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drdeca

2,635 karma · joined August 22, 2013

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drdeca··on Mathematics in the age of AI
Not quite? It is more that 1) someone has gone through it, identified a step he thinks isn’t a valid step, and the author hasn’t been willing to work with that person 2) most consider the proof, due to its length combined with those doubts as to its validity, not worth their time and effort to work through and understand (because it would take a lot of time, and they have jobs to do, doing research and teaching, etc.)
drdeca··on Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption
Here’s a very simple one-time-pad style construction for homeomorphic (but not fully homeomorphic) encryption.

Suppose the plaintext, ciphertext, and key, are each a natural number modulo 5.

The key is selected uniformly at random. The ciphertext is obtained by adding the key to the plaintext (and as a result is also uniform random).

Then the ciphertext is sent to the server. The server only has the ciphertext, which is uniform random. The server then adds some integer mod 5 to the ciphertext, producing a new ciphertext, and sends it back to the user. The user then subtracts their key from the new ciphertext to obtain the new plaintext, which is their original plaintext plus the number the server added.

At no point in this process did the server learn anything about the user’s plaintext.

This is clearly secure.

It is also useless, because just adding a number isn’t a useful thing for a server to do (they may as well just send the user the number and let them add it themselves), but that’s because it is a toy example.

I suppose if mind uploading were possible, then under FHE it would in principle be possible to take the ciphertext and run the computation of “this mind upload of this person reads the data and provides some output”, and then presumably that uploaded person would have the experience of seeing the plaintext? But it wouldn’t be possible to get any information about the plaintext without the key (or enough brute force to find the key, but that’s why we use big enough keys to make this infeasible).

drdeca··on Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption
They didn’t say that it “appears” indistinguishable from noise, but that it is indistinguishable.

It seems like you strongly believe otherwise, but I suspect you don’t have a good reason to, and just find it unbelievable.

Do you think you can distinguish it from noise, if given an implementation and the information an adversary would have access to?

Of course, you not being able to wouldn’t demonstrate that noöne can. But, it seems like if you had a good reason to believe that an adversary can, that would suggest you might have some idea of how they could do so. And, if you do have such an idea, then, if that idea works, it would be important for others to know, and if it doesn’t, it would presumably benefit your understanding to see why it doesn’t.

drdeca··on Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption
Hmm, could one instead of sending the model weights, send like, a merkle tree root for them, not exactly specifying the model, but at least demonstrating that the same model is used each time?
drdeca··on Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption
You said that FHE is an oxymoron, seemingly on the basis that in proper encryption the ciphertext is indistinguishable from noise, and you think this can’t be true of FHE. I am arguing to the contrary.

In the secret sharing multi-party computation schemes, the individual shares of the secret are random and have no information about the plaintext.

I see no reason that FHE can’t have ciphertexts indistinguishable from noise.

drdeca··on Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption
Eh? With secret sharing one can do computation on a shared secret where it is provable that no individual party can recover any information about the data with their share alone.

I don’t see why you conclude that FHE couldn’t be close to as secure as that. (Like, not information theoretically, but with computationally bounded adversaries.)

drdeca··on Graduate student proves a quantum uncertainty principle for fractals
The state you describe, sqrt(1/2) ( |01> + |10>) is an entangled state, but not all entangled states are like that.

The state sqrt(1/2) ( |00> + |11> ) is also possible, and is also an entangled state, but doesn’t have the two particles in opposite states.

By contrast, the state (1/2) (|00> - |01> + |10> - |11>) is (while a valid state) not an entangled state, because it is equal to (1/2) (|0> + |1>) (|0> - |1>) .

drdeca··on Graduate student proves a quantum uncertainty principle for fractals
No.

A state is entangled when it isn’t a product state.

Two spin (1/2) particles in a singlet state have the kind of “they have opposite states” thing going on that you describe, and is a specific way that two particles can be entangled.

drdeca··on Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states
By that logic, wouldn’t prizes in “test of strength hammer” games also be illegal?

The game just has multiple aspects to it.

drdeca··on Hyperspace
Wouldn’t the ideal be that it informs you up front that it requires payment to get the benefit, but allows you to scan to estimate the benefit before deciding whether to pay (but after acknowledging that getting the benefit requires payment)?
drdeca··on Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
Maybe “rock solid” could be understood as slightly hyperbolic (though it is metaphorical, so hard to say whether it is really hyperbole), but, it is possible to predict some things probabilistically with a high degree of accuracy. Depending on the task, a high enough degree of accuracy sounds doable, and if it offers a sufficiently convenient fallback to an actual human when it fails, that sounds like it could be quite a bit nicer than navigating a phone tree menu?

Classical voice to text combined with NN based voice to text, I would imagine can be highly accurate, and that’s probabilistic.

drdeca··on “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
There’s a minimum karma requirement.
drdeca··on Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice
I don’t think what you are pointing at is a real issue.

Something exists. Therefore, on of the following 3 must hold: “one or more things exists or have existed which were not a consequence of another thing existing”, “an infinite regress of things existing as a consequence of other things”, “a cycles of consequences”.

The purported absurdity of life arising by chance is not about life existing, but about it arising by chance as a consequence of other non-living things.

The idea that god coming from nothing is absurd, well, that absurdity seemingly has to apply somewhere, as all 3 cases of the trichotomy above seem around as absurd? Eventually something has to be without explanation, whether it be a thing or a chain or cycle of things.

