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pyentropy

834 karma · joined May 18, 2019

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pyentropy··on The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Please. This is IAS -- the members can barely be bothered to commute.
pyentropy··on The k-server conjecture is true
> Hadamard matrix of order 668

Solved? https://epoch.ai/frontiermath/open-problems/hadamard

pyentropy··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
Not a Lean expert but some of the proof tactics used to prove are probably novel? Or, you could prompt agents later to analyze which lemmas or parts of the proof are surprising or applicable to other problems?
pyentropy··on Don't stop early: Case-folding source code at memory speed
A lot of good repos (CLIs, frameworks) had 'tree' unicode directory structure with like ├──, └──, and │ , as well as emojis for passing/failed tests and README docs maybe a unicode arrow or two, but LLMs absolutely overuse it.

I don't know why chatbots prefer → over -> so much. It's becoming a countersignal compared to the old terminal customization era, where arrow ligatures were a signal of effort.

pyentropy··on Terence Tao: Mathematics in the Age of AI [pdf]
Vedran Miletić doesn't sound German to me! :-)
pyentropy··on Terence Tao: Mathematics in the Age of AI [pdf]
In times when software eng teams push for maximizing token usage, Tao's public view is to encourage verification, limit AI use for tasks that have real-life consequences and prevent low-effort papers that exhaust the review pipeline?

He also focuses on training the next generation of mathematicians and prioritizing the process of slow digestion of results, which to me sounds very.. reasonable?

pyentropy··on Terence Tao: Mathematics in the Age of AI [pdf]
Note that the SAIR lecture is from 6 months ago, this Beamer presentation is from 2 days ago.
pyentropy··on Ask HN: How are thinking efforts implemented?
I'm considering the possibility that it's good to break the prefix and cache because the LLM itself was rewarded (during post-training) with different prefixes/system prompts, each containing reasoning traces of the correct size.

I might be very very wrong though and LLMs disagree with me, insisting that cache is preserved and the system message doesn't have to change (even though it often contains effort level in context) if effort level changes across turns, and that all you have to do is tell the inference lib that parses think tags to early-close think tags that are too long.

pyentropy··on Ask HN: How are thinking efforts implemented?
Examples with inference of different reasoning effort levels is in the OpenAI docs as well - https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/articles/openai-harmo...

https://docs.vllm.ai/en/latest/features/reasoning_outputs/#a...

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/reasoning

pyentropy··on Ask HN: How are thinking efforts implemented?
LLM-judge/parallel branching ≠ multi-token prediction ≠ reasoning effort.

See https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/articles/openai-harmo... and src/openai/types/shared/reasoning_effort.py

pyentropy··on Ask HN: How are thinking efforts implemented?
The number of tokens you predict at time (multi or not) has nothing to do with whether the model wants to emit any, some or a lot of reasoning tokens in reasoning tag -- similar to how branch prediction will not really change the for loop iteration count.
pyentropy··on Ask HN: How are thinking efforts implemented?
Take a look at the harmony repo which specifies the internal OpenAI format - the effort level is specified in the context after the <|start|> tag - https://github.com/openai/harmony

Note that inference libs also have parsers that put hard limits on reasoning tokens with separate counters (similar to how you can put a limit on token generation per completion versus waiting for an <eos>). For that, take a look at vllm reasoning docs.

pyentropy··on Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout
If H800 is a memory-constrained model that NVIDIA built to avoid the Chinese export ban on H100 with equivalent fp8 performance, it makes zero sense to believe Elon Musk, Dario Armodei and Alexandr Wang's claims that DeepSeek smuggled H100s.

The only reason why a team would allocate time on memory optimizations and writing NVPTX code rather than focusing on posttraining is if they severely struggled with memory during training.

I mean, take a look at the numbers:

https://www.fibermall.com/blog/nvidia-ai-chip.htm#A100_vs_A8...

This is a massive trick pulled by Jensen, take the H100 design whose sales are regulated by the government, make it look 40x weaker and call it H800, while conveniently leaving 8-bit computation as fast as H100. Then bring it to China and let companies stockpile without disclosing production or sales numbers, and have no export controls.

Eventually, after 7 months, US govt starts noticing the H800 sales and introduces new export controls, but it's too late. By this point, DeepSeek has started research using fp8. They slowly build bigger and bigger models, work on the bandwidth and memory consumptions, until they make r1 - their reasoning model.

pyentropy··on Why haven't biologists cured cancer?
You should start a blog... or maybe not - pursue the battle in academia/work and occasionally drop nuggets of wisdom like this somewhere. But do not delete them.
pyentropy··on Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
I updated the post with a a link to counter-argument from Sabine Hossenfelder, the arguments from Zvi and three points from my side.
pyentropy··on Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
I updated the post with a a link to counter-argument from Sabine Hossenfelder, the arguments from Zvi and three points from my side.
pyentropy··on Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
Scott worked at OpenAI Safety and he likes it: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8047

But is the "-ed" in worked a problem?

pyentropy··on Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
Thank you.
pyentropy··on Is Aschenbrenner's 165 page paper on AI the naivety of a 25 year old?
It is a question. I tried to put what my opinion is on a few statements but I absolutely cannot summarize 160 pages (Business Insider did using GPT, which I find insulting and funny) nor have a 100% opinion on something that involves national security, secrets and other stuff that I don't have access to.
pyentropy··on In the long run, we're all Dad
You haven't read Scott's blog enough :)

He's an atheist psychiatrist. However, he enjoys how natural selection, social dynamics and reputation can also be modeled by the moral rules of most religions. For example, going to therapy isn't that different from practicing confessions in a church.

pyentropy··on My primality testing code is faster than Sir Roger Penrose's
Fun fact: jgc (John Graham-Cumming) is the person that started the petition that forced the UK government to publicly apologize for its harsh treatment and persecution of Alan Turing.
pyentropy··on The puzzling poll that made many Twitter users angry
The character limit incentivizes content that's polarizing and evokes strong emotions, because you are competing for attention without the ability to express subtleties/details.
pyentropy··on Metaculus
You can gain reputation by simply forecasting the same outcome as the (publicly available) average probability of everybody - so a user that forgets to forecast on questions is gonna be worse off than a bot who just follows the crowd.

