I must miss some important context here. What exactly was the purpose of his initial email to OpenAI in the first place?
Telling OpenAI that Anthropic has apparently solved an important problem but most likely that refers to him and he is using OpenAI models (not Anthropic's)?
And he wants to clarify that with OpenAI in advance? And get a pardon for Anthropic's likely but false press statements?
I dont get it.
[edited] needless to say, the behavior of the OpenAI employee is really despicable
Because OpenAI employees kept leaking that Anthropic had a solution to Navier-Stokes and he wanted to figure out what was going on, since he was working on Navier-Stokes with an Anthropic employee. The rumor has been loudly circling the math community for the past week or so. For a bit of context, here's a timeline from mathematician and AI researcher Elliot Glazer:
I also did prefer my plastic Pasmo (essentially the same as suica) card until I learned during my last trip, that it can only be recharged with cash :-/
This doesn't especially bother me, but it is a kinda funny workflow to go to an ATM to withdraw cash (with your bank card) only to immediately put it back into the machine (to charge your IC card).
This is just BS. I had and saw many public discussion also on German Marktätze on this topic, some quite heated. Nobody was arrested or removed from their job or otherwise sanctioned. But of course people were disagreeing.
The right to free speech is not the right to freedom from contradiction!
This is just not true. There has been tremendous progress in the field. Starting with google’s experiment in 2019 on showing quantum advantage - admittedly on a useless problem, but quantum advantage nevertheless, to fault tolerant encodings by the Harvard group to recent demonstrations of a road toward advantage in generative models by goggle, to name a few. It’s still far away from running Shor’s algorithm to factor relevant numbers and break RSA and the like, but even there dramatic progress is being made, see, e.g., https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665
> Unfortunately, the United States yet again has to bail out the rest of the world.
You mean like the one last time where they fought the war on terrorism in Afghanistan for the rest of the world and where it took them 20 years to replace the Taliban with … ehm … the Taliban?
First - there's no "kind". I don't align with MAGA or any of those guys. Most should be in jail.
Second - that's not the point I was making. I have a lot of respect for the military members that served alongside us during our time in Afghanistan.
But just as though the United States military can be apolitical and is largely treated as such in the United States, we can criticize the broader actions by the governments of those who sent troops without criticizing the valiant efforts of those troops who fought alongside us.
I‘m a bit confused by your statement. In Afghanistan a NATO coalition fought in the war. 456 British, 301 French, 158 Canadian and 54 German soldiers died.
Besides that I’m really unsure why you think that more military power would have helped. I really do believe that in a general sense this is true: since WWII the US has won every battle but lost every war. And that’s not down to an inability to be tactically extremely successful. It‘s down to taking on war aims that are impossible to achieve or at least extremely difficult and (most notably currently) being strategically totally lost.
> Besides that I’m really unsure why you think that more military power would have helped.
More troops on the ground means more resources to help keep the peace. I think that's just something we can take at face value to prove more military power would have helped.
But the issue was political power, not military power. The US performed exceptional - we kept at it in Afghanistan for 20 years, through a financial crises, and more. But without the rest of the world signing on to help politically and even militarily, instead choosing to jeer and strut their rooster feathers from the sidelines, there was only so much we could do. And now even today folks seem to like to cheer that the US "lost" Afghanistan without realizing what the repercussions are for those who live there.
The US actually won quite a few wars since World War II. Iraq being a very good recent example. That one is kind of funny because for a long time the consensus has been America screwed up, but the last I checked Iraq is doing much better, has a functioning parliamentary style government, and the only real negative thing to say is to ask whether it was worth it or not to have that come to be. I would say yes.
> It‘s down to taking on war aims that are impossible to achieve or at least extremely difficult and (most notably currently) being strategically totally lost.
It's been like 2 months and we've decimated Iran's military, killed a lot of their leadership, and neutered their nuclear program and the best they can do is threaten to lob missiles at oil tankers like the Houthis. It's unfortunate but time will tell whether this was a "strategic failure", and it's even more so unfortunate we can't in real life run the counter-factual where Iran continues to build missiles until we actually can't do anything, then they close the Straight and that's the end of maritime trade as we know it.
30,000+ Iranian civilians (probably some children too) murdered by the Iranian regime - we can speak to their justice first when the IRGC and their cronies answer for their malicious and violent crimes against the world.
Unlike the Iranian regime we don’t intentionally kill or murder people. How do you know? Because they take their own people and at the point of a gun force them to stand around on bridges and stuff because even the Iranian regime knows that we don’t kill civilians. Something that, for some reason seems to be solely lost on you.
Iran fired 2,500 ballistic missiles at the United Arab Emirates alone, intentionally targeting civilians.
We could pose it as a simple question and examine what the answers would be:
Do western powers bomb civilians intentionally?
US -> No
Israel -> No
Other westerner powers -> No
Iran -> No
Hamas/Hezbollah/Other terrorist murders -> No
You -> Yes
It's a strange thing when you aren't even on the same page as your Iranian friends.
And intent matters. I for one support a form of reparations paid to the families of those who we mistakenly killed. Will Iran pay such reparations for those they've murdered inside and outside of Iran? Of course not. There's a difference - we're morally superior.
