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smokelon Doomscrolling Ourselves to Death

For all we know social media will emerge across another 6,000 year timeframe. I think we're going in circles :)

smokelon Doomscrolling Ourselves to Death

My point is exactly that comparing some variation within 20 years with to a 1000 year period makes little sense. Sure, our collective literacy might be decreasing now, but perhaps it was a bit too high to begin with? Leaders of a country are not the majority. The article makes quite a few of these categorical mistakes.

AI also allows for a lot more learning. Using ChatGPT to read and better understand Moby Dick works wonders for me.

smokelon Doomscrolling ourselves to death

While I agree with your sentiment, I doubt that we can really judge that properly without some objective distance in time. The invention of the printing press, canals, gunpowder, sailing, may have changed lives quite a bit. Consider also the people who were "discovered" by the Europeans [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

smokelon Doomscrolling ourselves to death

There are more people now, and all else being equal, there would likely be more stupid people as well, in absolute numbers. That might give someone the impression that things are going downhill.

Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?

smokelon Doomscrolling ourselves to death

Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound.

Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had larger attention spans. There are still stupid people now.

smokelon The Real Luxuries In Life

Time seems to be one of the most valuable luxuries. AFAIK it is not entirely clear why time seems to pass faster when one grows older. One argument is that the older brain does not form memories as intricate as in the younger brain.

Has anyone experimented with actively making more complex memories to make time pass slower? Seems like the best approach to living longer, at least in experience.

smokelon Can AI design circuit boards yet?

> It had never “seen” a go board, or had one explained

I assume that you are referring to AlphaGo or AlphaZero. In either case, this statement is not correct. Both algorithms most certainly know exactly what a go board looks like, and what the rules are.

In the case of AlphaZero, it initially did not know how to best play the game, or what strategy or tactics would work. But the connections between the neural network and the go board are hardcoded, by humans.

smokelon GPT-6 Astra

"Somebody is wrong on the internet" will get you more, and more reliable, results on what people actually want from AI. You are now participating in a very high-value survey.

smokelon GPT-6 Astra

There's a branch of mathematics called "pointless topology" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointless_topology

smokelon AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

In this case, the argument is valid though. Only recently have some of the models become powerful enough (for some) to actually be useful in day to day programming, without too much hand-holding. For most, this change occurred with the introduction of Claude Opus, and OpenAI and Google have caught up. Unfortunately, none of the "open" models is at this level yet.

The field is moving fast, and asking for scientific arguments is not realistic. It takes an extreme amount of effort to show what exactly is different.

We were in a similar position with static vs dynamic typing for decades. There is still no scientific proof that one is better than the other, but it is quite obvious to professionals which flavor works better in a given situation.

So, even though the argument might be sloppy, I subscribe to it. Using DeepSeek to dismiss better models is the bad argument here.

Edit: added "(for some)" as a disclaimer that you still need to be a fairly decent programmer to actually benefit.

smokelon Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

Would it make sense to guess that humans have something analogous to the latent representations or embeddings found in LLMs or VLMS, with different neural circuitry to experience them?

Some of us may lack the physical systems to experience memories visually. Perhaps for some it's trainable, suggesting the varying levels of vividness, but perhaps some just simply don't have the capacity at all.

I don't buy that over 10%+ of HN has proper aphantasia, though. I wouldn't trust my own mind at self-reporting anything.

smokelon Show HN: How much of Hacker News is AI?

An estimated 2,000 articles per month at 2,000 words per article would result in 4,000,000 words, which costs either $200 or $2000 to process at Pangram [1]. It might make life a lot more enjoyable for many users here, though.

[1] https://www.pangram.com/pricing?category=developers

smokelon HelloAssembly: The smallest possible complete Windows application (2021)

Somewhat more meaningful was "INT 19h" (CD 19), which also took 2 bytes and started the boot loader, bypassing the slow boot sequence of most systems.

