gwf

An honest accounting of this history has to call out Sinofsky's role, and it's not pretty. He nearly killed the company in pursuit of power, insisting that everything be brought under his control. Who pushed in 2005 that online and search had to be organized under Windows? That was Sinofsky. He forced the engineering team that most needed to move fast onto three‑year product cycles--sheer insanity, and just one of a 1000 bad calls that ultimately contributed to his ouster from Microsoft. And when it came time to plan his own exit from Microsoft, who did Sinofsky turn to? Jeffrey Epstein, of course, because that's what normal people do. Treat everything Sinofsky writes as an attempt to launder his reputation--then add another layer of skepticism on top of that--because Steven Sinofsky does not live in the same moral universe as the people whose careers and products he derailed.

It's the new .NET in that it been so overused as to become almost meaningless.

Not trying to "Schmidhuber" this or anything, but I think my 1999 NIPS paper gives a cleaner derivation and explanation for working on the Jacobian. In it, I derive a Jacobian operator that allows you to compute arbitrary products between the Jacobian and any vector, with complexity that is comparable to standard backprop.

[*] G.W. Flake & B.A. Pearlmutter, "Differentiating Functions of the Jacobian with Respect to the Weights," https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/1999/file/b...

This is so nice to randomly come across. Let know if there's something that I can do to help (I am the author of CBofN). You can reach me at <my first name>@<my last name>.org.

Really nice job and thanks for the shout out to my book.

Well said. (cough, cough, Schmidhuber, cough.)

I don't think this comparison is fair to LeCun. He has literally been at the forefront of ML for over 40 years, starting with his PhD thesis and continuing to the present, and his public fame is entirely a byproduct of the awareness of the impact of his work. (Disclaimer: I've known Yann for decades and worked down the hall from him during his NEC years.)

I recently learned that someone is seeking to impersonate me on IG. They've created a new IG profile w/ my name, photo, etc., and now have more followers and friends than I do. They've even started to friend people within my network, and have sent DMs acting as if they are me.

Meta / FB / IG have a reporting form for when identity theft is involved, and it requires that you send supporting documents like your driver's license and a picture of you holding the drivers license. I did all of that.

Here is the entirety of their response:

"Hi,

We have fewer people available to review your request due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

We’re only able to review requests for the most urgent cases. This means we can’t review your case right now. Please try again at a later date. Thank you for understanding.

The Instagram Team"

Your second group represents the core "inner loop" of about a thousand revolutionary applications. Take the basic capability of translating image->text->speech (and the reverse), install it on a wearable device that can "see" an environment, and add domain-specific agents. From this setup, you're not too far away from having an AI that can whisper guidance into your ear like a co-pilot, enabling scenarios like:

1. step-by-step guidance for a blind person navigating the use of a public restroom.

2. an EMS AI helping you to save someone's life in an emergency.

3. an AI coach that can teach you a new sport or activity.

4. an omnipresent domain-expert that can show you how to make a gourmet meal, repair an engine, or perform a traditional tea ceremony.

5. a personal assistant that can anticipate your information need (what's that person's name? where's the exit? who's the most interesting person here? etc.) and whisper the answer in your ear just as you need it.

Now, add all of the above to an AR capability where you can now think or speak of something interesting and complex, and have it visualized right before your eyes. With this capability, I could augment my imagination with almost super-human capabilities that allow one to solve complex problems almost as if it was an internal mental monologue.

All of these scenarios are just a short hop from where were at now, so mark my words: we will have "borgs" like those described above long before we reach anything like general AI.

> PS: If you have italian ancestors and are interested in getting your citizenship let me know, I'm writing a blog post with my experience so far :)

I am very interested in the citizenship process.

I was also one of Cynthia's Ph.D. advisors when she was a graduate student at Princeton, some twenty years ago. It was obvious to me then that she would go on to do great things, so it's delightful to read this news this morning.

My fondest memory of Cynthia, however, has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with just being a kind person. We were at the NEC Research Institute's company picnic where they had an inflatable dragon for the kids to jump around within its interior. Me, Cynthia, and my wife went inside without any kids and jumped around like idiots for a while. Cynthia and my wife got bored, so I stayed behind for One More Big Bounce. With the epic bounce, I also succeeded in cracking a vertebra, nearly passing out on the spot from the pain. Eventually, I would crawl out, an ambulance was called, and I was brought to the Princeton ER.

I would have a full recovery, but I was in the ER for several hours that night. Cynthia came with us to the ER, and when she saw how uncomfortable I was on the gurney, she went back to her dorm to retrieve her favorite blanket, so that I would have even a small comfort. I am not sure how long she stayed, but I know that she was there with me longer than anyone else except my wife.

Anyhow, she's a lovely human being and I am honored and proud to have known her and witnessed the origins of her career.

As a 14 year old in 1981, I bought a Timex Sinclair from Sears with money that I had been saving up for a over a year. Best. Purchase. Ever. What I learned on that $99 machine would change the course of my life.

