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submitted 3 months ago by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/opm@lemmy.world

A new pack of pure Awesomeness is hopefully arriving soon...

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 54 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Really embarrassing also for the journals that published the papers – and which are as guilty. They take ridiculously massive amounts of money to publish articles (publication cost for one article easily surpasses the cost of a high-end business laptop), and they don't even check them properly?

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submitted 5 months ago by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/opm@lemmy.world
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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/generalrelativity@mander.xyz

I was reading some works – true pearls! – by Synge: his conference contribution Tensorial integral conservation laws in general relativity (1959/1962) and his book Relativity: The General Theory (1960). In these works Synge introduces an extremely interesting definition of four-momentum and of rotational momentum, based on two-point tensors. The definition is interesting because (1) it involves the full Riemann tensor, not just the Einstein tensor, (2) it includes the (or rather, defines a) four-momentum and rotational momentum of the gravitational field, (3) it obeys a conservation law as opposed to a balance law (the equation ∇⋅T=0 expresses in general just balance, not conservation).

The definition for rotational momentum is also interesting because it appears as the natural generalization of the one in Newtonian mechanics, which is based on the affine structure of its 3D space. Roughly speaking, in Newtonian mechanics we have (r-a)∧p, where a is a fixed point, r the point of interest, and p the momentum (density) at the point r. Synge essentially replaces the difference "r-a", which relies on an affine structure, with the geodesic distance between two points R and A in spacetime, through his two-point "world function". In his book he explains that general relativity requires the appearance of a reference point (a or A) also in the definition of four-momentum, whereas such reference point is superfluous in Newtonian mechanics.

OK this was a very poor summary, just to pique your interest. For details see Synge's conference contribution, and chapter VI, especially §4, of his book (refs below).

Bryce DeWitt even commented "Je suis tout à fait de l'avis du professeur Synge qui insiste sur le fait que ces fonctions de deux points se montreront très importantes dans le futur développement de la théorie de la relativité générale" on the conference contribution. Two-point tensors were quite fashionable in the 1960s, they are used in interesting ways also in Truesdell & Toupin's The Classical Field Theories (see Part F and Appendix III there).

Yet, these definition venues seem to have been abandoned today. Here are my questions to you: why? just for unfathomable sociology-of-science reasons, or because of physical-mathematical ones? Are there works today which further explore these venues?

References:

• Synge: Tensorial integral conservation laws in general relativity, in Lichnerowicz,Tonnelat: Les théories relativistes de la gravitation (CNRS 1962), pp. 75–83. https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=74345AB69DDF9EE233FA55F55FDCB057

• Synge: Relativity: The General Theory (North-Holland 1960). https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=7AE08880CF8086FED4D3BCF732BE8E54

• Truesdell, Toupin: The Classical Field Theories, in Flügge: Handbuch der Physik: III/1 (Springer 1960), pp. I–VII, 226–902. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45943-6_2 https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=728F54156B632C44EAC2C559F120DDAB

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/bayes@mander.xyz

A little advertisement for a new free online course about the foundations of data science, machine learning, and – just a little – artificial intelligence. It's been designed for students in computer science and data science, who could be uncomfortable with a head-on probability-theory or statistics approach, and who might have a lighter background in maths. The main point of view of the course is how to build an artificial-intelligence agent who must draw inferences and make decisions. As a course, it's still a sort of experiment.

https://pglpm.github.io/ADA511/

In more technical terms, the course is actually about so-called "Bayesian nonparametric density inference" and Bayesian decision theory.

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submitted 5 months ago by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/opm@lemmy.world
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submitted 6 months ago by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/anime@lemmy.ml

Can't help imagining Saitama putting a definite end, without so much back-and-forth, to Mahito's hateful smirk. One punch is all that's needed.

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submitted 10 months ago by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/english@lemmy.ca

What are the comparative and superlative of the adjective "fun"? I'd say "more fun" and "most fun"...

But I'm somehow slightly tempted by "funnier" and "funniest", which should be for "funny" though, not "fun"...

