It reminds me of an old French fable in which a lamb tries to reason with a wolf why he should let him live... The wolf listens to the lamb's logic but then he eats it anyway and the story ends with a sentence like "The reason of the strongest is always the best one."

It is quite a cynical point of view of course. It's a hard balance, when it gets bad sometimes it's better to air the dirty laundry and go through the pain of purging those cheaters.

But the worse thing is to have people be loud and proud cheaters, which is happening more and more. That's a deadly virus to a civilized society, everyone starts thinking they are dumb for not cheating, and we quickly go back to the dark ages.

It's a bit like calling out the bank for being a fraud because they don't have all the money in a vault, and rushing to get your cash out. If people start taking the red pill and shouting that society is just a game of pretend, which it kind of is, then our very real prosperity can vanish overnight.

This sentence assumes a certain degree of shared prosperity. I think this is increasingly an illusion. IMO, Social media tends to create filter bubbles which create illusions of shared prosperity. Most of the social bubbles I participate in, the view is much more like 'monopolized prosperity' than 'shared prosperity'.

I've been in a unique position to have mingled with billionaires/millionaires and also normal people and the contrast is significant. In some circles; it's like even the company cook, janitor, receptionist and wall-painter is getting rich... In others, it's like there are some really talented people who keep failing over and over and can't make any money at all from their work; like they're suppressed by algorithms.

I think most people wouldn't mind seeing the whole system collapse as they don't feel they have any stake in it; their experience is that of being oppressed while simultaneously being gaslit about being privileged! It's actually deeply disturbing. I don't think most people on the other side have any idea how bad it is because their reality looks really wonderful.

My view is that the oppression which used to be carried out at a distance in Africa is now being carried out to large groups of people within the same country; and filter bubbles are used to create artificial distance.

My experience of the system is that it works by oppressing people whilst keeping them out of view so that those who benefit from that system can enjoy both physical as well as psychological comfort. The physical comfort is real but the psychological comfort is built on the illusion of meritocracy; which can be maintained by creating distance from the oppressed. It's why the media keeps spreading narratives about homeless people being 'crazy' and 'on drugs' IMO. Labeling people as crazy is a great way to ensure that nobody talks to them to actually learn about their experience. It's the ultimate way to dehumanize someone. Because their experiences would shock most people and create deep discomfort; it would sow distrust in the system.

I think it's exactly the other way around? Wealth inequality (in the US, as an example) has actually not drastically changed in the past few decades, but I do agree the perception of unfairness has increased a lot.

My hunch is that everyone is now being fed wealth porn on social media and comparing themselves to influencers or actual billionaires who actually do live or pretend to live a .01%er lifestyle.

Life's never been fair; but feeling shortchanged for living a solid middle class lifestyle because Bezos has a big yacht seems new.

Ultimately it all feels depressingly materialistic to me. Go work on something actually meaningful!

If I were to extend your analogy, the problem in modern world has become aggresive. E.g. you have committed a crime or fraud. Everyone else has proved decisively and beyond doubt that you have committed fraud such that it has become common knowledge. yet the justice system isn't acting. In a sense, you are taunting and teasing me, "what you gonna do about it?" This is inviting violence. The guy killing insurance company CEO has exactly this line of thinking.

"Therefore Socrates said that it wasn’t enough to use the intellect in all things, but it was important to know for which cause one was exerting it. We would now say: One must serve the “good cause.” But to serve the good cause is—to be moral. Thus, Socrates is the founder of ethics.

"Socrates opened this war, and its peaceful end does not occur until the dying day of the old world."

Plato/Socrates are the original ghost story tellers. I spit on their grave. Republic is easily one of the worst books written in human history in terms of its impact. Right up there with Das Kapital.

Real progress requires that hard work of crafting and spreading a vision, something to point at that helps people express what they struggle to express themselves. It also then needs that protected intimacy of long conversations between individuals to digest it.

The architecture of social media centered around short-form public communication is not appropriate for this.

This of course applies to both constructive and destructive movements, but it’s the only way to get big real things done. I suppose that’s why we have this emergent class of powerful independent (podcast) intellectuals after a long time of the concept not being a thing. Again, for better or worse, plenty of both.

