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Admittedly not a statistician, but I think the article is missing the point. The reason why people circle the P values is because nobody actually cares about the thing the p-value is measuring. What they actually care about is whether the null hypothesis is true or some other hypothesis is true. You can wave your hands around about how actually when you said it was significant what you were really saying was something technical about a hypothetical world where the null hypothesis is factually true, and so it's unfair to circle your p value because technically your statement about this hypothetical world is still true. This is not a good argument against p value circling, but rather it merely demonstrates that the technical definition of a p value is not relevant to the real world.

The fact remains that for things which are claimed to be true but turn out to not be true later, the p values that were provided in the paper are very often near the significance threshold. Not so much for things which are obviously and strongly true. This is direct evidence of something that we already know, which is thst nobody cares about p values per se, they only use them to communicate information about something being true or false in the real world, and the technical claim of "well maybe x or y is true, but when I said p=0.49 I was only talking about a hypothetical world where x is true, and my statement about that world still holds true" is no solace.


I understood the point of the article to be exploring the extent to which p-values can be interpreted as strength of evidence in favor of the alternative hypothesis. I don't think anyone is spending all this energy on p-values because they think people care about the p-values.

Did anyone else think there were several transitions that seemed like pure GPTisms?

> This isn’t innovation—it’s institutional auto-cannibalism. The new mission statement? Optimization.


Yep


To be honest I feel like I have seen much better expositions of zero knowledge proofs. The playing cards example is nice in some ways, but people are often exposed to trickery regarding playing cards. The recipient of the proof needs to verify that the deck of cards is a normal deck of cards, that no cards have been swapped out or altered, etc. These are all precisely the things that magicians are regularly able to fool people about. So really you have to make an additional assumption of "no funny business", which distracts from the mathematical core of what you are trying to demonstrate.

Likewise, the example of compositeness is a bit off because even though there is knowledge about the composite number that the proof does not reveal, that knowledge is in fact not known the to person constructing the proof either! The proof is not really zero knowledge either, since it gives the reader knowledge of a specific witness to its compositeness.

Even the wikipedia example of going into the cave (which used to be featured more prominently in the article) I think is terrible. Why wouldn't you just walk a loop to prove you know the way through the secret door? Also, it's clearly not zero knowledge, as it reveals some information about how quickly they can pass through the gate.

In general I think avoiding physical examples is necessary, since reality is complicated, and in the real world some information always leaks.

I think the best example for teaching about ZKPs is the graph isomorphism problem: Given two large graphs, you can prove that you know a isomorphism between two graphs by generating a new randomly labeled graph that is isomorphic to both of them and showing it to the provee, who can then ask you to demonstrate that this new graph is isomorphic to either graph A or graph B. Since you don't know ahead of time which one they will ask for, the only way you could consistently pass this test is if you actually do have a graph that was isomorphic to both A and B simultaneously. But since you only reveal one of the isomorphisms, it really is zero knowledge.


My conclusion from watching a lot of Penn and Teller is that when you're invited to examine the deck it probably is normal and often the trick will involve a force.


Make it throw an exception with an index out of bounds to terminate the loop.


Once you have some experience, phrases like this are a dead giveaway: "and honestly? It’s incredible to watch". Also 30 em dashes in almost as few sentences.


Those question marks? The ones that don't mark questions? Only intonation? I could live without them.

But it was nice to learn a little bit more about why I wouldn't like Rust.


Do you have a link to your codes letter available online?


I don't, but I can upload a sample tomorrow in case you're interested in taking a look.


China is installing solar capacity at three times the rate of coal. What exactly is your point?

There's no "wonders of china", just the fact that we are falling further behind because of dumb policy which is justified by non sequiturs like "china also installs coal" or "china uses child labor".


> "china uses child labor".

Oh, right, right. We just ignore this? Weird you brought it up as something that should be ignored? What?


It's weird to bring it up in response to an article about the US falling behind authorities china and how that's bad. Unless you think we can't improve our energy infrastructure in the USA without using child labor too?


> Unless you think we can't improve our energy infrastructure in the USA without using child labor too?

I think pointing out child labor anytime we're discussing someone who is doing it... actually is a good thing. You seem to not have your priorities on this.


