why are none of these people working on 3d printing guillotines. reading this blog post makes clear that there’s a use case

“I don’t know what this is, here’s my reaction to what I thought the topic was, no I didn’t read the article or lurk”

bizarre that they actually just say this

read through some HN comments the other day and felt so intelligent by comparison. I’m kind of a dipshit so don’t get that feeling many places. just there and /r/adviceanimals really

ok. this stackexchange answer suggests “at least” 810 gp as the cost for a wizard to cast wish.

https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/138091/how-much-should-you-pay-a-wizard-for-casting-your-wish-spell-scroll-for-you#138094

the cost of gp has little relation to that of modern currency. but in DND settings a goat costs one gp, and I am just going to bullshit and say goats are roughly as valuable irl as they are in the vaguely 18th century englandish default vibe of dnd. based on this goats as a store of value theory, we need to pay the wizard at least 810 goats.

now the cost of a goat depends greatly on its age and type, but we can guess that the cost of an adult dairy goat will be about 750 USD: https://rurallivingtoday.com/livestock/how-much-does-a-goat-cost/

in Australian dollars, the cost comes out to about $13,000. we now need to consult an Australia expert. @dgerard@awful.systems, is paying a wizard 13,000 Australian dollars to cast a tik tok protection spell over Australia a superior deal to paying an ai company however much to detect age from hand motions?

so openai is claimed to be doing great on the FrontierMath dataset. I’ve already seen the usual sort of dipshits using this to pump ai on reddit, and here’s a post that went to the frontpage on HN:

https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/22/can-ai-do-maths-yet-thoughts-from-a-mathematician/

(tl;dr only a few problems from the dataset are public but if representative the problems are about 25% survivable by an undergrad; coincidentally this is the % openai says their models are completing.)

this post is by kevin buzzard. he has a let’s say not easily beloved personality, but I don’t think of him as credulous or grifty, and people in his area regard him as an excellent mathematician.

he points out but I think does not focus enough on how discrediting the secretive nature of the dataset is. the fact that you can’t make it public is necessary to run such experiments in a scientifically reasonable way, but also makes it totally impossible to run the experiment in a scientifically reasonable way. an experiment which cannot be examined or reproduced is actually the opposite of science. it’s pure grift fuel

do you have any thoughts on why these wealthy and powerful public figures have all chosen this extraordinarily unusual aesthetic

very interesting, thank you for sharing

anyone know of an applicable rpg spell here. I want to know how much this would cost

“no,” he says, “miku-tan will have a banana juice.”