Or, were you not aware that most people who believe that God exists believe that God is the first cause?

Apparently you weren’t aware of that, because you said something about magic and stardust??

drdeca··on Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
“GP” in this context is short for “grandparent” or “grandparent post”. It means the comment that they comment they are replying to, is a reply to.
drdeca··on Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
Can you give an instrumentalization (spelling?) for “ingenuity” by which we can test whether a behavior (in a context) shows any “ingenuity”?
drdeca··on Towards a Theory of Bugs: The Ruliology of the Unexpected
Well, of course at the real hardware level there will be some non-zero amount of nondeterminism, but the error correction steps that have been implemented are enough to make the probability of it behaving contrary to the design of the hardware, low enough to be pretty negligible.

And if you want additional assurance (due to, e.g. the computation being very long) you could probably use some cryptographic techniques to produce a certificate that the output is as it should be, and you can check that certificate as many times as you want to avoid possible random hardware errors in the process of checking the certificate.

drdeca··on Towards a Theory of Bugs: The Ruliology of the Unexpected
It is true of course that there is no automatic procedure which takes in an arbitrary program and decides if it has a desired input/output behavior. (Whether an input program has a given “semantic property” is undecidable.)

But that doesn’t mean that it is impossible to have all our programs be formally verified. For that, if we have a formal specification for what each should do… Well, I suppose it’s possible that some program we would want is possible to implement with the desired properties, but not possible to prove that it has those properties? It is possible to enumerate (program, proof) pairs though.

drdeca··on Towards a Theory of Bugs: The Ruliology of the Unexpected
Eh? I don’t see how Gödel’s results imply that.
drdeca··on The arguments against open source AI are bad
Most people don’t want to hurt lots of other people in an untargeted way, yes.

But there are a lot of people, and, apparently a few of them shot up some electrical substations?

If you hold constant the (very small) fraction of people who want to cause mass harm, and increase the average ease with which a randomly selected person could cause mass harm , you would expect the amount of deliberate mass harm to increase, even if the fraction of people who would want to do that is like, 0.000001 of people?

drdeca··on The arguments against open source AI are bad
Whether or not this is compatible with how the constitution ought to be understood, in practice, it is illegal to create a nuclear bomb.

Maybe those laws should be considered unconstitutional, idk. But those laws are currently in place.

drdeca··on OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation
Well, what’s the theorem statement for the result you’re thinking of then?

Of course n bits can only encode for 2^n options. But to prove mathematically that we are close to the best that can be achieved in 1GB requires a mathematical definition of what we mean by better. Rather, it requires at least a choice of a proxy for what we mean by better. (Showing that some approximation of what we mean by better is close to as good as can be, would suffice. Like, if we can show that the loss can’t get much lower with a 1GB model, that would count.)

drdeca··on OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation
So, when you said “proven” I thought you might have meant like, a mathematical proof. It appears that this is not what you meant. (Right?) (If it is what you meant, I was asking for like, the particular theorem.)

Also, ok, when I said “intelligence”, it was because you were already talking about how “smart” the model could be. So, I thought you were already on board with using the word “intelligence” to refer to the phenomenon where these kinds of models produce outputs that satisfy the kinds of tasks they are pointed at.

None of those links give an argument that the current 1GB models are the best they can be.

My understanding is that so far when training a model by distillation (using the logits of the teacher model), one can achieve better outcomes than one could if training the 1GB model from scratch on the same training data as the large model, and that so far, better models as the teacher model have yielded better results for the student model.

drdeca··on OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation
What proof of a ceiling are you talking about? Wouldn’t proving this require a good definition for intelligence, which I don’t think there is consensus on?
drdeca··on The human-in-the-loop is tired
Do you think the sort of people who complain about articles being AI-written are incapable of writing articles or something? Why would not being willing to read articles produced that way result in not reading any articles?
drdeca··on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
I think there is both value that comes from the work being authored by a human, and value which does not?
drdeca··on Is The Economist Always Wrong?
If your prediction is a probability distribution, rather than a discrete outcome label, then, assuming the distribution over the future depends continuously on your action, there should be a fixed point, I think?

Like, if you output a probability distribution among n options, and then there is a continuous map from the probability distribution you describe in your output, to another probability distribution over those options…

Err, hm, maybe you need a stronger hypothesis on the continuous map? If it is contractive then it will definitely have a fixed point. I don’t remember the hypothesis needed.

drdeca··on 98% isn't much
Do you know any browsers which don’t support https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (if you remove the google traffic tracking js that’s iirc tacked on at the end of the page (or maybe I’m thinking of better mfing website (which adds a tiny bit of css)? Idr.)) ?

I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. I don’t think the other commenter was saying that such websites should reach 100%, only that they should start from there and sacrifice only as much as is necessary.

drdeca··on Self-Harness: Harnesses That Improve Themselves
Was surprised and somewhat disappointed that the article doesn’t appear to evaluate how well the models work when running in the harnesses optimized for the other models. Do they still do better than with the baseline harness? Does each model do worse with a harness optimized (by this process) for the other models, than it does for the harness optimized for itself?
drdeca··on Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too
This seems implausible.
drdeca··on I was wrong about the Midjourney ultra-sound scanner
The criticism of “these posts are AI generated” seems like something that is about the posts themselves?
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