Hacker News Reader

galimaufryon Neural networks as non-leaky mathematical abstraction

I think it's gesturing towards the ideas in section 5 of https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf

galimaufryon Neural networks as non-leaky mathematical abstraction

They are well-defined, but the usual framework that explains them ("non-standard analysis") is extremely abstract.

If you are dealing with polynomials/algebraic geometry only then there is a very simple, totally rigorous approach using nilpotents. And there is a newer approach called "alpha calculus" that I know nothing about but here is an example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.3477.pdf

galimaufryon At Tech’s Leading Edge, Worry About a Concentration of Power

I'm not an expert, but I've read highly-cited ML papers where the researchers barely bothered with hyperparameter search, much less throwing a few million dollars at the problem. You can still get an interesting proof of concept without big money.

And low resource computing is more theoretically and practically interesting. I've heard experts complain of some experiments "they didn't really discover anything, they threw compute at the problem until they got some nice PR." This was coming from M'FAANG people too so it's not just resentment.

galimaufryon Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ

I didn't really understand the answer though. The computer is programmable, but the way supremacy is demonstrated is orthogonal to its programmability - it is still demonstrating superiority on just the one problem of simulating itself starting from any initial condition, no?

galimaufryon The Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech

> You don't see these college students go after someone with actual power just like you don't see the animal rights advocates throw paint on Hell's Angels for wearing leather.

This is a strange example of inconsequential protest, as the movement against furs was highly successful.

galimaufryon The Most Expensive Lesson of My Life: Details of SIM Port Hack

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but at least in the US banks take on all risk of fraud. If someone starts writing bad checks in your name, that's ultimately the bank's problem rather than yours.

galimaufryon Fearing More Violence, Sri Lanka Silences Social Media

Myanmar is not a typical example: social media drove violence, but social media was being manipulated by the army:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

galimaufryon Joe the office mate

I have heard that J.P. Serre used the same method when writing his books.