I'd think they'll also be worried about the EU deciding that they cannot afford to use an American based cloud company for government business. (I'm assuming that Microsoft is used extensively)

It's sort of like what is happening with defence. The EU is ramping up its plans and spending but it's simultaneously planning how to limit its dependence on the US.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fpo...

Of course it could. The more interesting question is how it will be acknowledged, by mathematicians, by the AI interests, and by the media.

As with many other fields, computers offer the opportunity to search vast mathematical spaces that are beyond the ability of humans to investigate.

But the as yet unanswered question is how to tell a computer to look for something "interesting". In searches for drugs, for example, we might ask the computer to find a drug that will bind to a particular site or otherwise disrupt a metabolic pathway, but ask it to find *new* interesting ideas is beyond description, let alone execution.

This isn't particularly surprising, it's a vanishingly rare skill even amongst humans skilled in the field.

And so it will be with AI proofs. There will be great fanfare the first time an AI proves, with or without guidance from top mathematicians, some previously unsolved conjecture. "ChatGPT proves the Goldbach Conjecture! AI surpasses human intelligence!" but assuming that the Goldbach conjecture can be proved using already known mathematics then all the work is done, and all that remains is searching, something that AI is particularly good at. The search space is vast however, and it's just as likely that the only way an AI can find a proof is with the intuition of genius mathematicians stopping it going off down unproductive routes. The AI will find the proof but it may, or may not be something it could have done alone.

And, should it happen, it's quite likely that the AI proof will spur countless interesting discoveries by the mathematicians skilled in the field once they see the "trick" to solving that problem. Possibly half a dozen other unsolved problems might fall, not due to AI but due to *understanding*.

The second thing that will happen, but probably will slip most of us by because it won't make the mainstream press and we don't read mathematics journals, is some deep and profound new conjectures (with or without proof) that will be mostly the work of mathematicians but with a good dose of AI assist. This may, or may not, get credited to AI but will involve the sort of intelligent searching that AI can deliver on a scale that isn't possible by humans due to the limited number of them, their low speed relative to computers, and their propensity to make mistakes, particularly when doing boring grunt work.

The final thing that probably will happen eventually but doesn't appear to be on the horizon, is AIs coming up with new and profound conjectures absent the guidance of mathematicians. This is going to be hard to identify, not least because there's a vast difference between a computer coming up with 200 "conjectures", 198 of which are "completely wrong headed", 1 of which is already known and 1 of which the mathematicians looking at its output say "Ohhh, that's interesting" and an AI coming up with 3 conjectures, 2 of which are already known/proved and one is new, novel and interesting.

Jesus,

They checked healthy arteries.
They checked diseased (clogged) arteries and found 16x the level of microplastics of the healthy arteries
They checked arteries of stroke victims and found 51x the level of the healthy arteries, 3x the level in the clogged arteries.

And this is homeopathy?

Microplastics aren't at all hard to detect with the right equipment, they're just hard to see without. It's like cholera in early Victorian times, we're at the level of knowing there's something but not understanding exactly how or why it a problem or why it impacts some people far worse than others.

You're the doctors saying "it's a miasma", these are the doctors saying "the miasma theory makes no sense, how come the nurses who care for cholera sufferers are less likely to catch it than people living at the other end of the street".

Nobody knows why plutonium is dangerous to ingest in "homeopathic doses" either. It's a heavy metal, it's radioactive, and it bioaccumulates - it's a really good idea to avoid even low levels of ingestion, and a really good idea to have international regulations controlling how plutonium is produced, stored, and disposed of (there are isotopes of plutonium that aren't useful for fission) even though we don't actually know how it will kill you - the primary theories are its heavy metal toxicity and the effects of its radiation on the bone marrow.

And the same with microplastics, they're not heavy metals, they're not radioactive, but they do cross the blood-brain barrier (I don't think plutonium does) and it appears they do bioaccumulate, possibly in the worst places in the body and they might have a genetic level impact on cells. AFAICT this study is looking for correlation rather than causation although they suggest a possible causative effect, I'm not sure if that's speculation or an informed guess - you would need to be an expert in the field to know and I'm not.

One can't eat eggs with a silver spoon so one needs gold spoons for eggs, aluminium being so common and cheap today. We need to reserve the hallowed halls of learning for the sons of Lords who know their superiority.

