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I thought "Alt" in the title is meant in the sense of "stop", as in "halt", but on second thoughts maybe that only works in French (where h is always silent)?

It's clearly meant to be part of the Ctrl-Alt-Del key sequence that interrupts Windows computers to bring up the task manager.

But doesn't Ctrl+Alt+Del bring up the screen to switch users or sign out? "Task Manager" is one item in the list of options you get, but it's not the main one or anything, in fact it's the last:

https://www.lifewire.com/thmb/hzx6btMYEqZJfSAL3WVxXuW3-jw=/1...


The author may just be showing their age a bit. That's what Ctrl+Alt+Del does on modern versions of Windows, but from Windows 95 to Windows XP (inclusive) it directly launched the Task Manager.

Ctrl+Alt+Del on an IBM PC or a compatible clone reboots the machine no questions asked. There's a dedicated reset button in case that fails.

Doing anything other than a reboot started with protected mode MS-Windows 3.1 IIRC (then marketed as "386 enhanced mode").


Yeah; in Windows 3.1, Ctrl+Alt+Del took you to a blue screen that allowed you to kill an unresponsive task (but didn't display a list of tasks; the Task List was launched with Ctrl+Esc), or told you there was no such task to kill if there wasn't.

Before Windows 3.1 it just rebooted the machine as you described.

Launching Task Manager was the 95 to XP behaviour, but NT behaved differently -- even Windows NT 4.0 (developed alongside Windows 95) took you to the security screen with Ctrl+Alt+Del (something that would later be ported to Vista), where launching Task Manager was one of its options. These OSes weren't used residentially though, until Windows 2000 attempted to merge their lineages and Windows XP finally cemented the deal.


Would have made more sense to say Ctrl+Shift+Esc since that just directly brings up the task manager. All in all I would say it is a slightly weird title, but I assume enough people get what they want to say with it.

Yes, but I thought they were making a colourful pune or play on words.

>> “[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”

I'm pretty sure clay tables, that had to be fired to preserve them, did not function as "notebooks". Scribes probably used either unbaked clay or wax tablets to take notes, and they would erase and overwrite them constantly like etch-a-sketch.


>> It dates the landslide to about 9400 years ago (BP), so this article about the star map putting it at 5500 years ago seems to be a colourful fabrication (my bad).

Don't feel bad. Genuinely exciting if it were true.


Optimus could do surgery on humans right now if it wasn't for regulation that prohibits killing people off with robots.

Your filthy Earth laws don't apply on Mars.

FTA:

>> However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin.


To add to this, more data from more regions means the estimate of average human miles without an incident is more accurate, simply because it is estimated from a larger sample, so more likely to be representative.

>> "Probability" does not mean "maybe yes, maybe not, let me assign some gut feeling value measuring how much I believe something to be the case."

That's exactly what Baeysian probabilities are: gut feelings. Speaking of values attached to random variables, a good Bayesian basically pulls their probabilities out their ass. Probabilities, in that context, are nothing but arbitrary degrees of belief based on other probabilities. That's the difference with the frequentist paradigm which attempts to set the values of probabilities by observing the frequency of events. Frequentists ... believe that observing frequencies is somehow more accurate than pulling degrees of belief out one's ass, but that's just a belief itself.

You can put a theoretical sheen on things by speaking of sets or probability spaces etc, but all that follows from the basic fact that either you choose to believe, or you choose to believe because data. In either case, reasoning under uncertainty is all about accepting the fact that there is always uncertainty and there is never complete certainty under any probabilistic paradigm.


Baffling to see such a take on HN.

If I give you a die and ask about the probabiliy for a 6, then it's exactly 1/6. Being able to quantify this exactly is the great success story of probability theory. You can have a different "gut feeling", and indeed many people do (lotteries are popular), but you would be wrong. If you run this experiment a large number of times, then about 1/6 of the outcomes will be a 6, proving the 1/6 right and the deviating "gut feeling" wrong. That number is not "pulled out of somebody's ass" or some frequentist approach. It's what probability means.


Yes, that's the frequentist approach. Surely, even on HN, there is an understanding that there are two interpretations of probability?

You don't think that the probability of each side of a die is 1/6 ?

I see, you don't know what I'm talking about. My apologies, I assumed a common background. Here's some introductory materials on Bayesian vs frequentist interpretations of probability:

Bayesian and frequentist reasoning in plain English

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/22/bayesian-and-fr...

Comparison of frequentist and Bayesian inference

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-05-introduction-to-probabilit...

To Be a Frequentist or Bayesian? Five Positions in a Spectrum

https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/axvcupj4/release/1

Beyond Bayesians and Frequentists - Computer Science

https://cs.stanford.edu/~jsteinhardt/stats-essay.pdf

You'll find that it's a big subject with a long history and many strongly-held opinions that have nevertheless evolved over the years. Happy reading!


Which one of these answers the question I asked?

Oh it's you. I didn't notice the username change.

My account is over 11 years old. What other name are you thinking is mine?

What you're hinting at is the fact that proofs created by human mathematicians are not complete proofs but rather sketch proofs whose purpose is to convince mathematicians (including the person deriving the proof) that a statement (like the Reimann hypothesis) is true. Such human-derived proofs can even be wrong, as they sometimes turn out to be, so just because a proof is given, doesn't mean we have to automatically believe what it proves.

