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MVissers

387 karma · joined October 28, 2019

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MVissers··on Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries
Also, this trade war pushes the USA close to a war with China over Taiwan and maybe Panama Canal, which is exactly what you want as an authoritarian to stay on longer. Find an enemy and use emergency powers to maintain control.
MVissers··on Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries
Decoupling from China will lead to China annex Taiwan sooner. China will have the USA and the world by the balls then, so not sure we want that to happen quicker.

And I don't think anyone is calling themselves allies of the USA right now. The whole world is looking to decouple from the USA. Europe is completely over the USA, they can't rely on them for leadership, protection or for trade.

From a tech perspective, expect Europe to decouple from the USA from an economic and cultural perspective in the next decade. Smartest thing Europe can do is to create alternatives to US services, build its own defense industry and stop looking at the USA for any leadership.

MVissers··on Tesla loses ground as Chinese EVs dominate global markets
I mean, we all know who the driver is to launch 'cybertrucks' and 'robotaxis' instead of more affordable variations.

Also, not sure what the whole 800v hype is about. I rent EVs for roadtrips and Tesla's are basically the fastest charging ones with current architecture, haven't had a need for 800v since at the cell level the charging speed is already maxed out.

Re: the Y, even though they won't sell because some hand gestures and behaviors, they did almost every complaint people have about the old model Y.

MVissers··on Apple M4 MacBook Air review: I have no notes
Geforce now is amazing these days if you like gaming and only have a mac.
MVissers··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
Doesn't seem that this administration think they do. Pro free speech my ass.
MVissers··on The NIH is being slashed and burned, not "reformed"
I mean, if you re-elect the guy that tried to forcibly stay in power last time, I'm not sure what else to say...

Zero sympathy for Americans that voted for this and the ones that stayed home.

I feel bad for the ones that voted Kamala and for the West.

MVissers··on What if Eye...?
So the special thing about NEAT is that it allows the shape of the neural net to change. It can also do some sort of mix between two neural nets (like sexual reproduction), but I haven't implemented that.

Natural selection in this sim just happens by itself, there is a limited amount of food and only the best adapted ones survive. So the best performing neural networks duplicate themselves and create small variations of themselves. This part is not connected to the NEAT algorithm, I've just seen that NEAT performs particularly good vs more fixed-structure neural networks.

MVissers··on X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
Not OP but.. He’s full of shit?

You get banned for sharing identities of DOGE people, but Musk can share the name and tax documents of a federal judge.

Hypocrite.

MVissers··on US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
I can tell you that the non-US west has lost a lot of goodwill in the last few weeks.

There are boycott’s afoot and I wouldn’t be surprised if canada and Europe will choose more Chinese and domestic in the future.

Basically, the US closing its borders will lead to a Chinese world leadership which is not good for the US either.

MVissers··on US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
And the Chinese will pick up the pieces in Africa and other places.
MVissers··on What if Eye...?
So they carry neural nets and evolve using the NEAT algorithm, which introduces slight variations: new connections and new nodes.

Over time this allows fish to develop basic behavior such as searching for food, navigation a maze, etc.

The only other 'useful' gene right now is around herbivore/carnivore digestion (0 to 1), which allows them to extract more energy from either meat or plant-food. Most of the time they actually develop specific behavior according to this gene.

I don't really code in what offspring need to do beyond having slight variations to both factors described above, it kind of evolves randomly into more complexity (neural net + behaviors).

Also importantly– I need to program an energy decay system and death if they run out. So basically: Energy source, energy decay and evolving neural nets that can give an organism the possibility to survive and evolve if they get more energy. And voila– Life emerges.

Working on plants now, and again simple rules: Neural nets in the plants to mimic evolution of complex biological systems that evolve from generation to generation. And a light-based energy source and light-based energy capture system (leaves). My current (preliminary) experiments show that the plants start to look like trees over time to maximize energy capturing compared to competing plants.

Looking to publish this once I have it a bit more refined.

MVissers··on What if Eye...?
Hah, I'm creating something like this right now as a hobby. Will open source it soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDePFvxj6Po

I think we're quite far off if you want to model full organism complexity. But if you want to answer a research question you can model simpler versions today. Like this research team did around how vision evolves.

By the way– As of recently, we were able to model C Elegans (flatworm) in 3D with all neurons and neurotransmitters. It reacted to virtual stimuli just like a real worm (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-024-00738-w). So single-organisms is already possible. But the evolution of these entities in 3D will take us a bit more time is my guess:

Also I'm not a CS person, just an enthusiast.

MVissers··on Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
You could say the same about doing a startup. They pay is shit, grueling hours and 90% of them don't amount to anything meaningful.

Doesn't mean that it's not worth it for most. Some people just want to do science. Or startups.

MVissers··on Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
You don't really learn how to learn in a masters or undergraduate. You learn how to consume information, but not how to research new things, validate those and defend it to others in a rigorous way.

Whether it's worth the investment depends on ones goals in life.

