Natural proofs are a certain type of proof of the circuit complexity of boolean conditions. The barrier is that it has been proved that [1] natural proofs cannot be used for P vs NP.
I’m not sure that is a problem here given that as I understand it, natural proofs apply to circuit complexity approaches and they say the whole circuit complexity method has fundamental limitations which they describe thus:
The circuit complexity approach seeks to establish lower bounds by proving that NP problems require super-polynomial circuit sizes. While achieving success for restricted models such as monotone circuits, this approach has faced insurmountable barriers in establishing non-linear lower bounds for general circuits.
So they take an entirely different approach using category theory. It may have a similar limitation as the natural proof barrier (as far as I know), but as they dismiss the whole circuit idea and do something different I wouldn’t say them not mentioning the limitation of a specific type of circuit-based approach is that much of a problem.
[1] assuming certain things which people generally believe to be true
Deciding to set a "success" target of 100 million players and then spending upwards of $400 million USD developing one title is a recipe for studio closures and/or layoffs when it inevitably "fails" because executive leadership didn't set reasonable targets or come up with a reasonable budget. It's a big house of cards.
A more diversified portfolio of titles with more reasonable budgets would be a much safer choice, and it's how things were done successfully in the past.
i'd rather see studios take creative and financial risks personally, not saying I care about yet another battle royale game, but in principle it should be about good games that are innovative and push boundaries, not milking a sequel from an established ip for the sake of stable employment.
Creative risks and financial risks are almost diametrically opposed. It's a lot harder to take a creative risk when a lot of money is on the line. It's also harder aligning a large team to execute on a novel vision.
>It's a lot harder to take a creative risk when a lot of money is on the line. It's also harder aligning a large team to execute on a novel vision.
well indie games are their own separate thing and large studios will never have the creative freedom and the ability to align a small team to a novel vision that they do. However studios with deeper pockets and larger teams can still innovate and push the boundaries of what gaming can be so long as the executive team isn't a bunch of spineless losers.
i agree, no matter how much wishful thinking jensen sells to investors about paradigm shifts the days of everyone rushing out to get 6 figure tensor core clusters for their data center probably won't last forever.
If Nvidia was at all in a hurry to lock-out third-parties, then I don't think they would support OpenCL and Vulkan compute, or allow customers to write PTX compilers that interface with Nvidia hardware.
In reality, the demand for highly parallelized compute simply blindsided OEMs. AMD, Intel and Apple were all laser-focused on raster efficiency, none of them have a GPU architecture optimized for GPGPU workloads. AMD and Intel don't have competitive fab access and Apple can't sell datacenter hardware to save their life; Nvidia's monopoly on attractive TSMC hardware isn't going anywhere.
The profit margins on Macs must be insane because it just doesn’t make sense at all Apple just doesn’t give a fuck about data center workloads when they have some of the best ARM CPUs and whole packages on the market.
If Xserve is any basis of comparison, Apple struggles to sell datacenter hardware in the best of markets. The competition is too hot nowadays, and Apple likely knows the investment wouldn't be worth it. ARM CPUs are available from Ampere and Nvidia now, Apple Silicon would have to differentiate itself more than it does on mobile. After a certain point, it probably does come down to the size of the margins on consumer hardware.
I will never not be forever saddened by the fact that Apple killed their Xserve line shortly before the App store got big. We all ended up having to do dumb things like rack-mount Mac Minis for app CI builds for years and it was such a pain.
there was news they recently bought a lot of nvidia gpus since their progress was too slow to use their own chips even in their own data centers for their own purposes
I don't know how it happened, but Intel completely dropped out of the AI accelerator market.
There are really only three competitors in this market with one also-ran company.
Obviously it's Nvidia, Google and tenstorrent.
The also ran company is AMD, whose products are only bought as a hedge against Nvidia. Even though the hardware is better on paper, the software is so bad that you get worse performance than Nvidia. Hence "also ran".
Tenstorrent isn't there yet, but it's just a matter of time. They are improving with every generation of hardware and their software stack is 100% open source.