And wouldn't a single instruction such as NOP or HLT be simply 1 byte?

smokelon Training AI to Paint with Code

Interesting, tell me more!

smokelon I don't enjoy the Internet any more

A ⊆ X ∧ p ∈ X ⇏ p ∈ A

smokelon AI Isn't Outthinking Mathematicians. It's Out-Remembering Them

Mathematics is typically concerned with "proofs" [1], which similarly to code, often allow for strict validation. Thanks to reinforcement learning techniques, it is now possible to train LLMs to perform very well on code generation, and mathematical proof generation.

Law and medicine are fundamentally harder fields to obtain decent training data for, and LLM results are therefore expected to be less powerful. Also, making mistakes in these fields is costly, but perhaps you were alluding to that already.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_proof

smokelon AI by Hand

https://github.com/karpathy/llm.c

However, I wonder about the use of this. Typically, you'd want to use a GPU for inference, and programming those in C is quite a challenge. The educational value of learning LLMs in C/C++ seems a lot lower than in Python. May I ask why you're interested in this specifically?

Also, why ask this here, and not simply use Google or an LLM to find the information? It comes off as a bit lazy, especially given that you provide no extra context.

smokelon I built a 500k-domain search engine for makers in a weekend for $10

I typically interpret it as an excuse, not a selling point.

smokelon John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

> Its new plans called for traveling through the galaxy looking for entities like itself.

Why not simply set up a network with other planets and communicate over FaceTime? I don't see a reason why Earth should actually hang out with others of its kind.

Anyway, the article seems a bit anthropocentric to me. I'd much prefer a nihilist view, where our future AI overlords simply don't care what we humans do.

smokelon AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon

The technical aspects of SOTA models are not publicly documented. How do you know if something is converging?

smokelon AI Mania: From Tulips to Tokens

This is a pretty confusing article. It seems to string together some loosely related facts to make the current AI boom look bad.

smokelon Software for One

Yes there is, at least to me. The reason being total freedom to tune the operating system, and not being limited to what someone imagined I would want to do in the future.

smokelon Diátaxis

Perhaps add "A systematic approach to technical documentation authoring" to the title?

smokelon Software for One

That would be the 1980s approach. I would be more interested in being able to read an email and then say something along the lines of:

  in context/mail:
    when today/evening:
      if content excites me:
        send alert

This should be available directly by pressing some code button, and there should be some kind of user interface that makes it trivial to enter these commands.

smokelon Software for One

It's somewhat unfortunate that programming is still pretty hard to start with.

Early home computers would boot up with BASIC. Granted, the user experience was horrible, but at least you could start programming right away.

What is stopping us from creating an operating system that has programming as a first class citizen?

There is JavaScript in the browser, but that still feels as an afterthought, and incurs all kinds of security problems.

Why must we wait for AI to work around this? Is it really true that only very few people are interested in programming? Why not teach it in primary school, along with reading and writing?

smokelon Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

I think that credit might go to IBM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon

smokelon Book Corners: Community map of neighborhood book exchange spots

> If you want a good one you'd have to set up your own and aggressively curate it

Expect a community library with only books on homotopy type theory and quantum computing soon!

smokelon Book Corners: Community map of neighborhood book exchange spots

Most of the books in these community libraries are really crappy. I would assume that people:

a. Toss out books at home they don't like and bring them to these libraries

b. Take interesting books from the libraries, and leave the bad ones

Any ideas on how to improve that?

smokelon Flux 3

In the 1990s "Object-Oriented Ontology" was introduced by Graham Harman [1]. The name was borrowed from computing, but its meaning has little or nothing to do with Simula or Smalltalk.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Harman

smokelon Flux 3

> Frivolous use of the term World Model

The term "world model" as it was once used in model-based RL can now apparently refer to anything as silly as linear regression. Then again, the RL folks probably borrowed the term from behavioral scientists before them. It's probably best to simply accept this :/

A similar thing happened to "object oriented" which has been misused by philosophers and visual artists alike.