MVissers··on Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
It doesn't need to appeal to everyone. It's also very very lab dependent. I didn't find a lab at my European institute in my area of interest, so ended up not doing a PhD. I still do some science for fun though as a hobby.

I spent some time at Harvard as an undergrad doing research there though, and it was the most intellectually stimulating environment I've ever been in. Maybe YC is similar, but it's a lot about money in those environments and most startups aren't that interesting either.

MVissers··on Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster
I think that's why most innovative science today happens at the intersection of two domains– That's where someone from a different field can have unique insights and try something new in an adjacent field. This is often hard to do when you're in the field yourself.
MVissers··on Tabby: Self-hosted AI coding assistant
Yup!

No goal to become a programmer– But I like to build programs.

Build a rather complex AI-ecosystem simulator with me as the director and GPT-4 now Claude 3.5 as the programmer.

Would never have been able to do this beforehand.

MVissers··on My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
I mean, they should probably prepare people with knowledge of taxes and investing then.

The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.

US, China, India, UK, etc, much more disparity so it’s much more important for kids to be ‘top of the field’.

MVissers··on Plasticlist Report – Data on plastic chemicals in Bay Area foods
Yes.

And the last decades we’ve had a new unknown cause of colon cancer increase in young adults.

My money is on plastics, but will be hard to prove.

MVissers··on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB
We've almost wiped ourselves out in a nuclear war in the 70ies. If that would have happened, would it have been worth it? Probably not.

Beyond immediate increase in inequality, which I agree could be worth it in the long run if this was the only problem, we're playing a dangerous game.

The smartest and most capable species on the planet that dominates it for exactly this reason, is creating something even smarter and more capable than itself in the hope it'd help make its life easier.

Hmm.

MVissers··on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB
We've seen 10-100x cost decrease per year since GPT-3 came out for the same capabilities.

So... Next year this tech will most likely be quite a bit cheaper.

MVissers··on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB
My guess as an amateur neuroscientist is that what we call intelligence is just a 'measurement' of problem solving ability in different domains. Can be emotional, spatial, motor, reasoning, etc etc.

There is no special sauce in our brain. And we know how much compute there is in our brain– So we can roughly estimate when we'll hit that with these 'LLMs'.

Language is important in a human brain development as well. Kids who grow up deaf grow up vastly less intelligent unless they learn sign language. Language allow us to process complex concepts that our brain can learn to solve, without having to be in those complex environments.

So in hindsight, it's easy to see why it took a language model to be able to solve general tasks and other types deep learning networks couldn't.

I don't really see any limits on these models.

MVissers··on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB
I think this is a fair criticism of capability.

I personally wouldn't be surprised if we start to see benchmarks around this type of cooperation and ability to orchestrate complex systems in the next few years or so.

Most benchmarks really focus on one problem, not on multiple real-time problems while orchestrating 3rd party actors who might or might not be able to succeed at certain tasks.

But I don't think anything is prohibiting these models from not being able to do that.

MVissers··on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB
What would you need to see to call it useful?

To give you an example– I've used it for legal work such as an EB2-NIW visa application. Saved me countless of hours. My next visa I'll try to do without a lawyer using just LLMs. I would never try this without having LLMs at my disposal.

As a hobby– And as someone with a scientific background I've been able to build an artificial ecosystem simulation from scratch without programming experience in Rust: https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator

I recently moved from fish to plants and believe I've developed some new science at the intersection of CS and Evolutionary Biology that I'm looking to publish.

This tool is extremely useful. For now– You do require a human in the loop for coordination.

My guess is that these will be benchmarks that we see within a few years: How good an AI coordinate multiple other AIs to build, deploy and iterate something that functions in the real world. Basically manager AI.

Because they'll literally be able to solve every single one shot problem so we won't be able to create benchmarks anymore.

But that's also when these models will be able to build functioning companies in a few hours.

MVissers··on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB
Probably just not trained on this kind of data. We could create a benchmark about it, and they'd shatter it within a year or so.

I'm starting to really see no limits on intelligence in these models.

MVissers··on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB
I would agree if the cost of AI compute over performance hasn't been dropping by more than 90-99% per year since GPT3 launched.

This type of compute will be cheaper than Claude 3.5 within 2 years.

It's kinda nuts. Give these models tools to navigate and build on the internet and they'll be building companies and selling services.

MVissers··on Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic
Price dropping is just a matter of time. Compute gets cheaper and the models get better. We’ve seen 100x drop in price for same capabilities in ~2 years.

Don’t forget about writers and designers losing jobs as well. If you’re not absolute top and don’t use AI, AI will replace you.

MVissers··on Phased Array Microphone (2023)
I believe modern macbook pro’s already have multiple microphones that probably do some phase-array magic.
MVissers··on M4 Mac mini's efficiency
Apple doesn't want you to use it while charging. They succeeded.
MVissers··on Routine dental X-rays are not backed by evidence
Doc here. They are basically carpenters. They us drills and saws and hammers and stuff.
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