Even if you can squeeze an existing model into smaller hardware, that means that you can squeeze a larger (and hence smarter) model into that 6 figure cluster. And they aren't anywhere near smart enough for many things people attempt to use them for, so I don't see the hardware demand for inference subsiding substantially anytime soon.
At least not for these reasons - if it does, it'll be because of consistent pattern of overhyping and underdelivering on real-world applications of generative AI, like what's going on with Apple right now.
Much of that federal funding is for research, the same as any other R1 university. We all benefit from research findings. Endowments are used for other purposes.
There are a few colleges that take no federal funding in order to maintain total independence (mostly for religious reasons). But their research output is virtually zero.
> I'd guess bad-to-good ratio is at least 10 to 1. Should we fix that?
Should we fix... what? Your unsubstantiated claim? You didn't even bother to do napkin math about it, you just asked a bunch of leading questions and then claimed inaction by the masses.
The federal funds are for doing research that the government wants to fund, not keeping the university’s lights on. This is about terminating a productive partnership, not ending a subsidy handout to schools.
Yup, people really need to learn their history. The modern federally-funded research university system came about as a direct result of the US getting caught with their pants down after Sputnik. The government decided it's in its best strategic interests to maintain long-term investments in basic and applied research. Those aren't things you can just spin up on short notice, though it's easy to kill it.
Also, isn't a ton of the IP from federally funded research just handed over to US corporations for free or pennies on the dollar?
Something tells me this is more of the current administration threatening to completely wreck US prosperity if they don't get wins on their bigoted social war agenda.
Absolutely. Everything in tech is hugely funded by tax payer money.
Modern semiconductor manufacturing is nearly all researched in partnership with federal funding. It's viewed as a national security issue.
The best theory I've heard so far is that Trump has this wild idea that if he can tank the US economy into a recession/depression then he can renegotiate our debt. He thinks this will save the US trillions of dollars. Except it'll cost the US trillions of dollars as well. I don't know if he's smart enough to think this up but it does kinda seem like what he's doing.
It actually isn’t. Grants, as well as much of endowment funds are restricted. They legally must be accounted for separately and can only be used as specified. If you have a billion dollars in restricted endowment or grants towards scholarships and resources, you cannot use them to keep the lights on.
Research projects require grant funding because the schools do not have a business model to justify doing the research.
As a university professor, I agree with you. I think universities must cut the cord and be independent. The university faculty gave up the control to administrators and administrators, in turn, gave up the control to politicians.
I think this is the common-sense response. The push back I've heard is that endowments are apportioned to specific things. That is, it's not an open piggy bank. Nevertheless, $50B is a _lot_ even if the smallest allocation is 1% of the largest that is likely on the order of tens of millions.
It'd be an interesting strategy if you could split the organization based on departments that depend heavily on federal funds (i.e. perhaps STEM fields such as medicine and physics/hard sciences, etc.) and those that are not (and perhaps simultaneously requiring more freedom of thought).
Perhaps resurrect the Radcliffe College to support the more intellectual, free thought based departments. [1]
Do you have money in the bank? Do you have income? If so, you don't really need any help from the government. If you value your personal independence so much, then cut the cord.
Just consider the tax-exempt status as an indirect subsidy for research and education. I think its ROI is much higher than from any other way the government could use the uncollected amount.
Sure, that's the narrative to manufacture consent from the naive, but I don't buy it at all. Perhaps for very small fledgling universities that makes partial sense; even then I am skeptical. For Harvard, definitely not.
At very least, if your endowment is growing on an inflation-adjusted basis, it does not appear to me that you need further subsidies; your primary business is to be an hedge fund and the treasury of an empire, not education for the masses. Gains should be taxed like a hedge fund at that point.
If you want to subsidize education as a society, there are much better ways: fund research directly and cut through the indirect cost crap (which was popular among academics up until the moment the current administration started advocating for it).
> Harvard has a 50 billion endowment, what do they need federal funds for. If they value their intellectual independence so much, then cut the cord.