I didn't find anything about this in the main dictionaries.

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 58 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)
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submitted 10 months ago by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/lego@lemmy.world

...and thought of randomly posting it here.

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/sdfpubnix@lemmy.sdf.org

I wanted to tag SDF today. A #sdf came up, but it seems to refer to something(s) different. I also saw a #sdfdotorg.

Is there a tag that's sort of "standard" to refer to SDF? Standard in the sense that it's typically used by ~~SDF members~~ [Edit:] Mastodon users interested in SDF.

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 36 points 11 months ago

This is actually already implemented, see here.

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 63 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Title:

ChatGPT broke the Turing test

Content:

Other researchers agree that GPT-4 and other LLMs would probably now pass the popular conception of the Turing test. [...]

researchers [...] reported that more than 1.5 million people had played their online game based on the Turing test. Players were assigned to chat for two minutes, either to another player or to an LLM-powered bot that the researchers had prompted to behave like a person. The players correctly identified bots just 60% of the time

Complete contradiction. Trash Nature, it's become only an extremely expensive gossip science magazine.

PS: The Turing test involves comparing a bot with a human (not knowing which is which). So if more and more bots pass the test, this can be the result either of an increase in the bots' Artificial Intelligence, or of an increase in humans' Natural Stupidity.

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 101 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

There's an ongoing protest against this on GitHub, symbolically modifying the code that would implement this in Chromium. See this lemmy post by the person who had this idea, and this GitHub commit. Feel free to "Review changes" --> "Approve". Around 300 people have joined so far.

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

Personal websites often give an email address for contact, as a mailto:blah@blah.blah link. And the address is often obfuscated in a variety of ways to avoid its harvesting by spam bots.

If one wants to give one's Matrix address in a website, what's the correct way of writing it as link? is it recognized as any kind of MIME (like mailto:)?

And is Matrix-address spamming something possible and common? In this case, how should one obfuscate a Matrix address given in a website?

Lots of questions from a noob :) Thank you for your explanations!

Edit for others with the same question: as per @QuazarOmega@lemmy.world's explanation in the comments, the Matrix address can be given as the link

https://matrix.to/#/@[yourusername]:[your.server]
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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/firefox@lemmy.world

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/2217942

In my desktop Firefox I use Cookie Autodelete to keep a whitelist of sites whose cookies won't be deleted. All other cookies are deleted as soon as all tabs for a particular site are closed.

Android's Firefox, from what I gather, only give you two choices: delete all cookies upon quitting (not tab closing), or save them across sessions.

Unfortunately the extension above does not work on Firefox Android, and I haven't found any other alternatives.

Do you know of any alternatives or other solutions, to get a behaviour similar to the desktop one? (And also: how come that extension is not supported on Firefox on Android?)

Cheers!

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by pglpm@lemmy.ca to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

In my desktop Firefox I use Cookie Autodelete to keep a whitelist of sites whose cookies won't be deleted. All other cookies are deleted as soon as all tabs for a particular site are closed.

Android's Firefox, from what I gather, only give you two choices: delete all cookies upon quitting (not tab closing), or save them across sessions.

Unfortunately the extension above does not work on Firefox Android, and I haven't found any other alternatives.

Do you know of any alternatives or other solutions, to get a behaviour similar to the desktop one? (And also: how come that extension is not supported on Firefox on Android?)

Cheers!

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 38 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This image/report itself doesn't make much sense – probably it was generated by chatGPT itself.

  1. "What makes your job exposed to GPT?" – OK I expect a list of possible answers:
    • "Low wages": OK, having a low wage makes my job exposed to GPT.
    • "Manufacturing": OK, manufacturing makes my job exposed to GPT. ...No wait, what does that mean?? You mean if my job is about manufacturing, then it's exposed to GPT? OK but then shouldn't this be listed under the next question, "What jobs are exposed to GPT?"?
    • ...
    • "Jobs requiring low formal education": what?! The question was "what makes your job exposed to GPT?". From this answer I get that "jobs requiring low formal education make my job exposed to GPT". Or I get that who/whatever wrote this knows no syntax or semantics. OK, sorry, you meant "If your job requires low formal education, then it's exposed to GPT". But then shouldn't this answer also be listed under the next question??