However it gets more interesting when you try to beat the crowd - because you have to take risk and disagree with the masses. You will either end up with negative reputation or a very large one. You can learn more about scoring functions and how to measure the accuracy of everyone's forecasts: https://www.metaculus.com/help/scoring/

Personally I have opened one question, and it involves predicting the net sales of Apple Vision Pro until 2025: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/17407/apple-vision-pro-n...

pyentropy··on Google claims to have proved its supremacy with new quantum computer
Are you familiar with logic circuits (those made of gates like AND, OR, XOR, NAND)? Just like they are the founding blocks of classical computers, the founding block of quantum computers are quantum circuits.

Quantum circuits are made of quantum logic gates like Hadamard, CNOT, Z, CZ, etc. Instead of bits as inputs and outputs, quantum logic gates have qubits. Unlike boolean logic where bits are 0 and 1, a qubit is a 2D vector [α β] where α and β are complex numbers, corresponding to a superposition of the zero and one bases: α * |0> + β * |1>. You can visualise a qubit as a point on a sphere, the so called Bloch sphere [1]

There are multiple ways to implement a qubit, but you need to start with some quantum phenomenon. An example is the polarisation of a photon, so horizontal could be |0> and vertical polarisation could be |1> and the qubit is represented as complex vector of these two. If you've studied linear algebra you know manipulating a vector often involves linear transformations. Any linear transformation can be represented as a matrix - so applying gates is just doing matrix multiplication. Unary gates are 2x2 matrices and binary gates are 4x4 matrices - for photons they would be implemented with mirrors and optical waveplates. Measuring the polarisation at the end is the output. The output is not deterministic but it always follows the same distribution, so you could design a circuit that has |001> X% of the time, |010> Y%, |111> Z% of the time, etc. such that X + Y + Z + .. = 100%.

I'm not too familiar with the details of random circuit sampling, but the idea is that you start with a big circuit that wasn't intentionally designed and therefore has no known properties we can exploit - instead it's a random mess of transformations to the qubits. A classical computer cannot run big quantum circuits - N gates with the 49 Google qubits requires like 2^49 * N^3 classical gates, so it won't be able to calculate the output distribution. However, what we can do is run the quantum circuit many times (do measurements on the quantum computer) and collect many samples. Given enough samples, a classical computer can verify whether there's consistency between them and whether an actual transformation produced them (and therefore quantum computation happened) or its just pure noise / garbage using cross entropy benchmarks [2].

Note that the purpose of the "random" in the random circuit is to introduce hardness and prevent cheating (assume that the classical computer is the "opponent" of the quantum computer); the circuits don't calculate anything useful / of human value.

What's interesting is that once people with supercomputers saw the benchmark formula and analysed the constant factors, they found a loophole which let them run a classical algorithm which generates measurements/samples that satisfy the benchmark with 40K classical CPUs for a week, or even a single A100 within 140 days. Some of their success was due to the sheer power available and some is due to algorithmic cleverness (see: tensor networks). In my opinion, they are only disproving the Sycamore supremacy in a fussy way.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-entropy_benchmarking

pyentropy··on DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
I've had horrible DR and DP as a child. It runs in families with anxiety disorders and personality disorders.

No matter how many times it happened, it was always equally scary - feeling like a passive observer of a movie starring some piece of flesh and bones as the main character, feeling completely separate from that body and unable to control its decisions. The episodes usually lasted <30 minutes.

I don't know about its occurrence in psychedelics, but in my case it always occurred after periods of extreme emotions (seeing a classmate die and being aware of my own mortality, being rejected by some 'friends' in school, and a few others). The way I see it (and some neuroscientists claim), the brain shuts the perception of "self" in order to stop intense emotional pain.

pyentropy··on Anime.js – A lightweight JavaScript animation library
He's not using the timer to do per-frame calculations - the GPU does the interpolation using the `transition` property. He's just using the timer for setting the target state.
pyentropy··on So this guy is now S3. All of S3
Further context: Bluesky lets you use a domain name you own as a user handle.

The official method is to set a TXT record, but apparently their "AT protocol" also lets you confirm a domain by serving `GET your.domainname.com/xrpc/com.atproto.identity.resolveHandle`

and `xrpc` was available as an S3 bucket name :)

pyentropy··on Transcendental Algebra (2017)
Although it's an interesting puzzle I think it's messed up to take this too seriously.
pyentropy··on We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible
He should've put "browser engine" in the title which is the impressive part - there are far too many Chromium wrappers around ;)

And this is much more than that: custom JS interpreter, SVG, CSS renderers and so on...

pyentropy··on OpenAI Tokenizer
A character is the base unit of written communication. Single characters as tokens is not a bad idea, it just requires too much resources to make it learn and infer.

BPE is a tradeoff between single letters (computationally hard) and a word dictionary (can't handle novel words, languages or complex structures like code syntax). Note that tokens must be hardcoded because the neural network has an output layer consisting of neurons one-to-one mapped to the tokens (and the predicted word is the most activated neuron).

Human brains roughly do the same thing - that's why we have syllables as a tradeoff between letters and words.

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