I agree. Gulf monarchies will probably come in a give even more billions to these institutions anyway to make up for the losses. No strings attached of course...
Harvard probably already secured some more funding from Qatar and what not.
i'll be a contrarian, that css and svg "hacks" like this are "impressive" are a symptom of a web-platform that is dogshit for multimedia. If a game did this nobody would even blink, the fact that it's another convoluted css hack makes it "notable".
just because QFT follows an internal logic, doesn't mean the jump from macro physics to quantum physics itself is logical. In my opinion we still don't have a logical explanation for why the model changes so dramatically from classical to quantum physics.
As a naïve fool with no understanding of quantum physics, I want to take a stab at this! Here’s my hypothesis:
Consider a world in which everything is “very quantum”, and there are no easy approximations which can generally be relied on. In such a world, our human pattern-matching behavior would be really useless, and “human intelligence” in the form we’re familiar with will have no evolutionary advantage. So the only setting in which we evolve to be confused by this phenomena is one where simple approximations do work for the scales we occupy.
Sincerely, I don’t think this argument is super good. But it’s fun to propose, and maybe slightly valid.
The main objection is: if there wasn't a classical limit, our brains would have evolved differently.
So yes, we can use the antrophic argument as evidence for the existence of the classical limit, but it doesn't have explanatory power for why there is a classical limit.
This is called the anthropic principle. I personally have objections to it, specifically that due to emergence it is hard to make definitive statements about what complex phenomena may emerge in alternate universes. However, it's taken seriously by many philosophers of physics and certainly has merit.
My point is that it isn't possible to determine the emergent behaviour of a complex system from first principles. So arguments of the type "these physics don't result in atoms being produced, so life can't emerge" doesn't imply that other complex structures _like_ life don't emerge.
Technology is made iteratively by repeated trial and then observed error in the physical structures we've created (i.e. we build machines and then watch them fail to work properly in a particular way).
Technology that works in a different universe without atoms, would require us to be able to experiment within that universe if we wanted to produce technology that works there with our current innovation techniques.
I'm a fool too but two things I remember. One was a paper discussing the thermodynamics of groups of particles. When they have strong interactions with nearby particles classic behavior emerges very quickly as the number of particles increases. And not n equals 1 million, or 1000, but more like two dozen.
And then there was Feynman asked to explain in layman's terms how magnets work. And he said I can't. Because if I taught you enough to understand you wouldn't be a layman. But he said it's just stuff you're familiar with but at a larger than usual scale. And he hinted even then one level down and you run out of why's again.
I did study physics, and our statistical physics lecture only derived thermodynamic laws.
We also had a somewhat shoddy derivation of Newton's Laws from the Schrödinger equation, but wasn't really satisfactory either, because it doesn't really answer the question when I can treat things classically.
What I'd really like (and haven't seen so far, but also haven't searched too hard) is the derivation of an error function that tells me how wrong I am to treat things classically, depending on some parameters (like number of particles, total mass, interaction strength, temperature, whatever is relevant).
(Another thing that drove me nuts in our QM classes where that "observations" where introduced as: a classical system couples to a quantum system. Which presupposes the existence of classical systems, without properly defining or delineating them. And here QM was supposed to be the more fundamental theory).
>What I'd really like (and haven't seen so far, but also haven't searched too hard) is the derivation of an error function that tells me how wrong I am to treat things classically, depending on some parameters (like number of particles, total mass, interaction strength, temperature, whatever is relevant).
There are plenty of ways to do this and things like Wigner functions literally calculate quantum corrections to classical systems.
But generally if you can't even measure a system before it's quantum state decoheres then it's quantum status is pretty irrelevant.
I.e. the time it takes for a 1 micrometer wide piece of dust to decohere is ~10^-31 s and it takes a photon ~10^12s to cross it's diameter. So it decoheres 10 billion billion times faster that a photon could even cross it.