The hoi polloi today, don't even know why they must respect their betters.

Truss has worked diligently to earn comparisons to Trump

Truss came within a hairs breadth of bankrupting the UK. It doesn't get a huge amount of noise outside of the specialist press but many UK pension funds were highly leveraged using LDI. The huge spike in the bond rate caused many funds to be dumping equities at any price in order to meet margin calls due at the end of the day.

You can argue that the use of LDI, and the leveraging was bad and the pension funds should not have been doing it, but if Truss thought that then she was in a position to reign this in - she had a substantial majority in parliament and could easily have changed the rules for pension funds. But (and I don't believe for one minute that she had thought any of this through), to bankrupt the pension schemes because you don't like the way they're using LDI so that the PPF (Pension Protection Fund) will have to pick this up is insanity of the highest order. I'm not actually sure what happens if the PPF goes bust, it's not something that seems to have been considered - dealing with an individual fund failure can be covered by future levies, but the sort of failure that was imminent would have meant that the remaining firms would also have been forced into liquidation if the levy had been asked to cover the new liabilities.

I understand that the US doesn't have the same level of defined benefit pensions (currently, around 1 in 8 UK people either receive or will be eligible for a DB pension) and I would assume much less regulation of the pensions and little if any statutory protection if one goes bust, so the precise set of events that brought down Truss could not happen in the US. But a dedollarisation that sends US Treasury yields soaring the way the UK yields went is still bound to have catastrophic side effects. Trump's efforts are weakening the dollar but not crashing it and there are some good arguments why a weaker dollar could be good for the US so, as of yet, Trump is not emulating Truss although it's not inconceivable that he could in the future.

I often no in my mind, but my fingers do the typing and dont always get it write.

Just say know.

Woosh.

Consider: the missing apostrophe in "dont" and the wrong form of "write" which should be "right".

Impressive! I literally cannot tell whether the anonymous coward that wrote the woosh is an imbecile or a genius.

Damn missed one:

It wasn't given enough time.

At least when Donald Trump's term is over, we'll be able to remind right nuts that Trump tried it their way and it failed horribly.

That's not how it works. For the true believers, belief trumps facts and the reason it failed will be one of:

It wasn't done right.
It wasn't done enough.
It was blocked by the dems.
It was undermined by the wokerati.
It was hindered by the elite.

Every single time it's the same, and it's why you cannot pander to their views. From immigration to climate change, the only response to "moving half way" is for the irrational to move even further into nutjob territory.

You cannot reason because they're beyond reason.

If someone slapped the shit out of you and then said, "oops I'm sorry, I take it back" would you trust them? Especially if they did it with no good reason (treating a trade deficit as a tariff) .

Of course not, but it's still easier to avoid a tariff war if both sides don't have to undo changes. I think I heard that the EU is due to vote on tariffs on the US today, no doubt they'll then be applied some short time in the future. That's why it's easier to step back early on, there's mistrust regardless, just a better outcome.

US is dominant in services and finance. 2 things that will be the easiest to replace or move.

I agree with your general drift but actually often goods are the easiest to move. Most things have multiple sources, and a combination of inertia plus cost of changing supplier tends to hold things stable rather than instantly chasing the cheapest price. Over the longer term, obviously businesses do want to cut costs. The difference for US purchasers though is that Trump has imposed tariffs on everybody so prices are going up regardless, and there's a big risk in moving supplier to a significantly cheaper source due to tariff differentials that it will suddenly change back to being much more expensive again on a whim.

But if there's an all out trade war starting between the US and everybody else, then non-US buyers will be moving to non-US suppliers and US buyers will be moving to US suppliers. Everybody will lose but the US buyers are likely to be more hurt than the non-US buyers.

And while it's currently still "Trumps whim", it's easy and quick to ramp up tariffs but reducing them again is often a long drawn out negotiation, and Trump isn't known for liking long drawn out negotiations. China has gone the instant retaliation route and the other nations may well end up following suit, but if Trump changes direction next week, it may be US - China trade that is hobbled in both directions.

