Anthony Barker

@SebastienBubeck Notice that if you have just a bit of memory, you can improve by counting the number or requests and switch from the “Move to the front” policy to the Transportation rule after the lines cross around request 250.

My good friend Christian Coester solved a 50 years old open problem in self-organizing lists (was it really open? did people even care? yes and yes), and, you guessed it, ChatGPT-Pro made the key step in the proof*! (*a Christian Coester on the other side of the screen was needed to see through the full proof!) The problem is extremely simple: you are organizing (online) a list of items, and when item in position i is requested you pay i. Requests arrive i.i.d., and so the best thing to do is to organize the list in order of decreasing probability of appearance of items. But now what happens if the probabilities are not known, and you want a memoryless algorithm (note that with memory one could just estimate frequencies and approximate the optimal ordering)? 40 years ago it was shown that the most stupid memoryless rule of moving the requested item to the front achieves a competitive ratio of pi/2 (and this is tight). But empirically there seems to be a better idea, which is to be a bit less aggressive and simply move up the requested item by one position (the "Transposition Rule"), see Codex's experiment below. In the very first paper on this topic 50 years ago, Rivest conjectured that indeed this should be a very good rule. What did Christian prove? He showed that Transposition Rule's average cost is at the most the optimal fixed list plus ONE. Just a regret of one. Beautiful. In fact the proof shows something more delicate, and this is where ChatGPT comes in: Denote p_i for the probability of the i^th item (in the optimal ordering). Now under the stationary distribution of the Transposition Rule, denote s_i for the "excess cost" that item i incurs from wrong placement, namely: s_i = sum_{j < i} (p_j - p_i)*Prob(i appears before j) The regret of Transposition Rule is exactly the sum of those slack terms s_i. Now here is the magic: ChatGPT suggested that s_i might be smaller than p_i. If true that concludes the proof, since then we have sum s_i <= 1. Note that it is quite magical, I don't see a reason a priori why s_i would be smaller than p_i ... ChatGPT proposed a an argument to prove this for small n, and Christian found an actual proof for all n.

Airdropping Starlink is an obvious move to let Iranians coordinate taking back their country.

Why does anyone use the term “humanoid robot” when we already have the much nicer term “Android”? Is it just because of the phone OS?

@VraserX Mostly rioting

I’m genuinely curious. If AI and robotics eliminate most human labor and scarcity… what does daily life actually look like? What do people do with their time? What gives life meaning? How do you imagine a post-labor world?

To open Hormuz and save the petroleum dollar, the US gov needs to go into the business of shipping insurance.

No surprise, yet a bad sign that they’re the one yelling it at us.

@WW3finalboss Obviously yes.

🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺 Should the European Union become a country?

@EmileAndHisBots Yes but the Czechs are still up for building h them.

@FiveIsGreen Also France!

Good news for Germany: there’s this great place next door called the Czech Republic that isn’t afraid of nuclear energy.

@christiandean_ US tax code

What other large datasets should I run this on?

@VictorTaelin Make a compiler, and make the optimization flag require a micropayment. AI wash the optimization flag to make it seem like you have to do it on some giant server while magically also keeping code private.

I think a lot of people will be using Bend2 soon. Been wondering about the business model though. How to sell a programming language? Since it is meant to be used by AI's, I think we could make it free for all, except AI labs must pay a license to use it on their agents 🤔

This is a clear symptom of the Singularity: AI researching new and better AI faster and more thoroughly than human performance.

@itsme_urstruly Call a broker

You wake up and it's 1990. No wifi. No mobile phones. No social media. No doom scrolling. What do you do first?

@clashreport Gosh that sounds like a German version of DOGE and the Argentinian chainsaw

Germany's Merz: We must deregulate every sector. I call for a “regulatory clean slate.” Minor corrections to laws are not sufficient. We need to systematically review the whole set of existing EU legislation.

@kuruscam @DJSnM British HMS Conqueror in the Faulkand Island bout.

@DJSnM Second?? When was the first?

This is only the second time in history a nuclear powered submarine has engaged and sunk a target with torpedos.

@sciencegirl Mostly linguistic diversity.

What is stopping humanity from living peacefully together?

I reckon from the snap invasion that Iran got its spicy metal out of Fordow before Midnight Hammer.

A light-femtoDay is 1.02 inches.

@Real_time_osint From US naval air defense?

@hecubian_devil Then we would have 650bn less and still no fusion power plants.

Imagine if we put $650bn into this instead of LLMs