This is utter nonsense. I have seen and read many reports and articles about the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank in the mainstream media! And you won’t loose your job when expressing solidarity.
But apart from all the other stuff you mention, you’re missing an important point: these things move. And unless all objects are synchronized (which they are not) they occupy a whole orbit, not only their actual volume. If two orbits intersect, the objects occupying those will eventually collide.
Yes. This is the idea behind Kessler Syndrome - that the accumulation of clutter in Earth orbit could lead to an "ablation cascade" as more and more things collide and more and more debris is created from those collisions leading to Earth orbit becoming too hazardous to traverse.
"A 1 kg object impacting at 10 km/s, for example, is probably capable of catastrophically breaking up a 1,000 kg spacecraft if it strikes a high-density element in the spacecraft. In such a breakup, numerous fragments larger than 1 kg would be created." https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/library/a-technical-asses...
I believe I described it badly or you misunderstood me then. What I was referring to in my mention of three-dimensionality is that the area in which all of them orbit isn't a single flat plane over a sphere shape. It's actually several flat planes layered on top of each other, with an obviously ever greater surface area the higher you go. Thus you have LEO, MEO and GEO satellites all sharing orbital space but at different heights so to speak. I'm aware that any given satellite generally flies along a fixed altitude (though as far as I know their latitude along that altitude can shift enormously)
I suppose each satellite has its orbit defined by the elliptical path (4 parameters). Like for GEO you can have many satellites in a single elliptical path.
You can also probably have different satellites on different ellipses whose paths intersect with each other, but the timing is such that they never collide.
What you say is important of course, and it's what makes me less than sure in my assessment. It was after all more of a mental exercise in appreciating just how vast an area of space this relatively tiny quantity of objects is spread across.
To give one further perspective example here: a single large bulk container ship can carry up to 8,500 car-sized units.
This means that even if every single one of the maybe 15,000 satellites in orbit were the size of a car (most of them are much smaller actually), all together, they'd fill no more than the storage spaces of two bulk container ships with lots of room to spare at that.
This, spread over a multi-layered area as vast as our orbital space, means that even with their constantly moving at incredible speeds, and all the junk out there scattered between the satellites themselves, there's an enormous amount of emptiness between it all mitigating against impacts being very likely or frequent at all.
After all, of the 8,070 or so Starlink satellites in orbit right now, there's little mention of more than a few having been knocked out by debris in orbit. It seems that solar storms are their much bigger worry and cause of mishaps.
As the saying goes, space is huge, sometimes more than our brains can easily comprehend. This applies even in the comparatively tiny orbital regions of it that we use daily.
The mental exercise is fine for realising that satellites don't look as big as pictures of satellites in graphics, it's just missing the point that if you don't want to hit a 20cm x 20cm x 20cm cube that moves at 17,500 mph and has slow and limited capability to adjust that movement you need to allow it quite a bit more space, and be able to predict its movement accurately relative to yours. Especially if any collision means thousands of pieces of shrapnel that continue to move at 17500mph for decades or more, whilst potentially being too small to track but large enough to do a lot of damage.
Trains take up a negligible fraction of the mileage of the lines they operate on and rarely cross other lines, but signalling is still critical.
All of these are useful things to keep in mind of course, and they're why I put forth my consideration as a thought experiment for perspective, not so much as an absolute assertion. Orbital space is complicated, and the the ramifications of accidents are extremely unique compared to those that apply in a terrestrial context, but I still stand by my point about it being absurdly big enough that a sense of proportion is needed in worrying about something like Kessler syndrome.
What really surprised me when I heard about it was that even after all those decades of research and development, there was still room to develop novel laminar flow wings and fuselage to be used in a business jet[1] in the early 2000s.
One of the major problems with dark matter and dark energy is, that the standard model has been experimentally confirmed to such high precision. All possible extensions proposed so far which tried to explain dark matter /dark energy have been basically falsified by the experiments.
The standard model is so descriptive and accurate, there is just no room for extensions which predict new physics but are still consistent with existing data.
I don't believe all possible extensions have been ruled out: e.g. right-handed neutrinos are still a viable dark matter candidate as far as I know, and these are in fact motivated by the standard model, because every other fermion has both right and left chiral forms.
So likely dark matter is a different flavor of something already in the model. Dr. Mills' Hydrino theory presents hydrogen with the electron in a lower orbit that does not radiate as a candidate for dark matter. These states are stable like the ground state. Transition into or between hydrino states emit light in the UV or soft X-ray wavelengths that is not seen in optical telescopes.
There are many ways Mills claims to have experimentally verified the existence of hydrinos but the most obvious one is the faster than hydrogen transit through a gas chromatograph.
Intuitively speaking, if dark matter interacts only with gravitational field, then it's not affected by most standard model symmetries. A field bubble, so to say. Tachyons are somehow thought of as possible, meaning standard model doesn't say much about them?
Telling OpenAI that Anthropic has apparently solved an important problem but most likely that refers to him and he is using OpenAI models (not Anthropic's)?
And he wants to clarify that with OpenAI in advance? And get a pardon for Anthropic's likely but false press statements?
I dont get it.
[edited] needless to say, the behavior of the OpenAI employee is really despicable
reply