Hacker News: baanist

New comment by baanist in "DeepSeek: Advancing theorem proving in LLMs through large-scale synthetic data"

baanist — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 21:34:22 +0000

I doubt you are going to change anyone's mind on this who is already convinced that computers can think and reason and all that's required is the right sequence of numbers. Moreover, the internet is awash with bots and AIs working on behalf of governments to spread political and economic propaganda. HN has moderation to avoid it but the moderators are human so they can't foil all attempts and notice all AIs and bots.

How Net Zero Killed 1.5C [video]

baanist — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:16:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52TWH2bSQ0A

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41804898

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

There Is No Energy Transition – Interview with Mark Mills [video]

baanist — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 01:11:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXkEgF1I2FA

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41794554

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by baanist in "BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy"

baanist — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 23:02:58 +0000

Most of what you've said is true but what exactly does it mean to "break barriers"? We can not escape the laws of chemistry, physics, and thermodynamics because we live on a compact manifold with finite resources which must be recycled eventually by the surrounding ecology. This is why plastics are now found in all newborns, the chemicals produced by our factories are recycled back into the ecology and our internal biomes.

BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

baanist — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 22:13:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/bp-drops-oil-output-target-strategy-reset-sources-say-2024-10-07/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41782332

Points: 77

# Comments: 86

New comment by baanist in "Show HN: Compiling C in the browser using WebAssembly"

baanist — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 22:19:42 +0000

Like most things in software the use cases are the limits of one's imagination. The browser has always been a Turing complete development environment so this is just another demonstration.

New comment by baanist in "Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?"

baanist — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 18:04:38 +0000

Type Theory and Formal Proof (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/type-theory-and-formal-...)

New comment by baanist in "Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction"

baanist — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 08:56:40 +0000

I think it has already started¹.

1: https://neurosciencenews.com/microplastics-brain-health-2779...

New comment by baanist in "The Worst Argument Against Ozempic"

baanist — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 21:36:01 +0000

It's easier to take drugs even if it costs a lot of money.

Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect

baanist — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 23:53:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-pinpoint-the-quantum-origin-of-the-greenhouse-effect-20240807/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41736335

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by baanist in "Were RNNs all we needed?"

baanist — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 21:51:25 +0000

Neural networks are Turing complete, i.e. there is a universal neural network that can compute any effectively computable function¹. Incidentally, when this is combined with Rice's theorem² it means that safety research is essentially an unsolvable problem because any non-trivial property of a sufficiently complex neural network, e.g. one that can simulate a Turing machine, will have properties which can not be predicted with finite computation.

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0893965991...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem?useskin=vecto...

New comment by baanist in "Were RNNs all we needed?"

baanist — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 21:45:32 +0000

I thought the whole point of neural networks was that they were good at searching through these spaces. I'm pretty sure OpenAI is pruning their models behind the scenes to reduce their costs because that's the only way they can keep reducing the cost per token. So their secret sauce at this point is whatever pruning AI they're using to whittle the large computation graphs into more cost efficient consumer products.

New comment by baanist in "Were RNNs all we needed?"

baanist — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 19:06:11 +0000

Why aren't AI researchers automating the search for efficient architectures?

New comment by baanist in "An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped"

baanist — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 02:17:30 +0000

No need to get angry and sarcastic.

New comment by baanist in "An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped"

baanist — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:31:58 +0000

Are all fruit fry brains the same? Does anyone know what has actually been mapped and why it would generalize from one fruit fly to the next?

New comment by baanist in "Sorry, GenAI is NOT going to 10x computer programming"

baanist — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 23:28:07 +0000

He was right that scaling would not achieve abstract reasoning and he's been right so far on basically every new hyped development. The closed research labs like OpenAI are hoping to reduce all the gaps in their models by constantly patching out of distribution data sets but this clearly can not achieve any sort of general intelligence unless they somehow manage to obsolete themselves and the entire company by automating the out of distribution patching itself which they now perform by burning lots of cash and energy.

There are people who need to write a lot of emails so for those people I'm sure OpenAI will continue to deliver some kind of value but everyone else will still have to continue thinking for themselves regardless of what Sam Altman keeps promising.

New comment by baanist in "Sorry, GenAI is NOT going to 10x computer programming"

baanist — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:42:53 +0000

These algorithms are not capable of symbolic reasoning and abstract interpretation. The most obvious demonstration of this is that no algorithm on the market currently can solve sudoku puzzles even though they have spent billions of dollars "training" them on logic and reasoning.

New comment by baanist in "Sorry, GenAI is NOT going to 10x computer programming"

baanist — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:32:19 +0000

I don't have any subscriptions to the latest models but what improvements have you noticed in scaling and language understanding? Last I checked people were still discussing "9.9 > 9.1" and "How many 'r's are in 'strawberry'".

New comment by baanist in "Sorry, GenAI is NOT going to 10x computer programming"

baanist — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 18:32:00 +0000

What is he wrong about?

New comment by baanist in "Sorry, GenAI is NOT going to 10x computer programming"

baanist — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 18:31:14 +0000

I think he does a pretty good job of it. I know who he is and I read what he has to say on all the latest hype trends in AI.