Is the conversation we're having now not both serious and on social media?

I think if the great minds of old had access to our modern internet, they would have no trouble communicating their ideas. It's not like all social media is short form. You can type a whole book into the comment box here if you want.

This is horrible for a language whose whole purpose I thought was that to be foolproof and that if it compiles its true. Having very subtly different definitions of common operations is such a footgun.

Of course, I understand that this doesn’t bother mathematicians because they are used to not having any guardrails anyways. Just like C programmers have the attitude that if you fall on such a trap, you deserve it and you are not a “real programmer”. But Lean is supposed to be the other extreme isn’t it? Take nothing for granted and verify it from the ground up.

I suppose I am falling for that “Twitter confusion” the post is referring to. I never had any issues with this when actually using Lean. I just don’t like the burden of having to be paranoid about it, I thought Lean had my back and I could use it fairly mechanically by transforming abstract structures without thinking about the underlying semantics too much.

Anyway, despite the annoyance, I do assume that the designers know better and that it is a pragmatic and necessary compromise if it’s such a common pattern. But there must be a better solution, if having the exception makes it uncomfortable to prove, then design the language so that it is comfortable to prove such a thing. Don’t just remove the exception because 99% of the time it doesn’t matter. If we are happy with 99% we wouldn’t be reaching for formal verification, there are much more practical means to check correctness.

In other words, you can use all these junk theorems to build strange results on the side, but you can never build something that disagrees with normal math or that contradicts itself. There is no footgun, because the weird results you obtain are just notation. They look weird to a human, but they don't allow you to actually break any rules or to prove 1=0.

More importantly, the other way around, it seems too easy to copy a proposition from paper onto Lean and falsely prove it without realising they don't express the same thing. A human probably wouldn't but there's increased usage of AI and other automatic methods with Lean.

I do understand I'm being purist and that it doesn't matter that much in practice. I've used Lean seriously for a while and I've never encountered any of this.

Are the various alternative axiomatic foundations also equivalent at this level or not? I suppose they are since they can implement/emulate each other, not sure.

Overall, I think that AMD is more focused and energetic than their competitors now. They are very close to taking over Intel on their long CPU race, both in the datacenter and consumer segments, and Nvidia might be next in the coming 5 years, depending on how the AI bubble develops.

They’ve become a big name now with AI, but they were never the only game in town in their home markets. They had an edge on the high-end so their name had some prestige, but market share wise it was quite even. Even with AI, they have a temporary head start but I wouldn’t be surprised if they get crowded in the coming years, what they do is not magic.

Perhaps calling it an “optimization” is misleading. Certainly it makes code faster, but more importantly it’s syntax sugar to translate recursion into loops.

Of course, it's possible that we've both been repeating ourselves all year long! I mean, I know I do that, I just think I've ridden more hobby horses than it picked up. :-)

It's fun, though. Thanks for sharing - a couple of my "roasts" gave me a genuine chuckle.

https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/aschobel

When it comes to of being able to do novel tasks on known knowledge, they seem to be quite good. One also needs to consider that problem-solving patterns are also a kind of (meta-)knowledge that needs to be taught, either through imitation/memorisation (Supervised Learning) or through practice (Reinforcement Learning). They can be logically derived from other techniques to an extent, just like new knowledge can be derived from known knowledge in general, and again LLMs seem to be pretty decent at this, but only to a point. Regardless, all of this is definitely true of humans too.

Generally, I use LLMs routinely on queries definitely no-one has written about. Are there similar texts out there that the LLM can put together and get the answer by analogy? Sure, to a degree, but at what point are we gonna start calling that intelligent? If that's not generalisation I'm not sure what is.

To what degree can you claim as a human that you are not just imitating knowledge patterns or problem-solving patterns, abstract or concrete, that you (or your ancestors) have seen before? Either via general observation or through intentional trial-and-error. It may be a conscious or unconscious process, many such patterns get backed into what we call intuition.

Are LLMs as good as humans at this? No, of course, sometimes they get close. But that's a question of degree, it's no argument to claim that they are somehow qualitatively lesser.