teekert

Unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated "models" :)

Is a fact stored on your brain like digits on a harddrive? No, it's a pathway that lights up and branches when information enters it. It is dynamic, a compressed form you could say, right? The model holds information, but not all information, but enough to be useful (in decision making).

Arguably it's the same, but the model is probably a "compressed" version of the whole fact that took place in reality.

And you can entertain the models internally and sharpen them. Alone or with others.

Yeah we do that too, does take a bit of the fun out of that moment where you sit down with your family and show them your trip, they already say it all haha. I'm really old right?

Was recently in Borneo, picked up a magazine in an accommodation, read an article about how traveling nowadays needs to be documented and is about experience as much as your feeds... I... felt old.

I think that in some cultures it's even more than others, for example I often saw hordes of Chinese tourists (but there are of course simply a lot of Chinese people) take turns in front of a waterfall (on flip flop or even heels), have some pics taken and go back to the bus.

I also visited food-markets and saw food stalls with large lines of people, where as some had hardly any people waiting, I ask: Why this stall? "It's popular on Chinese social media"... One by one they snapped a pic as the cook made their meal, and waited for >30 mins to do so.

People ask me when I travel (with family usually): Where is your Polarsteps? My what now? (Yeah yeah I know what it is I just pretend I don't.)

Amazing.

Edit: Also amazes me that many people told me: "Wow 5 weeks in Malaysia, you could have done Thailand, Vietnam, etc, etc as well!" Well yeah but I like to take some days to explore and not rush and get to know a nice restaurant and eat there again and rent a scooter or bike and drive around a bit. And sleep 2 nights in some small village that doesn't have a large temple or something and eat a great meal there for 2 euros, made by people that are very proud that you as a tourist sat down at their place and don't accept any tip. Moreover, there is a boatload of cool stuff in every country, to me this country hopping just adds travel time, not much more. Next time we'll visit another country, and if not, I still rather experience one country more deeply.

Another edit: Also an amazing thing, the amount of couples where the guy is holding a phone, making of a video of the girl while she dreamily walks through the sea waving her arms slowly, just looking around. Like a perfume commercial (what's up with those anyway?!), or like Hillary Clinton when the balloons fell. A-ma-zing, what a species we are.

I guess they mean that intelligence is being able to hold models (compressed versions of reality) internally and use them to make predictions with a probability better than chance. That last part is the definition of information.

Ah, I used to say that US debt in dollars is about the same as the amount of cells we have in our bodies. But "they" really took a big leap these past years!

Because you can be smart about 1 thing, but have all the wrong assumptions in life. I.e. just must deeply believe that it is your right to seek hapiness, not that you must adhere to what people generally believe is the optimal way to exist in your culture.

Such realizations require experience, wisdom, contemplation. Not whatever leads to a high IQ.

Well, as a user of LLMs I also find it annoying, the agents gather information on my behalf, they save me time and money. Are we splitting humanity? Those with info accessible to agents and those who only use their human sense directly?

This whole distinction is futile imho. And no, I'm not Sam Altman.

I mean training is one thing, you should honor people's licenses, but browsing and gathering information? Why force me to do it with my biological neural net?

My agents act on my behalf, if you make it difficult for them I (or they) will get their info elsewhere. Will this split the internet? How long is this feasible? How long until any agent can work around any barrier, just at the expense of more energy?

This is the (John Perkin's coined term) "Corporatocracy" at work.

If you want to know how and why it is like this, read Perkin's books (atm I'm reading "The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"). It's why Meta will not get sued but Aaron was, and it is why ships are now lining up in front of the Panama canal paying as much as 400k for a crossing with little of that wealth making it to the people of Panama.

American industries that is. (I’m currently reading the new Economic Hitman.)

I did always love biology, not because of my teachers, but because of my own wonder of it ("I sort of get how an engine works, but how do humans work?"). And I became a biologist, and thinking about the things this author describes indeed still blows my mind. I get the high level of a lot of things now, but every time I need to do a deep dive, I feel like "how the hell can this even work". But it works, and it works incredibly well. I still think it's the nicest field to be in (even though I love computers and Linux and FOSS as well).

"I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good!

But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened. I understand why it’s tempting to force a machine do the hard part for you, but it can’t, and the hard part is the only part worth doing anyway. Making something thick—that’s a lot of pressure! But remember: you were built to perform under pressure, and that’s just what you’ll do."

This is so true. I should re-read this weekly and not feel like some ultra-philosopher trapped by his own laziness... I can just... not feel guilty, the ideas are not that good... yet.

We need something other than Android, and we need the government to make sure we can run Android apps (like government ID and banking apps) without being spied on. They've been doing whatever the f they like for long enough if you ask me.

Hmm, I also only see a skull

... In fact, because te landscape is so dynamic and can sometimes change within 1 to a few generations, having a brain as the primary store for behavior/customs/models/information is super advantageous compared to using DNA, as the brain is a flexible neural network and can adapt much, much quicker. No doubt this is why we are successful (ie, a dung beetle will die trying to push a stuck piece of dung, because the behavior is hard-coded and it cannot model the world and model solutions to encountered problems, and it therefore cannot pas solutions on to future generations, as we can. Perhaps a dung beetle will someday mutate to alter it's behavior when stuck, but you can see how suboptimal the whole process.)

Another example: [0]

Have to say this never would have occurred to me. There are also examples of US people being offended by scenes considered harmless in other cultures, ie the Totoro bathtub scene [1], search for "family bathing scene".

