Posts by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #B4urRQm9gxAqtCAQCW by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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To which I say no. No, no, no, no, no it has not. Quantum theory is really weird and there are unknowns, but it doesn't involve giving up materialism. In fact, it gives insanely accurate reliably predictions.Boo, then, I say.
(DIR) Post #B4urRQzcsrwvYyTBCK by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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In general, I'm annoyed at the idea that it's some sort of retreat from grandeur to see the brain as physical. You have, between your ears, the most intricate machine ever created, about which we are still discovering basic construction facts. Why does magic make it better?
(DIR) Post #B4z0lZUefJxHwEV2ps by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Guess we get an uptick in sales of A City on Mars (a) when Elon Musk runs his mouth, and (b) when inspirational astronaut crews go on daring voyages to deep space. Nice to have variety!
(DIR) Post #B55WNtsBbdgJfy1RoW by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Hey cybersecurity geeks-- so it seems like anthropic now has really good exploit detection ability. Do you think this makes offense or defense harder? Like, seems like everyone might have to go through a battery of automated checks before deploying stuff into the world.
(DIR) Post #B5BUVd9ibtCrBXXb6G by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Kinda funny, I was thinking about the idea of explaining imaginary numbers to high school students by saying "actually, there's no magic. You can do the whole thing using only reals." But then basically you have to be like "x^2+1=0" doesn't appear to have a solution until POOF, a rotation matrix appears. Which is maybe more confusing?
(DIR) Post #B5BUVdTvOlMyCCzjay by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Like is "there's this thing called i and it's 'imaginary' but we can use it like any other number" more or less intuitive than "you're sitting here doing algebra and suddenly a number explodes into 4 numbers"
(DIR) Post #B5DUQ4ZEAeGwmLk4u0 by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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I've decided it's time to just read straight through a linear algebra textbook. Is Strang still the standard?
(DIR) Post #B5DXy22UNNXse9JVIm by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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@p The because-of is a book project :D
(DIR) Post #B5KqlwKp17ZkiQYWEC by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Another wild result using LLMs to solve math problems. https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1smehbo/stunning_ai_breakthrough_gpt_54_solves_erdos/I continue to be amazed how little people care about this compared to automatic PowerPoint presentation generators and Ai girlfriends.
(DIR) Post #B5WbrBJTaXyDCbUFAu by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Bonus panel here: #smbc #comics #math
(DIR) Post #B5X24FQEDjdQWDXIrQ by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Sometimes the Internet is OK
(DIR) Post #B5YZqznGbfFTso7n1M by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Full comic here: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/waas #smbc #comics #saas
(DIR) Post #B5pIDDZTZDsvUqRJJo by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Do you think of LLMs came out in, say 2003, the major players would've allowed nsfw mode? Like to my knowledge there was never serious pushback on search engines indexing basically anything legal, even if it was deeply offensive. Is that a culture shift or is it more about how an LLM feels like a human being, rather than a mindless indexer.
(DIR) Post #B5pIDDuOJScCXiE0v2 by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Like, one of my earliest weird experiences with LLMs was when bing chat came out. I asked it "what is the most popular content searched for on bing." It started writing about porno for a bit, then abruptly everything disappeared and it said it couldn't answer the question. Which is strange in multiple ways, but most odd that Bing AI can't tell you the most searched for thing on Bing. The same servers will deliver, like, racist vore cartoons or whatever, but the Ai has to be squeaky clean.
(DIR) Post #B5wdZUvt9kSMrC6jK4 by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Full comic here: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/peace-4 #smbc #comics
(DIR) Post #B6M5XBiPI2voLPUEW8 by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Which is closest to your view?
(DIR) Post #B6ivEghVoJk5OpR89Q by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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So there's this argument that utilitarianism doesn't work because (per work by behavioral economists) preferences are non-transitive. That is, you can't make a top to bottom list of preferences for each person where the higher position is always a higher preference. But, like, surely preferences are *pretty* transitive? You can construct weird non-transitive cases. But for most purchase you could construct a list.
(DIR) Post #B6jDwOasI9LL9rK6Iy by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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When describing what a fruit tastes like, do you have a set of fruit primitives? Like a sort of fruit primary colors that are used to explain other fruit..
(DIR) Post #B6pD8Pa5VqIwgnseeG by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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The Ai bubble will pop
(DIR) Post #B7yVFZI0TgZbAbS0Gm by ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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Seems as if my wife is slowly becoming the Bodily Functions in Space go-to person? https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/w3ct8kcm