Hacker News: kidel001

New comment by kidel001 in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

kidel001 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:15:57 +0000

At first this was my take as well. That plus, well, maybe they are just on a serious PR kick with maths. But I am starting wonder if they have determined, or strongly suspect, that the road to exponential model improvement must first be paved with extraordinary improvements in math. Like in some sense this seems like a test case for where their true intensions might go: vast improvements in the efficiency / size / speed of models and their training. Hard to imagine trusting the models in all those spaces without first trusting them / training them to address new or unsolved math.

New comment by kidel001 in "I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad"

kidel001 — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 19:50:52 +0000

I too maintain an older thinkpad! i want to say T430 so probably not as old, maybe got in 2012 or so? In any case, I have replaced: the screen, the battery, the power button (3D printed), the hard drive, the RAM, and the entire internal fan /cooling structure, and probably some more things I've forgotten. Why? Well it's all been over the years. But 1) because you can! like this post describes. Also: it's been nice to have a windows system around that I can remote into for certain tasks that are difficult or impossible on linux, like using the adobe suite. The last time something broke (the fan) I looked up how much a used T430 costs on ebay (~$40-$50) and buying a new fan was still cheaper. So I fixed it. It's been like that every time and it's still here.

New comment by kidel001 in "Detecting edges of images at the speed of light"

kidel001 — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 16:14:51 +0000

To add onto this... some amount of what they are calling edge detection here seems to overlap with what has already been implemented in microscopy using phase contrast... which has been around since 1932.

New comment by kidel001 in "Detecting edges of images at the speed of light"

kidel001 — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 16:11:57 +0000

Technically... they are outlining edges at the speed of light. Detection is a separate process entirely.

New comment by kidel001 in "Bird-inspired drone uses legs to walk and jump into the air"

kidel001 — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 16:31:03 +0000

Ah yes, the bird-inspired ... nose propeller.

New comment by kidel001 in "The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?"

kidel001 — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 16:08:40 +0000

These types of articles are so fundamentally flawed... it beggars belief. Why not ask the opposite question: if bandwidth works the way they describe, why can't H100 GPUs (3TB/s bandwidth) perform sensorimotor tasks 24 trillion times faster than a human? (Spoiler alert: they can not).

~~Could it be... there is a bit of a straw man argument here? About how much information it actually takes to input and output a complete sensorimotor task? I dare say!~~

New comment by kidel001 in "Moving to a World Beyond "p < 0.05" (2019)"

kidel001 — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 19:25:04 +0000

bioinformatician here. nobody has intuition or domain knowledge on all ~20,000 protein coding genes in the human body. That's just not a thing. Routinely comparing what a treatment does we do actually get 20,000 p-values. Feed that into FDR correction, filter for p < 0.01. Now I have maybe 200 genes.Then we can start applying domain knowledge. If you start trying to apply domain knowledge at the beginning, you're actually going to artificially constrict what is biologically possible. Your domain knowledge might say well there's no reason an olfactory gene should be involved in cancer, so I will exclude these (etc etc). You would be instantly wrong. People discovered that macrophages (which play a large role in cancer) can express olfactory receptors. So when I had olfactory receptors coming up in a recent analysis... the p values were onto something and I had to expand my domain knowledge to understand. This is very common. I ask for validation of targets in tissue --> then you see proof borne out that the p-value thresholding business WORKS.

New comment by kidel001 in "Moving to a World Beyond "p < 0.05" (2019)"

kidel001 — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 14:48:51 +0000

People need tools to filter results. Using a somewhat arbitrary cutoff for what to work with is actually fine because people need to make decisions. Further, papers that report false positives do not tend to lead to huge branches of successful science because over time the findings do not replicate.
But I am curious about something else. I am not a statistical mechanics person, but my understanding of information theory is that something actually refined emerges with a threshold (assuming it operates on SOME real signal) and the energy required to provide that threshold is important to allow "lower entropy" systems to emerge. Isn't this the whole principle behind Maxwell's Demon? That if you could open a little door between two equal temperature gas canisters you could perfectly separate the faster and slower gas molecules and paradoxically increase the temperature difference? But to only open the door for fast molecules (thresholding them) the little door would require energy (so it is no free lunch)? And that effectively acts as a threshold on the continuous distributions? I guess what I am asking is that isn't there a fundamental importance to thresholds in generating information? Isn't that how neurons work? Isn't that how AI models work?