None of your other examples are comparable to the story. They're not deliberate deaths caused by adherence to some tradition. They wouldn't be prevented if people "just stopped doing it". They're accidents and violence, that we've taken reasonable steps to prevent (traffic laws, car safety standards, the criminal justice system, worker safety laws,...), but haven't been 100% successful.
The comment I was responding to asked for examples of “lotteries you don't see, because you're used to them, and they're just part of how the world works, like this one is to the people in the story”. The comment wasn't asking for “deliberate deaths caused by adherence to some tradition”.
Expanding the idea of "lottery" that much makes it meaningless, and useless as social commentary. Sometimes people die of cancer, or lightning, or shark attacks, and eventually of old age. What insight is there in calling them "lotteries you don't see"?
This sort of theoretical result is not always as clear-cut as you suggest.
Computers are finite machines. There is a theorem that although a machine with finite memory can add, multiplication requires unbounded memory. Somehow we muddle along and use computers for multiplication anyway.
More to your point there is a whole field of people who write useful programs using languages in which every program must be accompanied by a proof that it halts on all inputs.
(See for example https://lean-lang.org/ or David Turner's work on Total Functional Programming from about 20 years ago.)
Other examples are easy to find. The simplex algorithm for linear optimization requires exponential time in general, and the problem it solves is NP-hard, but in practice works well on problems of interest and is widely used. Or consider the dynamic programming algorithms for problems like subset-sum.
Theory is important, but engineering is also important.
> There is a theorem that (...) multiplication requires unbounded memory
What theorem is that?
The multiplication of any two integers below a certain size (called "words") fits in a "double word" and the naive multiplication algorithm needs to store the inputs, an accumulator and at most another temporary for a grand total of 6*word_size
Sure, you can technically "stream" carry-addition (which is obvious from the way adders are chained in ALU-101) and thus in a strict sense addition is O(1) memory but towards your final point:
> Theory is important, but engineering is also important.
In practice, addition requires unbounded memory as well (the inputs). And it's definitely compute-unbounded, if your inputs are unbounded.
I dislike the term "we muddle along". IEEE 754 has well specified error bars and cases, and so does all good data science. LLMs do not, or at least they do not expose them to the end user
So then, how exactly do we go about proving that the result of chaining prompts is within a controllable margin of error of the intended result? Because despite all the specs, numerical stability is the reason people don't write their own LAPACK.
But it's not like these systems make theory go away, they make compromises. So the question is, what's the compromise required for an algorithm that can check the conformance of computer programs to natural language specifications that doesn't involve hoping for the best?
Natural language specifications often aren't specifications at all: interpreting them requires context that is not available to the computer, and often not even available to the specification's authors without further research / decision-making.
LLMs address this problem by just making things up (and they don't do a great job of comprehending the natural language, either), which I think qualifies as "hoping for the best", but I'm not sure there is another way, unless you reframe the problem to allow the algorithm to request the information it's missing.
The Hacker News guidelines say “Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. ‘Did you even read the article? It mentions that’ can be shortened to ‘The article mentions that’.”
I accidentally read the comments on the post and got as far as this one:
“Honestly, since we're going towards socialism, we need to abolish child support. Women have the right to get an abortion because it is their body their choice. A man has to use his body …”
I mean that's just reductio ad absurdum to be haughtily oblique about the whole issue.
Social programs =/= socialism. There are plenty of capitalist economies with robust social safety nets - most EU countries provide free healthcare, education, and forms of UBI in the forms of grants for artists and social welfare for those incapable of working.
It's rather unfortunate that so many people are against genuine equality when it comes to reproductive rights.
While it makes perfect sense to me that a pregnant woman should have final (only?) say in whether or not she carries a child to term, it strikes me as rather off that:
* Outside of marriage, the biological father has no rights when it comes to participating in their child's life, whether we're talking custody or mere visitation.
* The father has no right to avoid child support despite having no say in either its birth or participation in their lives.
* Upon being targeted by the state for child support responsibilities, the court system virtually never allows cessation of payments upon a failed paternity test (i.e., paternity fraud). Note: roughly 30% of paternity tests that are performed reveal children are not biologically related to their presumed fathers.
* In about half the states, it's illegal to even perform a paternity test without consent of the mother.
I do find it fascinating that many people will use the very same blase "you should have thought of that before having sex" dismissals when bringing up any of the above issues as are used so often against women fighting for their right to abortion.
tl;dr: child support should be linked with visitation/custody rights. If a father abandons or is denied those rights, they should be absolved of child support, especially if it's proven they aren't actually the biological father.
Matt Levine's introduction to this story made me laugh:
“If you have a certain sort of mind, you might think ‘no, people respond to incentives; if the grid paid for every efficient lightbulb, we’d save more electricity.’ If you have a certain, not unrelated, sort of mind, you might think ‘well, if nobody is getting paid for installing these lightbulbs, maybe I should get the money.’”
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