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rfhjt

47 karma · joined October 18, 2019

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rfhjt··on Iswaac.dev – WebGL 3D software visualization
Update: post hidden as it's clearly missed the "be seen" window.
rfhjt··on Iswaac.dev – WebGL 3D software visualization
It's the aerial view vs the address book difference. The intent is to draw dependencies as underground pipes: you select a building and see what it's connected to.

This isn't a startup: it's just a side project that I've spent maybe 12 hours on.

rfhjt··on Learning to code vs. learning to automate
It's been like that since the Stone age. The reason it's like that is the fundamental forces that drive humans: greed, cruelty, ego and all that. Hard to expect someone in power to not get more power if he's blinded by greed. How many people do you know that voluntarily spend 25% of their income on those who are lower on the social ladder? I don't know anyone, myself included.
rfhjt··on If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)
So space expands itself at every point at a certain rate. There is an elephant in the room here: how do all the parts in space coordinate to expand at about the same steady rate? Why don't we see radically different expansion rates in different parts of the universe, e.g. stars on the left are getting further apart 10x faster than those on the right? We often use the air balloon analogy, but an air ballool is inflated by the same force which equally applies to every part of the balloon. My point is that, there is probably a simple underlying mechanism that drives space expansion and the clever nature of this mechanism would explain the relativity axiom used in GTR.
rfhjt··on If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)
Unless we create a link between two points nearby ahead of time, wait for a billion years and then use this link to jump between the two points. In fact, I think that such links exist everywhere between any two points in space, but they remain latent in the form of quantum entanglement.
rfhjt··on If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)
Unless we find a way to create a space links between two distant points.
rfhjt··on If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)
That's an easy one. We hold the same chain and the distance between us is 100 links. The chain has a curious property: its links subdivide like living cells and on average 1 link takes a minute to split into 2. Thus, every minute the distance between us doubles and half hour later we'll be 1 billion times further from each other. We can replace the chain with a net or even with a 3d net.
rfhjt··on If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)
Our awake experience is also subjective. When we look at a car, we see how it slides on 4 wheels. A deeper look reveals that the wheels aren't sliding, but rolling. What we see in our mind is simplified models, while the objective reality is much more complex, messy and not comprehensible.
rfhjt··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
I have some interesting ideas about managing software complexity in general (i.e. why this complexity inevitably snowballs and how we could deal with that), or about a better way to surf the internet (which may be a really big idea, tbh). But all these are moonshot ideas that gave a slim chance of success, while I need to pay ever raising bills. On the other hand I have a couple solid money making business ideas that I'm working on and that will bring me a few tens of millions, bit will be of no use to society, and I have a fallback plan: a corporate job with outstanding pay, but that brings exactly nothing to this world (it's about reshaping certain markets to make my employer slightly richer).

Do I deserve to be paid for 5 years for something that may not work? "Deserving" something doesn't have much meaning: we, the humans, merely transform solar energy into some fluff like stadiums and cruise ships. Getting paid just means getting a portion of that stream of solar energy. There is no reason I need to "deserve it" as it's unlimited and doesn't belong to anyone. A better question to ask is how can we change our society so that all, especially young, people would get a sufficient portion of resources to not think about paying bills.

Chances to make a breakthru are small, but that doesn't matter. It's a big numbers game: if chances are 1 to million, we let 1 billion people try and see 1000 successes. The problem currently is that we have these billions of people, but they are forces by silly constraints of our society to non stop solve fictional problems like paying rent.