I guess if this hologram offended people, there must be some nice stories about Nirvana's Nevermind (1991).

[0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...

[1] https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/my-neighbour-totoro-10-things-di...

For me the 24h is buried... But then I can't change the default mm-dd to my country's default dd-mm, which just keeps throwing me off.

Even worse, my Casio can't even change the default mm-dd to my country's default dd-mm, keeps throwing me off.

I used to walk around with a Casio always, I would have welcomed this connectivity, but now I have a Pebble and I like the balance. Could have done without the HR monitor, and with GPS though (some features don't work without phone connection, too many I find). Other than that, perfect for me.

At this point, without Git commit history (assuming it is a bare code dump), is it still even possible to guarantee it is what Google says it is?

Perhaps not no, please enlighten me, where is my lack of insight?

Edit, thanx for the addition. Perhaps my issues with looking at it as "local maxima in high dimensional spaces" (even though we think of minima usually, as in a marble will find the minimum in a landscape with gravity pointing down, sorry I'm a biologist) is that with every mutation and every change in environment the landscape changes (so basically with time), is it still a useful way to think about it like that, at that point? So it not a "landscape in a high dimensional space", but rather a "high dimensional dynamic surface", like a sea?

"I imagine it would be very rare because chance mutations in a single individual that confer extraordinary survival / mating advantage to offset entire population would be rare like being a superman among men."

-> This also depends on population size, if there is a bottleneck event (ie 99.99 percent of some species dying) then among the 100's of survivors perhaps there could be a superman. Either because this person got lucky, or the rest got unlucky. But in general the distribution of traits is quite continuous, given large populations.

It's also good to keep in mind that us biologists have messy definitions, ie we call specimen A and B the same species when they produce fertile offspring. Some species produce offspring but infertile (Horse-Donkey, Lion-Tiger). But what if A and B have fertile offspring and B and C do, but A and C do not? The whole definition of species falls apart (it leads to a paradox).

We have a lot of that in biology. You need to learn to deal with it (sunglasses dropping down), and assign uncertainties to terms you learn about, they are often just our attempts to name boxes on continuous, multidimensional scales.

Well, what is suboptimal... One would engineer it differently, it makes a weird, seemingly unnecessary, loop around some other tracts. However, being a biologist I can also imagine that if we'd reroute the thing in someone using surgery, that person suddenly gets more infections because bacteria find their way up the tract more easily (no idea, but could be!). The point is... It's a mess based on some earlier mess, but it works, and changing one part in this mess can lead to unpredictable results.

As for "discontinuous evolution"... Again, what is discontinuous? I'm sure there are events to be found of which the probability of them occurring is so small and the effects so large that they'd fall into someone's definition of "discontinuous". But I think there is by definition no such thing as discontinuous evolution. If it occurred, it had a non-0 probability of occurring, then again, maybe the universe is infinite and everything has a non-zero probability of occurring. This is getting philosophical haha. Maybe listen to some Mindscape podcasts (Sean Caroll).

Actually rabbits eat their excrement again. That's also probably not how an engineer would make it (or an intelligent designer would design it, since we seems to be going in that direction ;) ).

Yes, but we cannot evolve to have our urinary tracts take a more efficient route (or at least the probability is exceedingly low), even though there would be pressure to do so. (Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point)

I'm a biologist so forgive me the poor wording, but there are "infinitely high" peaks/walls in the evolutionary landscape, as in: "the human urinary system has some evolutionary constraints and anatomical features that are not optimally designed from an engineering perspective, but they are generally functional and reflect our evolutionary history rather than deliberate design." <- this is from AI, I didn't remember the details, but the ureters or urethra take a long way around the inner part of the body because at some point it was a good route, but as we evolved it became suboptimal, but we can't just evolve to untangle all the pipes in our body and do some cable management... We're stuck with what we have (no tunneling electrons ;)).

So in that sense, a global maxima (minima?) solving function will probably not arrive at what we have, it has to take into account our evolutionary path, in its entirety (as in the whole tree.), because it is all encoded in 1 (or several) long molecules, and a radical changes would take a rewrite of many parts at the same time, which just does not happen. Maybe at some point we can do it ourselves... though I imagine there being a lot of unintended consequences in other places in the body :).

Another example is that sometimes complexity in a cell signalling cascade is simply there to get some timing right (ie delay some response), and the complexity is just there, and won't simplify by itself -> But then later the complexity may start to serve some purpose. Just like proteins that are "copypasta-ed" in the genome, leaving one copy free to mutate and attain a function, or not... etc etc.

This always comes up, it will probably never happen, makes me sad as well.

I saved al my sons data from this Samsung S10 using their Dex thing after his screen broke. Was really nice.

FP6+ would have been a no brainer for me if it had such a feature (would need to work on /e/ though) for some light dev work. Still going to buy one though (just messed up my iPhone 12 mini cams and faceID with some of Malaysia's high humidity.)

I for one would have loved to be able to plug a screen into the phone for a somewhat better experience + peripherals. With the 12 GB RAM though I hope to be able to runs minimal VMs and then rustdesk/VNC into those for work on the phone? It's not the same though...

I don't need USB for speed, it's all via the network anyway, even pics and videos are in Immich by the time I've found my cable.

Not at running on sustainably produced, repairable hardware ;)

(Wish it was though.)

Apple should really be ashamed of itself. But alas, corporations don't have shame, Steve would have been ashamed though.