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If you can increase your budget to 30k, you could consider a Slate EV.

Electric cars are still an underdeveloped form factor, so it makes sense that you can't get a car big enough for many passengers that is cheap enough for your budget (the battery needs to scale for passengers/weight, so the market so far is tiny cars or big expensive cars. The middle comes as the tech develops)


Nobody thought this was possible.

3sum hard was colloquially considered to be >= n^2

It's an absolutely unbelievable result! (Personally, this is more meaningful to me than Navier Stokes and feels more surprising - not that an agent did it but the result itself is extremely surprising!)


Do you have any more detail on this? When I first saw the 3SUM result, it was accompanied with a comment something like "There is the obvious O(n^3) algorithm, and a pretty easy O(n^2) algorithm". I thought for about 15 seconds and came up with: put all the numbers in a hash table (O(n)). Search every pair of numbers (O(n^2)) and check if the negative value is in the table (O(1)). I checked Wikipedia and that is basically the simple version (though there are algorithms with a lower constant and lower storage).

But it seems strange that an algorithm that I can come up with in 15 seconds (and I'm not very good at this) is also optimal! It's more surprising that this can't be beat (or couldn't be beat). So there must be something more to the story.


I don't really understand. The fact that, until now, no one's been able to come up with a better algorithm than the one everyone thinks of in 15s is what makes it an interesting conjecture.

It's made more tantalising by the fact that O(n^2) is so much larger than O(n) (the obvious lower bound needed to read the input), which suggests "room" for "something clever to do better".


It's the "Nobody thought this was possible" that I found curious. Yes, there is a lot of room between O(n) and O(n^2)! That's why it seems strange that it would be thought impossible.

But I guess it is just that people have been working on it for a long time with no progress, and so the thought was that there must be something especially hard about it. And, well, there is something comforting about round numbers, and so O(n^2) is something special, whereas if the O(n^1.9992) algorithm was known from the start I doubt anybody would have been surprised if O(n^1.9991) was possible.


It's not just that people have worked on it for a long time, it's that there are dozens of problems that are known to be 3sum hard and people have tried to make those as efficient as possible too!

Eg here's a paper with a bunch https://people.csail.mit.edu/virgi/6.1420/papers/gajovermars...

So every grad student who has thought about geometry problems will have spent more time than they're proud to admit thinking about better algorithms only to realize it's 3sum hard.

It's not just "people have thought about one problem a bunch" - the whole class has been wailed on to no avail


Yes that’s the idea, these conjectures basically say “there’s no better algorithm than the naive/brute force one”. It’s like if P!=NP, then there’s no (asymptotically) better algorithm for SAT than naive backtracking search.


It seems pretty clear that this is a serious scientific endeavor. I think it's fine for you to be skeptical, but it doesn't feel particularly "in the hacker news spirit" to sarcastically write it off like this


It's always a gamble to attempt humour here. Try the veal.


Unfortunately, the guidelines generally prohibit it:

> Don't be snarky

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Language and written language are themselves technologies that change what individuals can do (and thus impact their societies)

There is a well-known story about this discussed in Radiolab [2010] https://radiolab.org/podcast/91725-words/transcript

Here's ChatGPT summarizing one section:

> Younger signers had developed a richer vocabulary for mental states—concepts like believe, remember, forget, understand. They were much better than the original older signers at tasks requiring them to reason about what another person thinks or knows. Later, as the older signers picked up those mental-state terms from younger people, some of them improved on the same tests. Senghas describes it as language giving them new insight into other people’s thinking and motivations.

I see several likely stories:

* Much animal communication is practical, descriptive of the present (nothing abstract, or very few abstract concepts)

* If a species could expand its communication, it would give it more powerful tools and allow for more meaningful conversation with humans

* If such a thing is possible, it will be extremely disruptive to that species

I think if you could communicate about abstract ideas with your dog, you could exchange bedtime stories. However, I don't think such a thing is possible today, and it's not clear what species (if any, besides humans) will, in fact, be able to learn such things


Nicaraguan sign language is evidence for an innate language capacity, not that it is an invented technology and certainly not evidence for Sapir Whorf.


Evidence for vs compatible with are different things, and agreed!

I don't think it's particularly controversial to say "written language is a meaningful technology advancement for a civilization", though!


I'm confused why there's no attribution or reference to Tobi's (which in turn referenced the cursor git post)

Attribution is not just a problem for LLMs in mathematics!

Tobi is where I first heard the concept: https://github.com/tobi/walgit

And he credits this Cursor post for giving him the ideas and says it's worth reading: https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale

Note: in related work, the East River Source Control team has posted about their vision for git as well: https://ersc.io/blog/what-comes-after-git


I agree and nearly commented about that; it is very concerning & ought be at least in the README.

I was charitably thinking perhaps maybe possibly being a fork doesn't give you access to the full suite of GitHub tools: iirc issues aren't at least by default available? Maybe there's a setting for that.

It felt like a little too big a topic to tackle in my post, so I ommited, but I definitely have concerns! Very weird.


You know, the first time you navigate somewhere (if you don't already have perfect directions) will probably be the longest route you'll ever take to get there

For Earth, the proof presented for NS is just our first attempt navigating from our previously known facts to the proof.

I expect we will be able to shorten it dramatically (most likely with human and AI insights), but I don't think we should read too much into the length. If you want a similar point of comparison, see the original proof (by humans) of Fermat's last theorem. It has been shortened significantly. This is normal.


