I have also a weird story to tell that a human did and it is as crazy as this. It happen in 2019 so no LLMs at all.
A person that was hired as an expert in our startup spent more than one week full time working on implementing his solution to the problem we were having. I checked the code after one week to see the progress and was curious how they are implementing an already crazy sounding idea.
I found that the whole week was spent re-implementing in python, python's built-in "float" function. That was it, the whole code was just that.
Our problem was related to financial services and their implementation of "float" was not even correct.
But AI is only able to get you through those already easy first 90-99%. The hard and most time-consuming part of getting to 100% is still there, and AI does not help or make us more productive achieving that, in my opinion.
Every person after taking just one 101 statistics course tells everyone "correlation doesn't equal causation". But here, in the abstract is clear:
> National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
Not every rich person got an iPhone. The rich people without an iPhone did not had equal amount of less kids.
There are two groups, one has an iPhone, the other has not. The assumption is that two groups are big enough to have equal amount of people from any other group that can explain the decline in fertility, i.e. equal amount of rich/poor, educated, etc.
They can control for this because they know which people had access to the iphone based on the AT&T network coverage.
At the end of the abstract they state the likely explanation of this seemingly spurious correlation:
> National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
>the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
Why would iPhone _particularly_ do that? I can see greater social media use, greater access to porn, would do those things. But that's common to smartphones in general.
It wasn't the only smartphone. And it's not like the internet appeared simultaneous with the iPhone. It was just a different way to get access to the same websites, back when it launched, most of which didn't support the iPhone's screen size anyway. And the only difference was that it made it easier to reach those websites ... outside. On the move. Where you are more likely to meet people.
Their causal explanation here does not ring true in all sorts of ways. Nobody was deciding not to get married and have kids because they were too busy watching porn on an iPhone in 2007, a time when video on smartphones barely worked. Social media predated the iPhone by years. And this practice of controlling for some ad-hoc list of things and then announcing causality is a major cause of spurious false positive claims in academic science. They really should know better than to make strong claims of causality in a case like this. Sociology just isn't capable of explaining things like this no matter how many stats you throw at it.
There's much better work out there on this topic that is less heavy on the cute regressions and more heavy on the historical analysis+common sense. It's often a lot more convincing.
"A4 paper sheet-sized ceramic film could hold more than 2 TB of data" Just 2 TB? Makes you appreciate just how much 2 TB of data is.
Also, what's the point of "storing our future" if it is so difficult to read and decode? How would one even know where to look for the data if it's get lost. So besides doing it for fun I don't see the point of this and how it can be ever scaled to be in everyday use.
Right. This is probably just a start though. Just as Richard Feynman stated:
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom.
I recently wanted to purchase a 3TB harddrive. The price is not that heavy
(e,. g. at around 100 Euro), but I also realised that I'd much prefer that
price to go down significantly. I am still in shock at the RAM prices. That
is no longer affordable really.
Off-topic, but anyone knows where to buy such [1] old but not rare (so they are cheap enough) math books? In UK and globally? Is e-bay and perhaps amazon the best place? How to avoid fakes?
A person that was hired as an expert in our startup spent more than one week full time working on implementing his solution to the problem we were having. I checked the code after one week to see the progress and was curious how they are implementing an already crazy sounding idea. I found that the whole week was spent re-implementing in python, python's built-in "float" function. That was it, the whole code was just that.
Our problem was related to financial services and their implementation of "float" was not even correct.
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