  

  1. "What jobs are exposed to GPT?"
    • "Athletes". Well, "athletes" semantically speaking is not a job; maybe "athletics" is a job. But who gives a shirt about semantics? there's chatGPT today after all.
    • The same with the rest. "Stonemasonry" is a job, "stonemasons" are the people who do that job. At least the question could have been "Which job categories are exposed to GPT?".
    • "Pile driver operators": this very specific job category is thankfully Low Exposure. "What if I'm a pavement operator instead?" – sorry, you're out of luck then.
    • "High exposure: Mathematicians". Mmm... wait, wait. Didn't you say that "Science skills" and "Critical thinking skills" were "Low Exposure", in the previous question?

  

Icanhazcheezeburger? 🤣

(Just to be clear, I'm not making fun of people who do any of the specialized, difficult, and often risky jobs mentioned above. I'm making fun of the fact that the infographic is so randomly and unexplainably specific in some points)

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 35 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

One aspect that I've always been unsure about, with Stack Overflow, and even more with sibling sites like Physics Stack Exchange or Cross Validated (stats and probability), is the voting system. In the physics and stats sites, for example, not rarely I saw answers that were accepted and upvoted but actually wrong. The point is that users can end up voting for something that looks right or useful, even if it isn't (probably less the case when it comes to programming?).

Now an obvious reply to this comment is "And how do you know they were wrong, and non-accepted ones right?". That's an excellent question – and that's exactly the point.

In the end the judge about what's correct is only you and your own logical reasoning. In my opinion this kind of sites should get rid of the voting or acceptance system, and simply list the answers, with useful comments and counter-comments under each. When it comes to questions about science and maths, truth is not determined by majority votes or by authorities, but by sound logic and experiment. That's the very basis from which science started. As Galileo put it:

But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.

For example, at some point in history there was probably only one human being on earth who thought "the notion of simultaneity is circular". And at that time point that human being was right, while the majority who thought otherwise were wrong. Our current education system and sites like those reinforce the anti-scientific view that students should study and memorize what "experts" says, and that majorities dictate what's logically correct or not. As Gibson said (1964): "Do we, in our schools and colleges, foster the spirit of inquiry, of skepticism, of adventurous thinking, of acquiring experience and reflecting on it? Or do we place a premium on docility, giving major recognition to the ability of the student to return verbatim in examinations that which he has been fed?"

Alright sorry for the rant and tangent! I feel strongly about this situation.

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 60 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Understandably, it has become an increasingly hostile or apatic environment over the years. If one checks questions from 10 years ago or so, one generally sees people eager to help one another.

Now they often expect you to have searched through possibly thousands of questions before you ask one, and immediately accuse you if you missed some – which is unfair, because a non-expert can often miss the connection between two questions phrased slightly differently.

On top of that, some of those questions and their answers are years old, so one wonders if their answers still apply. Often they don't. But again it feels like you're expected to know whether they still apply, as if you were an expert.

Of course it isn't all like that, there are still kind and helpful people there. It's just a statistical trend.

Possibly the site should implement an archival policy, where questions and answers are deleted or archived after a couple of years or so.

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 51 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm not fully sure about the logic and perhaps hinted conclusions here. The internet itself is a network with major CSAM problems (so maybe we shouldn't use it?).

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 64 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The number of people protesting against them in their "Issues" page is amazing. The devs have now blocked the creation of new issue tickets or of comments in existing ones.

It's funny how in the "explainer" they present this as something done for the "user", when it's clearly not developed for the "user". I wouldn't accept something like this even if it was developed by some government – even less by Google.

I have just reported their repository to GitHub as malware, as an act of protest, since they closed the possibility of submitting issues or commenting.

[-] pglpm@lemmy.ca 36 points 11 months ago

Time to change distro.

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