rfhjt··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
This is what I meant. In our society, only very few, usually already rich, can try their own ideas. Most of us have to stick with known ideas that bring profit to business owners or meaningful visibility to universities. When I was in college, I had to work on ideas approved by my professor. Now I have to work on ideas approved by my corporation. But if I had money, I'd work on something completely different. Sure, in 15 I will be rich and can start doing my own stuff, but I'll also be old and my ability will be nowhere near the peak at 25 years.
rfhjt··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
The need to generate publishable papers means that a researcher can only participate in activity that leads to such a paper. He can't try to work on that idea for 5 years, because if no big papers follow, he's toast /he'd probably lose funding long before that).
rfhjt··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
And I disagree violently. The deepmind folks are on salary and every year they need to prove that they are worth the money. This applies to Demis himself: he needs to prove that his org deserves this gaziliion of dollars per year.
rfhjt··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
I merely meant that top mathematicians are substantially smarter and can work with concepts that are beyond the reach of even top programmers. We are generally good at recombining existing building blocks and using existing tools. Mathematicians can build new concepts. If I had the money, I'd try to convince the top mathematicians to work on AI full time.
rfhjt··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
Fwiw, after a certain amount of pain, brain "transcends it": everything disappears, there are some curious colors here and there, but there is no pain. Experienced that during an in ear infection.
rfhjt··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
How many of them are doing real research, though? Corporate researchers improve ads impressions and academics researches are busy generating pointless papers or they won't be paid. Very few if any do actual research.
rfhjt··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
Yes. Then you just cast a spell to summon a computer spirit and let it manifest into the wooden block.
rfhjt··on Comparison of California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and GDPR [pdf]
No, they can't sue the company. America has invented the concept of binding arbitration, that effectively allows the company to opt out from laws, as funny as it sounds. Your isp contract, your bank account contract, your insurance contract all likely contain the binding arbitration clause. Coincidentally, these are the companies that get the most accurate and valuable information on you.
rfhjt··on Neutrinos lead to unexpected discovery about eigenvectors and eigenvalues
What amazes me is that all this math works. This kind of tricks "lets assume this clever 3x3 matrix describes how it works" makes sense if you're reverse engineering a 3D rendering engine, because you know there is some simple math under the hood. The fact that our world obeys simple mathematical equations is surprising.
rfhjt··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
Maybe there is no secret. Just like image recognition is just a bunch of well connected matrices running a dumb algorithm, but at a great speed by GPUs, intelligence is just 100 billions dumb nano-computers with the logic of a fairly simple finite state automata, but with 10 thousand network connections per node. How does nematoda transfer intelligence to its copies? By encoding the FSA properties in the DNA. If this is the case, we'll see the next chapter of AI once a typical smartphone runs a million dumb programmable nanocomputers with a very sense network topology: people will just run the same dumb algorithms on this devices and discover that it exhibits the basic properties of nematoda-level AI. And thus AI would be a dumb engineering problem.
rfhjt··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
And programmers are probably not the ones who will come up with AI ideas. I'd bet on mathematicians that prove those Fermat's or ABC theorems.
rfhjt··on Open Letter to the Linux Foundation
As IT becomes bigger, it inevitably attracts politics. Linux plays a big enough role in our society to attract all sorts of evil people. If you own a gold mine, you also need an army to protect it.
rfhjt··on Open Letter to the Linux Foundation
This explains everything. Linus himself is wealthy, doesn't report to anyone, owns a good chunk of shares in a few infra companies and can safely say f--k you to the SJW crowd. But he has a weakness - his kids and family.
rfhjt··on Math Looks the Same in the Brains of Boys and Girls, Study Finds
Because makes and females have different nutrition, different habits and fir example use different drugs. It may be something silly like different contents of birth control pills. It's not a secret that small changes in amount of consumed zink, calcium or iodine make big impact on body and mental abilities.
rfhjt··on Math Looks the Same in the Brains of Boys and Girls, Study Finds
And this is not impossible. The obvious example is the north vs south Korean. The same people, but different nutrition, different lifestyles. Now the NK people are obviously smaller and I'd bet, have a much lower IQ (the lack of food doesn't help with math activities!) I'm certain that there are many subtle differences in how people live in Netherlands and Denmark.
rfhjt··on Math Looks the Same in the Brains of Boys and Girls, Study Finds
Not so quickly. They didn't find any obvious differences in some basic coarse metrics. That's like stating that the thermal image of AMD and Intel processors is about the same and thus their abilities are the same. The only thing this study proves us that the differences are more subtle than what they could measure.
rfhjt··on OpenAI Releases Largest GPT-2 Text Generation Model
Prompt: The coming global recession is a real possibility and"

Response: "The coming global recession is a real possibility and the Fed is playing games, creating artificial market conditions to make a recovery seem possible in the short-term. The Fed has an option to change its monetary policies but it will not make the problem go away, so it is in their best interest to pretend it won't happen."

Change and to however and you'll get another stereotype opinion. It really just composes pieces of texts it's seen around the prompt, but it does this really well.

Most of the news agencies can now fire most of their monkey typewriters: this GPT will outperform them on every metric.

rfhjt··on OpenAI Releases Largest GPT-2 Text Generation Model
Prompt: "Real things don't exist unconditionally and things that exist unconditionally are not real. However the reality has an essense. It is"

Response: "an actual thing, and it is not the thing to which we attach meaning. It is not real because it is not a thing. And therefore, it does not possess the qualities that are inherent in all real things."

Just wow. Sure, there are a few logical mistakes here, but this response serves as a good prompt for my bio-GPT. In other words, we usually need some starting points or hints for analysis and discovering these hints is non trivial because whatever we can think of is not very new to us. This GPT just gave me an answer that smells like a serious wisdom and I'll surely dig in that direction to see if this idea has any substance.

Edit: what's happening here is while I can't ask this model to give me a short and conscise summary on a topic, I can still interrogate this model and find out what it's seen in the training set. I can't possibly read all these books in the training set, but now I can rapidly navigate in the multidimensional meaning space: I tell it where to start and it says what it seems in close proximity to my prompt. This is a breakthru.

rfhjt··on قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
Should we introduce a license to publish math papers? This should supposedly raise the overall level of mathematicians.
rfhjt··on قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
There is even a coined story about languages: Babylon. People there made great progress building things together while they spoke the same language, but everything fell apart when they started speaking different languages. Countries create their own languages and cultures sometimes artificially, to silo its citizens: when you've been taught since childhood to speak some odd language, it's hard to jump the ship later, so you have to restrict yourself to this little playground or make an immense effort and learn the international language. Luckily, such language still exist, although we take that as given. Software today is that Babylon from the story: everyone speaks the same language, everyone can can join and contribute with minimal efforts. No taxes, fees, licenses and permissions needed to join. As software rapidly gets bigger, people that have power start realising that this kind of freedom is unheard of. They are used to the world of borders where they take a toll for a permission to cross. So they pull the trick as old as humanity: introduce artificial fragmentation of languages and cultures and make people in their country use a language they control. And the more obscure and counterintuitive this language is , the harder it is for people to cross the barrier and the more profits they gain. If I were an evil and powerful dictator of a big chunk of the world, I'd force everyone there to switch to an artificial and very complex language, make it the only allowed language in the country, and do the same with software. From now on all these people would naturally have to live in this little artificial playground.
rfhjt··on قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
Context. I don't know what lingua franka means, but I also know what it means. I could bother and find literal translation, but why would I? The same applies to obscure English words, weird programming language keywords or math symbols. Integral and differential symbols don't really translate into anything and we use the word "integral" only because we can't type this symbol on an average keyboard.
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