Thank you, Sir Clive, for helping me to find my calling.

  for a in range(1, Infinity):
      for b in range(a):
          print(a-b, "/" , b+1)

Will print out:

      1/1, 2/1, 1/2, 3/1, 2/2, 1/3, 4/1, 3/2, 2/3, 1/4, ...

Hence, we've just mapped all rationals (with duplicates) to a single linear list. Since any linear list can always be mapped to the naturals (1, 2, 3, ...), they have the same cardinality.

QED

1996, Jose Cibelli implanted his own DNA into a cow egg, then let it divide into 32 chimeric stem cells before destroying it. I heard about the news in 1998 and was blown away by how little anyone seemed to care.

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/12/us/researchers-claim-embr...

Yep, which is exactly what I did here:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82751815.pdf

None. The point of the paper was the proof technique, which was later extended to include a large family of constrained motion planning problems (i.e., problems that previously were of an unknown computational complexity could be easily mapped to the framework, thereby proving that they were PSPACE-complete).

Agreed, not with this particular design. However, you can absolutely do this just ternary numbers. You loose the ability to encode 3^n states (and are stuck w/ just 2^n), but the middle state can then be repurposed to indicate if the computation is complete (or not) as of yet.

I basically used this sort of design in a dual-rail logic framework which had 4 line-states per "data" line pair, two of which were real data bits, a third indicated unknown vs. unknown, and the fourth was unused.

See https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82751815.pdf, but beware that even though it doesn't look at all like ternary numbers in use, it absolute is.

Looking at the documentation, it reads as if the architecture has a proper clock that synchronizes all computation. Furthermore, an emulator would naturally have a global notion of time, synchronously updating all internal states in a linear sweep.

However, in hardware this model could be made clockless / asynchronous, such that computations go as fast as they can. The extra state of "unknown" can be interpreted as "not all required inputs are ready yet". Some care would be needed to buffer loops in a recurrent circuit, but that's about the only extra complication.

I don't think that you'd ever want to literally have sliding mechanics. However, the dual rail logic used is a type of reversible computation. Thus, thermodynamically it is theoretically much more efficient than standard (irreversible) computation because bits are never erased (which accounts for most of the energy loss).

Not-so-humble-brag: I am the first author in the first paper referenced in the linked PDF. I came up with the original PSPACE-completeness proof as well as the model of computation from which this is all based. So, yeah, it's kind of awesome to read this 22 years later while browsing HN.

More seriously, this is cute and it brings back fond memories of L-systems.

I could have sworn that Logo was a tiny subset of Logo. Live and learn.

Yikes! I guess I better finish it now. Although, you should prepare to be bitterly disappointed because the next book will have something to piss off almost everyone (not by design, it's just that simultaneously seeking breadth, depth, and readability will always fall short on at least on dimension).

Thanks ... I really appreciate the kind words. MIT Press has repeatedly tried to get me to do a 2nd edition and while it was tempting, I always ultimately decided that it was better to keep doing new things. Although, much to my surprise, a Japanese edition of the book just came out this year so there still seems to be some interest.

But that said, I am working on another book now that is meant to be a more accessible successor to CBofN and something of a computational "theory of everything else". I'm about halfway done, but the it's hard to write with the distraction of living in this bizarre timeline of ours.

No worries my dude. I am really happy to read that my book had such a big impact on you (as well as humbled by your praise). It's the little interactions like this that are the true reward for having written a book like CBofN, so I thank you.

As the author of CBofN, I thank you for the plug. But just one little correction: Gary is my first name and William is my middle.

Your descriptions of the human immune system and of viral evolution are both wildly inaccurate. I don’t intend to be snarky, but nearly every sentence is factually incorrect.

It was the best. RIP kuro5hin.

This is a really nice argument and I hope that Kevin and others continue to pursue it. However, I think there is a subtle flaw in the presented argument that is parallel to issues illuminated by Goedel's incompleteness theorem. The problem, I believe, is with the assertion:

> 1. The many-worlds interpretation is true.

> 2. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

> If all the previous assumptions are true, then at least one of these two must be false.

Both of these statements can be simultaneously true if we allow for a third possibility that is logically consistent with the entire argument:

3. Having near logical certainty and awareness that quantum immortality is true is fundamentally incompatible with living on the subjective immortal multiverse timeline.

This would actually be a robust assumption to have explicitly included at the start, as it also makes intuitive sense. Afterall, if you absolutely knew that quantum immortality was true, then you could (and likely would) walk around taking obviously foolish risks without ever experiencing any consequences. Such a universe would basically lack a coherent sense of cause-and-effect from your subjective point of view. And if it was a universe where cause-and-effect don't hold for you, then how could you have logical certainty about anything?

This means that if quantum immortality is true, you can never have logical certainty of its truth.

This is very similar to how Goedel's incompleteness requires that there be true statements that can't be proven as true because the existence of an explicit proof would negate the statement itself, breaken the consistency of the system of logic (and, hence, making it incomplete by necessity).

Humble brag: Stephen Hedetniemi was my first advisor at Clemson, and I took CS101 with him back in 1985. Both faculty and students were in awe of his intellect, kindness, and modesty. What a delight to stumble upon him this morning. Thanks for posting.