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rprenger

136 karma · joined December 18, 2014

Senior Deep Learning Researcher at Nvidia.
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rprenger··on OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid
Didn't Matt Levine tell a story about Masayoshi Son doing that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427688
rprenger··on Avoiding Trigonometry (2013)
Also, while we're getting rid of angles, can we please get rid of cross products and just use geometric algebra tools?
rprenger··on Show HN: Lights Out: my 2D Rubik's Cube-like Game
And you can do that at any board state, so if it starts with like 16 white squares you can make one or two greedy moves to minimize white squares, then do your memorize trick.
rprenger··on Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D
I felt a similar way when I moved from Chuck Yeager's Air Combat to (I think) F15 Strike Eagle 3. Yeager was the perfect mix for me. I remember rarely even seeing the enemy planes I was firing at in newer games.
rprenger··on A recent chess controversy
I think if Kramnik accuses someone of cheating it might actually drop the posterior probability that they cheated.
rprenger··on Our narrative prison
One thing about horror movies is that even though they usually pretty much follow a three act structure they at least usually have to have a prologue to set the mood before the "regular life" part. But recent ones I've noticed that don't follow the structure closely are

"Skinamarink" and "I Saw the TV Glow"

rprenger··on Go east from Seattle
Yeah as soon as I saw the "answer" I was like "yeah sure blah blah blah, you can make a trick question, but what IS the country that you'll actually hit if you walk East from Seattle". I was guessing England, but the right answer is France.
rprenger··on Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
This is pretty close to how AlphaZero works.

https://medium.com/applied-data-science/alphago-zero-explain...

rprenger··on Sorry you feel that way: why passive aggression took over the world
I think it's like:

Passive: Uh, your code looks great! Aggressive: Your code is garbage! Assertive: Your code is broken. Passive-Aggressive: It's great that you think your garbage code is great!

rprenger··on Lean4 helped Terence Tao discover a small bug in his recent paper
You can have both! LeanDojo: Theorem Proving with Retrieval-Augmented Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15626 (shameless plug)
rprenger··on DreamCraft3D: Hierarchical 3D Generation with Bootstrapped Diffusion Prior
I believe Zero123++ gives you the ability to generate consistent images from multiple camera views, where as DreamCraft3D seems to output 3D models with geometry and textures if I'm understanding it right. Like I could take the output of DreamCraft3D (if I had the code) and drop the result into Blender for example.
rprenger··on Web components will outlive JavaScript frameworks
I kind of hoped the long term result of htmx, instead of just being a Javascript library, was to become a standard in a newer version of HTML itself. The constraints of only forms being able to do POSTs, and the only way to handle the response is to rewrite the entire page seems arbitrarily limiting. If htmx were just HTML6 or whatever, it'd outlive all the Javascript frameworks.
rprenger··on AI will save the world?
The printing press.
rprenger··on Against longtermism (2021)
I think the "weight" here is weight as in mass and "convolutions" here is as in folds. The size/weight and folds of Einstein's brain have been the subject of studies, and the quote was from 1980.
rprenger··on Quantum physics falls apart without imaginary numbers
This Scott Aaronson lecture I really liked is relevant. It's like a "why quantum mechanics probably had to do the weird probability amplitudes (which can be negative and complex) instead of just normal probabilities even without experimental results" lecture: https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html
rprenger··on Real-Time Brain-to-Image Reconstructions
I generally agree with the assessment that the limiting factor in quality is the signal from the MRI. Just one slight correction to the description of previous projects. We first built models that predict the voxel responses from images using ML. Then recorded the fMRI response on a new image. Then we ran many many images (not just those previously seen that have an fMRI response) through the voxel models and picked the top N images with predicted responses close to the actual response. Basically we used the big list of images as an approximate "natural image prior". Then we'd often show the average of that top N images so you get one picture (which destroys interesting multi-model stuff, but we didn't have good stable diffusion models of images back then that could do a gradient search on or something).

If you wanna see what the reconstructions look like without fancy image priors (to get a better idea of how little signal there is) check out this figure from one of the early papers: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19778517/#&gid=article-figur...

rprenger··on The fraudulent claims made by IBM about Watson and AI (2021)
We put this in our ASR based keyboard app back in 2016. Basically kept the ASR decoders beam search candidates around and could use their differences and relative scores to suggest replacements. I would've assumed newer keyboard apps would have a similar option, but I haven't checked: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/03/baidus-new-talktype-keyboa...
rprenger··on Every day, I commit a new and more complicated version of some simple code
It should output the result of a GPT-stlye transformer fine-tuned on data set of 1,000,000 instances of "Hello World"
rprenger··on LaMDA is not sentient
Dr. Sbaitso! https://oneweakness.com/dr-sbaitso-online
rprenger··on Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words
I don't think a larger vocab would help. All the individual letters are in the ~50k token vocab already, but the word "alphabet" will still not get tokenized to [a, l, p, h, a, b, e, t]. Using a larger vocab like PaLM's 256k vocab would have the same issue.
rprenger··on Speedsolving Rubik's Cube: 8355 Method
Here's the resource I've used that I've liked best. It's more the math, but thinking this way helped me with other puzzles: https://math.berkeley.edu/~hutching/rubik.pdf
rprenger··on Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
Is this a high enough price to be considered a "Bear Hug"? I immediately thought of this scene from Succession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4QHqjel4kI
rprenger··on Alexandria Search
For my first search of "GFlowNetworks" (which the search bar suggested) It said: Found 5,887 (or something) results, but showed no results

For my second I searched my name and got a Wikipedia article about a show I've never heard of which didn't have my name anywhere in it.

For my third I searched "GFlowNetworks" again and it said Found 2,656,844 results in 1.61s, but showed no results again

rprenger··on Disney Filmmaking Process
That's an interesting pattern, that seems pretty clear now that you mention it. I would also argue that Ralph Breaks the Internet falls squarely into the "self/internal conflict" class too, as the main antagonist is literally Ralph's own insecurity.
rprenger··on PDEs you should know
I think what the other commenters are getting at is that PDEs can be used without having a closed form solution (and mostly are used that way as closed form solutions usually only come up in special artificial cases). You start your system in a real known state and then propagate it forward in time using (for example) the finite difference method on the equations to figure out the state at a later time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_methods_for_partial_...
rprenger··on The UX on this small child is terrible
Has anyone figured out how to enable "stay sitting on chair during meal"? StackOverflow has totally failed me here.
rprenger··on Five things we still don’t know about water
Do you mean tritiated water?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water

rprenger··on Spring tears down math t-shirt listing because it dared to mention 'zeta'
This got me thinking. If they did bump it up from $1m to $100m, do we think the Riemann Hypothesis would be solved sooner?
rprenger··on The Greatest Regex Trick Ever (2014)
Me too. I had to look it up. This page has pretty good breakdown:

https://itnext.io/a-wild-way-to-check-if-a-number-is-prime-u...

The main trick for me was you first have to convert the number to unary, which was done outside of the regex.

rprenger··on No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding
Yeah, figure 4 is more clear. This is the early stopped loss though, so the regularization is more explicit. If you trained the large models to completion on small data sets they would do much worse on test error due to overfitting.

It is interesting that larger models with regularization (early stopping) seems to work better than than training smaller models to convergence though.

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