Please stop being obtuse just because you're wrong.

Using "what about child labor" as a counterpoint to they are advancing at neck breaking speed, is a pointless argument because it's using a moral argument against a non-moral statement.

It's like saying: green energy is displacing coal towns, therefor it's bad!


Do you think moving a town is similar to child labor? What environment/culture do you live in where you do not want to stand up for children and would rather child labor not be brought up? Do you benefit from child labor?


> Weird you brought it up as something that should be ignored?

They didn't say it should be ignored but instead that it's not relevant to any point that was made by the person it's in reply to.

They are pointing out that something is true and then someone else points out how that thing became true, seemingly as a refutation of the initial point. The first point wasn't about how, so the second point is changing the topic.


The hardware+software used to both be under that same non commercial cc license, but there was recently a relicense of the software to GPL3. I think the goal is to just prevent someone else from profiting off of Clemens's work without him (while still allowing community use).


The GPLv3 does allow profiting off his work though, so that might not be the best choice of license. Especially since hardware vendors often deliberately don't comply with the GPL, and the only recourse is an expensive lawsuit.


> "hardware vendors often deliberately don't comply with the GPL, and the only recourse is an expensive lawsuit."

Isn't that unrelated to exact license choice, and going to be the case with any software that's wants to be open source but not allow commercial use?

There's no license or wording in a license that can change the fact that, if you let people get the source for non-commercial use, there's nothing except the threat of lawsuits to stop anyone from ignoring the license and using it commercially.


Thats going to be the case with almost any license, people even violate the MIT/BSD licenses. One possible exception is CC0, since it has no conditions.


I run an Open mower on my 1400 square meter lawn in the USA. AMA. (ps. If you are interested make sure to go to the discord instead of just reading the docs or GitHub pages -- that is where all the activity is!)


The page says there's no obstacle avoidance. How does it handle obstacles? Does it at least have a sensor to detect it running into an obstacle to then find some way around it? This would be the main concern for me.

Also, how long have you had it and about how much downtime have you had?


It does not have obstacle avoidance, the best it has is recognizing it keeps getting stuck and skipping the next goal until it finds a goal it can reach. This can often look like obstacle avoidance since the next goal might be in a slightly different direction and so it will be able to continue. This is aided by a new feature that I added which will make the mower back up first when it gets stuck before continuing.

However, I should note that it's a hackable ROS system, so people have added obstacle detection with various sensors on their mowers. There is just not official support or a standard way to do it.

I've mowed with it this summer and last summer, and there hasn't been downtime at much as repeatedly getting stuck and requiring me to bring it back to the dock (although less and less). But my lawn is probably the hardest lawn any Openmower mows, as I mentioned in a cousin comment.


How difficult was it to get the needed hardware in the US? It seems hard or expensive to do so.


The yardforce500 is hard to find in the USA, but it's extremely cheap in Europe. I found a great deal and paid $208 for the mower and $135 for a package forwarder to ship it from Germany. I have a complete spreadsheet of my expenses here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BV8VCtqTer8iodXvyRd1...


Nice!

How much time did it take you from the moment you started the project to the point where it fell like it was up & running?


It's hard to put a specific number on it, since it's been progressively improving the whole time I had it. I bought it in the fall of 2023, and got it "running" then, but it was not actually doing any useful work. Summer of 2024 it was doing useful work but required constant hand holding and a series of hardware and software upgrades to get it more stable. This year it is actually doing the majority of the mowing. It still requires frequent rescue but it's a lot less work than actually mowing the lawn myself.

However my lawn is probably the most difficult lawn of any openmower user. I'm in Vermont, so I have very steep terrain, a bumpy yard, poor GPS reception, very wet weather, and also my lawn is very large and complex shaped. For a simple use case it would be working great a long time ago. I also chose to do a "Mowgli" build which is based on more reverse engineering, which added complexity and unreliability (but saved some money).


There are a number of supported mowers now, including ones sold in the USA, and the number will increase with the upcoming V2 board! Really all the activity is on the discord server -- the GitHub projects are secondary so it can seem much less active (and information is less up to date) if you look there


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