The word “biggest” is surprisingly the most interesting part of the post. The greater heating effect is not due to wavelength. Infrared is actually less energetic. Nor is it due to higher intensity: there is less energy in the infrared than in the visible spectrum per unit wavelength, both emitted by the Sun and reaching Earth. The reason infrared caused the “biggest” temperature rise is a peculiarity of the prism used in the experiment: it bends shorter wavelengths more, so the infrared part of the spectrum was projected onto a smaller patch of the table. That means the radiation density was higher there, hence the larger temperature increase. We think of infrared as the heating part of the spectrum because, when absorbed by water and organic matter, it dissipates most of its energy into molecular resonance, which we feel as heat. However, if he used a mercury thermometer, that part of the effect would not be significant, because mercury reflects infrared as well as visible light. This is why you need to blacken the tip of the thermometer if you want to reproduce the experiment.
@michaelfreedman@martin_casado I’d argue the more important factor is the volume of available training data. That’s why LLMs tend to be far more fluent in JS or Python (and their ecosystems) than in C.
@_simonsmith Build vs buy has always been around, and most of the time building is a myopic mistake. AI or not, if the software isn’t core to your business and a solid buy option exists, building it will lose in the long run.
Planes don't flap their wings, but we think of them as capable of Artificial General Flying. They, however, cannot do many things birds can. Similarly, AGI will not be able to do many things we can, but we won't need it to flap.
AI won’t have to coerce us. It’s already apparent that we’ll willingly surrender our thinking to it. A few will pursue thought as a hobby, most will drift into mental vacancy. Just as we’re disconnected from our food’s origins, we’ll lose touch with the sources of ideas. In the end, we’ll live for emotions only. Aren’t we already, most days? We’ll sneer at the peasants of thought like we do at people who butcher their own chickens.
@Math_files Assuming two genders and, at birth, P(boy) = 0.5.
There are 4 possible pairs, so:
P(same-gender pair) = P(different-gender pair) = 0.5.
Given one child is a boy:
P(the other child is a girl) = P(different-gender pair) = 0.5.
All the rest of the data is irrelevant.
Mary Kay Ash once said, “Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying ‘Make me feel important’”. The motto is quite banal except for the word “invisible”. Why is the need for appreciation so often hidden?
@paulg To protect free speech, it would be better to proportionally lower the community-note threshold based on how often someone has been noted before. Chronic bullshiters should trigger an instant note.