In that sense, proofs can be seen as evidence that a statement is true, and since one interpretation of Bayesian probabilities is that they express degrees of belief about the truth of a formal statement, then yes, proofs have something to do with probabilities.

But, in that context, it's not proofs that probabilities should be attached to. Rather, we can assign some probability to a formal statement, like the Reimann hypothesis, given that a proof exists. The proof is evidence that the statement is true and we can adjust our belief in the truth of the statement according to this and possibly other lines of evidence. In particular, if there are multiple and different proofs of the same statement that can increase our certainty that the statement is true.

The thing to keep in mind is that computers can derive complete proofs, in the sense that they can mechanically traverse the entire deductive closure of a statement given the axioms of a theory, and determine whether the statement is a theorem (i.e. true) or not but without skipping or fudging any steps, however trivial. This is what automated theorem provers do.

But it's important to keep in mind that LLMs don't do that kind of proof. They give us at best sketch proofs like the ones derived by human mathematicians, with the added complication that LLMs themselves cannot distinguish between a correct proof (i.e. one where every step, however fudgy, follows from the ones before it) and an incorrect one, or an automated theorem prover, are still required to check the correctness of a proof. LLM-based proof systems like AlphaProof work that way, passing an LLM-generated proof to an automated theorem prover as a verifier.

Mechanically-derived, complete proofs like the ones generated by automated theorem provers can also be assigned degrees of probability, but once we are convinced of the correctness of a prover (... because we have a proof!) then we can trust the proofs derived by that prover, and have complete belief in the truth of any statements derived.


>> Yeah, EU is super fucked too since it outsourced its energy dependence to Russia, consumer manufacturing to China, defence and tech services to US, and only just woke up in the last 3 or so years that it was all a huge mistake that's now costing us dearly since we're at the whims of all 3 belligerents who know that now is the time they can squeeze us.

The EU policies makes sense if the goal is peace and prosperity. You can't reach that goal without collaboration and trade. If you're going to blame someone, blame the Great Powers, the US, China and Russia, in order of importance, who have suddendly gone ballistic and can only talk of war, War, WAR, and nothing else.

Oh, sorry, President Trump is all about trade... tariffs.

I mean if the world has gone mad, don't blame the EU for trying to be sane.


>The EU policies makes sense if the goal is peace and prosperity.

How can EU maintain peace and prosperity with no military? With hugs and kisses?

Because if that was their goal, then they really fucked up because they delivered the exact opposite: war next door and lowest purchasing power of the working class in years/decades.

You see, people like this are so detached from reality, they don't understand that peace and prosperity comes from strength, not from weakness. When you don't have military strength you invite conflict, since everyone else now sees you as an easy target and wants your slice of the global GDP.

The world leadership is composed of competitors and bullies fighting for dominance of land and resources, not of nice guys who bend over to your demands just because you're nice and peaceful. If you don't have any leverage, you get run over and colonized. It's wild this hasn't sunk in yet, especially given Europe's colonial past.

>If you're going to blame someone, blame the Great Powers

Ah yes, it's always everyone else's fault that the EU kicked its military, IT, energy, economy, manufacturing industry (and now farming too) in the balls for the past 20-30 years, allowing the US, China and Russia the opportunity to exploit this self inflicted weakness for their own benefits.

All countries are economic competitors to each other. Every fuckup you make is an opportunity for the rest to enrich themselves from your stupidity. They aren't obliged to save you from your mistakes when they can profit from it. It's how Europe got rich in the first place during colonialism.

>who have suddendly gone ballistic and can only talk of war, War, WAR, and nothing else.

Doesn't matter what other sovereign countries choose to do on the global stage, they're not accountable to you. But it's your job to have a strong military to deter others from having chimp-outs with you or in your backyard. Unless you live in a fairytale, you would know that world peace was never the default state in human history, but only a temporary state created by wielding orders of magnitude more force than everyone else who will then have to follow your rules and ideologies creating a state of compliance which you interpreted as peace. You should prepare for the worst even, or especially in times of peace, as other countries won't keep world peace for you or in your favor, but will try to free themselves from compliance to your game and try to enforce their own rules that benefit them. It's the EU's fault it slept at the wheel in terms of defence and lets itself get bullied around.

>Oh, sorry, President Trump is all about trade... tariffs.

For all Trump's problems, the US still got TSMC to build a cutting edge fab there, they're getting south Korea to build new ships there, and attract cutting edge tech companies like Infinera to close shop in EU and move everything to the US. What did EU get from being nice and generous with others? Other than illegal welfare scammers.

>don't blame the EU for trying to be sane.

I CAN blame the EU since that's where my taxes go so they're accountable to me. Being weak and powerless is not being sane. There's no virtue in letting everyone walk over you and exploit you. "Turn the other cheek" does not work in competitive international politics. Your weakness and complacency will always be used against you. I know what I wrote above isn't popular to hear but it's how the world works. Ignoring it doesn't help anyone.


Unfortunately one cannot have military superiority without eventually having to use it. That is the lesson from history.

Another one is that war doesn't work anymore and if we keep at it, we'll just mess everything up to a point of no return.


It's a British tradition. I was certain there would be a wikipedia page on that, but I can't find anything.


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