> Greg Egan’s Home Page / created Saturday, 25 October 1997 / revised Saturday, 16 March 2024
Wow, still using the same HTML for... decades!
That sent me on a trip down memory lane... back then, his email address was actually on the page. I sent him an email, and he answered in a few hours. THE GOOD OLD DAYS!
While I don't think there's much to be gained by asking AI for a verisimilitude of famous dead people, GPT 5.5 in response to that prompt ("What would Einstein be working on today, if he were alive") was more nuanced:
This is an educated guess, because we cannot know how Einstein would have reacted to post-1955 developments: Bell’s theorem, quantum information, the Standard Model, inflation, black hole thermodynamics, dark matter/dark energy, gravitational waves, and modern experimental cosmology. The missing information that would most change my answer is whether “today’s Einstein” would retain his later-life philosophical commitments — realism, locality, geometric unification — or adapt them after seeing modern evidence.
That might be obvious, but when a significant number of people don't pay enough attention to know something is AI, or simply watch it anyway and then scroll onto the next clip, so it keeps them engaged rather than bouncing them off the platform, it's still doing it's job of retaining attention to push more ads.
Most people I know will claim to not like AI, but they happily continue to scroll their Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok feed that's full of it. Until they delete the app in protest and go read a book, little will change.
I'd say I'm pretty attuned to detecting AI content and I was fooled a few times at inattentive moments. I imagine a lot of people fare worse, assuming they even truly mind whether it's AI or not.
That's why they always teach: "never compare floats for equality."
Or maybe they don't teach that anymore, I dunno.
See link for the Fundamental Axiom of Floating Point Arithmetic: All floating point arithmetic operations are exact up to a relative error of epsilon_machine.
I certainly teach that. When we work problems involving money, I always recommend students use integers for cents and only convert to dollars and cents when they have to print them.
On the other hand, if you store a small integer in a float it is generally reliable to compare to it. E.g., setting a float to zero and comparing whether the float is zero.
There is still hope for a compiler book. From Knuth's website:
> And after Volumes 1--5 are done, God willing, I plan to publish Volume 6 (the theory of context-free languages) and Volume 7 (Compiler techniques), but only if the things I want to say about those topics are still relevant and still haven't been said.
I don't think there is hope if you look at actuarial tables and Knuth's age. It's not clear to me if he'll be able to finish volume 4. The outline he has seems to have enough material to fill volumes 4C-4G to my eyes, and he isn't exactly cranking out the volumes.
Admittedly, volumes 5-7 wouldn't be as massive as volume 4 (it sort of turns out that almost all interesting algorithms ends up being categorized as being in volume 4), so you probably wouldn't have a half-dozen subvolumes per topic but, it's still too many books down the line, especially if he plans to revise volumes 1-3 before working on anything else.
I hope that God is indeed willing, but the man is 88 years old and he’s not done with the third tome of volume four. It would require a minor miracle for him to finish volume 7 within this lifetime.
Wow, still using the same HTML for... decades!
That sent me on a trip down memory lane... back then, his email address was actually on the page. I sent him an email, and he answered in a few hours. THE GOOD OLD DAYS!
reply