This is a truely bizarre claim. Imagine if one said:

"Weather forecasts should be banned because they can never reach 100% accuracy"


They are completely different things with different consequences. Someone can point to the sky and prove that the sun is there.


You're responding to a comment about weather forecasts, not current weather. Pointing to the sun is not a forecast.


Imagine writing an article in 5 days. Working hard. Posting it online and then everyone says it is ai and laughs and dismisses it because a tool says it is AI.



Imagine wasting several thousand people's time


You have to name pangram because the other ai detectors are quite bad


Fwiw, I only did the first 300 words (signed into pangram) and it seemingly correctly noted that there were 2 (mostly) human-authored sentences in there

What's wild to me is that:

1. People are responding to this article like it's hitting a nerve

2. In most Ubers you already don't talk to the driver (yellow cabs are higher variance in NYC). Doesn't seem like anything's being lost in that case.

3. There are enormous safety benefits to waymo, mobility benefits for youth (and elderly) that are afforded by this technology. It's not clear why people argue "Uber" is better than waymo. A few years ago there were arguments against Uber! (A technology which, again, provides a huge benefit, especially if you live in an area where people were previously expected to go out for drinks and then drive home)

I think it's fair to point out real issues at these companies. But we should be clear-eyed about which technologies we want to accelerate vs slow down


Have you actually read the article? They point out multiple times that they like the Waymo ride and would use one again and loved it. It's not a Waymo-bashing article, it cautions against the long term effects on research.

And here you have it — I used an LLM-ism. Oh, and now another one! Time to downvote me for supposed LLM use! (Which I obviously didn't, I'm typing this on an ancient smartphone waiting for a train, but that doesn't deter the witch hunters.)


You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different.

I use LLMs all day every day. I think they're great. I just don't like humans who put their name to what an LLM did.


> You actually didn't. The construct is slightly different.

Well I know that I did, so you are wrong with that claim, which sheds a strong (negative) light on other statements of fact that you posted in this discussion.

You may disagree with me, or I may even have gotten something wrong, but just claiming I didn't read the article ... sorry man, I thought HN had higher standards than that.


They were pointing out that "It's not a Waymo-bashing article, it cautions against the long term effects on research." does not sound like LLM-generated text.

It would sound kind of LLM-y if you had said "It's not an anti-Waymo article. It's an article about how assistive technology is quietly degrading research."

(Of course, the correct approach to detecting AI is not counting LLM-isms, but feeding long-form text through a classifier model and picking up statistical correlations that are more in-distribution with LLM text than human text.)


Correct. I was already pretty sure, but I wouldn't have written that post without checking Pangram first.


"It's not a Waymo-bashing article, it cautions against the long term effects on research." is not an LLMism. It superficially resembles one, but that's it.

(Nor is what I just wrote, there.)


I think they were referring to your fake llmism


Ah thanks. Fair.


Calling it "witch hunting" is just dishonest. That term implies a baseless overreaction to a heavily exaggerated or imagined threat.

That's hardly what's going on here. Unlike witches, AI slop really is everywhere and it's pretty clear that this article is slop.

I find complaining about AI callouts to be itself deeply distasteful although it would take some thought to put my finger on the exact reasons why.


Yes AI slop is prevalent. But the casualties that get thrown under the bus are also real, don't you agree? Is it really worth it to sacrifice those? In the name of the larger good?

I'm arguing that we're losing something by doing so, as a community.

> I find complaining about AI callouts

If they are correct then I'm all for it. But just suspicions turned into statements of fact are not helping anybody. People used em dashes before LLMs Not nearly as much as LLMs, but superficially judging people isn't doing any good.

I'd compare this with pitchforks coming out agains criminal immigrants. Yes, some immigrants are criminal. Doesn't mean that if you stand in central Copenhagen and have a dark skinned person in front of you that it's a criminal.


The rule of thumb is simple: if most of a user or author's writing is consistently human-generated, then I think we are very happy giving them the benefit of the doubt if one article or snippet flags the actually good ai detector

Unfortunately, many of the largest voices against pangram simply don't like it because it gives their lies less credibility.

I don't mind reading llm writing, indeed, I read more llm writing per day than most. But if you're using LLMs to increase the level of slop (blog posts, comments, tweets, etc) then we should call people out.

It's a colossal waste of everyone's time and attention, and we should be mad about it.

Late edit: if people are actually writing and it's consistently flagged by pangram (this is a statement I have not yet seen validated), the pangram folks are extremely proactive and excited to understand what's going on. This notion that somehow the authors of slop are victims is complete nonsense.


> if most of a user or author's writing is consistently human-generated, then I think we are very happy giving them the benefit of the doubt if one article or snippet flags the actually good ai detector

I would agree to that approach.

But that didn't happen here. Nobody has done that due diligence and folks are just blindly accusing. The author has published for many years. That's what I'm calling out.

> This notion that somehow the authors of slop are victims is complete nonsense.

Strawman? I didn't claim that or anything close to it. I also find the prevalence of slop writing hugely annoying.


It's super obviously AI-written. I can smell this shit from a mile away now, after using Claude Code so much.

In the just first few sentences I could tell.


Right, imagine if instead they had coined new terminology that was not obvious and it re coined that - this would be close to a smoking gun

Afaict that didn't happen so there's just lots of speculation


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