Moving services is, ironically, often much more difficult because so many things are intertwined and have to move together. The moving of Euro clearing to the Eurozone after Brexit is a good example of this - it's something the EU wanted to do before Brexit but they weren't allowed to, but after brexit it's taken much longer than was originally planned. I don't follow it closely but the original target was euro swaps (90% of which cleared at LCH) to move to the eurozone by 2022. Last I saw the target was June 2025 and it may well have been relaxed more since then.

You'll find that's not the case. I mean- not that they should cave, but we're all going down together. They cannot insulate themselves from us.
The US imports (imported?) ~600B USD a year from the EU.
That is lost revenue for the businesses there that they can't just pick up somewhere else.
Frankly, because nobody else can afford it. We're the largest consumer on the planet.

Except that that's forgetting three quarters of the picture.

In 2023 the US did import just over 500B in goods from the EU, but it exported around 350B, net imports 150B.

So that's reduced your figure by a factor of over 3 in one go.

The EU imported 430B in services from the US in 2023 and exported 310B, so that was a net flow of just over 100B towards the US.

So overall, the hit to the EU of stopping all trade with the US would be 50B all else being equal.

Of course, there are exports from the US that the EU doesn't want to lose, the costs of replicating them locally would dwarf that 50B and would take years to do, but the EU is big enough to take that task on if it has to.

The EU is keen to deescalate these trade wars and so is treading quite cautiously currently. France is one of the more belligerent voices that definitely want to take aim at that services deficit (combination of taxes and restrictions on how data can be used applied to US companies has already been mooted).

Natural language can express complex concepts

If you see smoke or fire then sound the alarm.
If you see red or green then the traffic light is working.

But.
If you see smoke and fire then sound the alarm.
If you see red and green then the traffic light is broken.

The problem with natural language isn't that it can't be expressive, and cannot handle each and every concept that matters in a programming language, it's that it's so encumbered by "common sense" that expressing anything in a natural language that isn't completely and *dangerously* ambiguous in a programming context is an exercise so difficult to do, that it's easier to learn a programming language where ambiguity is considered to be a bug in the language itself.

Speed limits are the *maximum* safe speed for a road, as determined by traffic engineers thinking about all the factors you mentioned and lots others besides, such as other road users.

I think you're alluding to this anyway but to make it explicit, safety is only one thing that goes into setting a maximum speed.

For example, late at night, in residential areas, the primary consideration is noise - it's something of a coincidence that 20-30mph is both a reasonable maximum for safety in pedestrian rich areas and also a good speed to keep engine and tire noise down.

Even emergency vehicles are restricted on when they can use their sirens at night in the UK.

The UK used to have 20mph limits but they had to be "self enforcing" - i.e. they required engineering to physically limit the speed of cars, most often speed bumps, but a big part of the reason why that's no longer the case and 20mph limits can be enforced through speed cameras is because of the noise due to drivers accelerating and braking hard between speed bumps etc and disturbing residents.

Your fridge-freezer breaks, as well as a new fridge freezer, you also lose a bunch of frozen food.

It's always been a problem for the poor, one of these unexpected costs. Needing to attend a funeral is another that can send people into debt.

But more and more people are ending up in the same position. The middle classes might still have some discretionary spending, but sods law says that their fridge breaks the day after they've booked a holiday, not the day before and suddenly they can't afford to pay their credit card bill that month.

I don't know anything about the subject matter, but when I read the headline "superbug" I thought this was a coding problem with a bug that had been unresolved for 10 years.

Anyone who has worked on a tricky bug will have known that it can take a very, very long time to really understand what is going on but often, once you have that understanding, the solution can be simple, sometimes just a one line change (it can also sometimes be hard if the bug turns out to be a "feature" of the framework)

I would think it would be very hard to work with an AI to "solve" a bug like this where you already knew the answer without, inadvertently or otherwise, giving hints to the AI that were as a result of your knowledge from investigating it.
"Crashes intermittently, this is the walkback" seems unlikely to be sufficient for an AI to solve where the underlying problem is corruption caused due to a race condition in a completely different place in the code.

And I would expect similar to be true for other fields. Ignoring the fact that the AI will almost certainly have had access to the previous 9 years of research on this topic even if it didn't have the latest papers, asking questions of the AI that aren't being influenced by the researchers knowledge of the answer, is likely to be borderline impossible.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

  -- Eugene Ionesco

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

  -- Voltaire