The error is usually taken as ratio of wavelength to your desired precision, but in general depends on your use case, sometimes you have full precision all the way down, sometimes you have insufficient precision on astronomic scale. Quantum physics doesn't have an absolute scale cutoff.
i started writing a response about how the human brain is designed to operate in an environment where classical physics is the norm, so we need to bridge the deviations from that if we are to really understand the world. But I don't know how much that's really true if you consider neural biology and I won't claim to know where quantum stops and classical begins as it relates to brain function.
You need quantum physics to understand how chemistry works.
So, given that chemistry plays a huge role in how the human (or any) brain works, it would be quite a stretch to argue that the brain works with classical physics.
We are often sloppy and sort all the chemistry in with classical physics, but that's a very human-centric approach. In reality, the Universe doesn't have different "domains" with separate rules for chemistry and physics; it evolves according to the Schrödinger equation, and we use Chemistry as an abstraction to not have to deal with nasty mathematics to predict how certain reactions will work.
I think the parent was really referring to "mind" instead of "brain". It's not the hardware of the brain that's classical, but our sense perception and model of the world.
I do think there's something to this approach though - our sensory organs and processing ability are not abstract powers of understanding the universe - they developed exactly to give us enhanced survival chances. We should not expect to even be able to detect (let alone intuitively understand) aspects of reality that can't be used for survival.
I do understand the point you’re making but my counter argument to that would be that physics hasn’t relied on our sensory input for a hundred years or more.
It’s been almost entirely based on maths and careful measurements from machined instruments purpose built for observing phenomena.
So at this point you’d hope the limitations of our biological senses would have been long surpassed.
>our [...] processing ability are not abstract powers of understanding the universe
Neural nets are called universal approximators for a reason. If what you guys are discussing is true, then a neural net would not be able to learn from a dataset about quantum experiments. I doubt this is the case. Also there is quantum cognition, and by that I mean the fact some researchers figured out a lot of puzzling results from experimental cognitive science seem to make more sense once analyzed from a quantum perspective.
>In my opinion we still don't have a logical explanation for why the model changes so dramatically from classical to quantum physics.
I think you have this backwards. QM IS the law of the universe and Classical Physics is just a high mass low energy approximation of it. In any case there doesn't need to be a logical explanation at all, the laws of physics are as they are. Why is the value of the fine structure constant what it is?
This is a false setup; you don't need to trust either. I'd prefer a law that makes the bodycam footage public & accessible by default. It could even be automated with geo-tagging where & when the recording happened.
The fact that police cars can start without the body cams being fully charged, the fact that they don't stream to a centralized and reliable server 100% of the time that they're worn, and the fact that they're possible to turn off while an officer is on duty with effectively zero consequences makes it pretty clear that no one in power cares about bodycams being a tool for the people. They're just weaponized against the populace.
Police get called to a lot of very nasty calls, and see a lot of things that people calling would really rather not be public by default.
Naked people at 2am who just ran a robber off (or are on drugs), domestic violence calls, child abuse calls, welfare checks where people are definitely not okay - and sometimes where people have been rotting for days or weeks in the heat.
Not to mention traffic accidents and crimes with decapitations, dead kids, dead pregnant women, and numerous combinations of the above.
Also, cops need to use the toilet too. And need to talk to people that don’t want others to know they are talking to the cops.
They already get geotagged.
I’m not saying body cam footage should be inaccessible if there is a legitimate reason, but the public is very quickly going to be unhappy if their law enforcement agency posts all their body cam footage on the Internet - or allows anyone else to do the same.
The church has a long history of defending and clarifying the principles and practices of faith in a relatively academic way, in a way that would surprise people who believe religion is an anti-intellectual endeavor.
I remember reading something along the lines of, Jesuits will have a perfectly ironclad logical argument to any theological point... Assuming you have already swallowed the 1-2 big rocks at the foundation.
it's such false power though, the politicians don't realize we can regulate the shit out of big tech and reallocate the money to more noble causes and google and facebook and all the other "tech" companies that aren't doing much but sitting on monopolies will be just fine. They don't need 1/100th of the capital they have to provide the service they do to society.
