Hacker News: ohum

New comment by ohum in "Cerebras Systems unveils a 1.2T transistor chip for AI"

ohum — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 03:39:50 +0000

A computing machine (not taking environmental factors like cosmic rays into account (though, why not?)) is deterministic, unless it interfaces with a truly random source of entropy. My physicist friend has said, there may be no randomness, only complexity.

Is all deterministic or do conscious entities have free will, or...?

The decisions made by your philosophical zombie will either be predetermined by the programming, or seeded by randomness. The decisions made by such a machine cannot be proved to be functionally equivalent to the decisions made by a conscious entity, and belief in such is a matter of faith.

Belief in randomness itself is a matter of faith. It’s impossible to prove that any event or measurement is truly random, and yes, there may be hidden variables- there’s no way to test.

There is no rational reason to believe that conscious behavior, consciousness, feelings, and all the activity of the mind, are functionally equivalent to a program and/or randomness.

Sounds like you are believer in the religion of materialism.

New comment by ohum in "Cerebras Systems unveils a 1.2T transistor chip for AI"

ohum — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 23:01:30 +0000

Please don’t take this as a personal attack. Your comment and certainty sound like religious fanaticism. The belief that consciousness is merely computation is unproven, and a matter of faith. It always seems a little short sighted when people claim to know something about consciousness and the mind based on a belief that the brain amounts to a biological computer. As an example of an alternative possibility to brain as a biological computer: in a holographic universe the brain itself is an emergent system. Or, Buddhists say that the material world as we perceive it is interdependent with mind, which is more fundamental than form. Some interesting phenomena that present problems with mind as programming running on a biological computer are the placebo/*cebo effects and Wim Hof :). Mind over matter, man.

New comment by ohum in "The Washington Post is preparing for post-cookie ad targeting"

ohum — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 22:59:28 +0000

Perhaps the advertisements you see after a purchase are intentionally delivered. Maybe testing has found a consumer is more likely to value and keep (vs return) a purchase, or recommend it to their friends, when related ads continue to be served for $time.

New comment by ohum in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2019)"

ohum — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 22:33:53 +0000

  Location: New York
  Remote: Preferred
  Willing to relocate: Possibly
  Technologies: SequenceL (massively multi-threaded C++), J, python, unix tools & shell scripting, BSD/Linux, bhyve & libvirt/qemu, kernel hacking
  Résumé/CV: available on request
  Email: admin@utsc.io

I have been coding professionally for almost 20 years. Most recently I have worked in HPC using the now disappeared language SequenceL, which is compiled to multi-threaded C++ or OpenCL. I have comprehensive knowledge of UNIX type systems, and have been involved peripherally with DragonflyBSD. As a new father I am looking for remote work, but would consider a commute into NYC and possibly even relocation within North America. I have dual citizenship, USA/Canada. I am not interested in working in fintech or on any cryptocurrency related projects. My preference is science over commerce.

New comment by ohum in "Google Cloud Networking Incident Postmortem"

ohum — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 17:24:40 +0000

At some point the system realized people are prone to failure. It then started deploying itself redundantly without dependence on people. This helped, but the people interfered. To fix this the system started building self replicating physical instances, creating new dependencies on material that resulted in grey goo (or paper clips).

New comment by ohum in "Huawei’s Ace in the Hole: Undersea Cables"

ohum — Tue, 28 May 2019 21:58:35 +0000

https://outline.com/R7vGvk is an outline version of the very good (from 1996...) Wired article, "Mother Board Mother Earth" https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

New comment by ohum in "Astronomers unravel a blast that sent ripples in space-time"

ohum — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 18:16:32 +0000

Is there an answer to that question? And, why is the distribution of matter not random? Maybe some sort of gravitational grouping? (eg earth's iron core, centrifugal enrichment of uranium). Or affinity for some orientation relative to field states, magnetism/diamagnetism etc.?

Like attracts?

New comment by ohum in "Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas"

ohum — Sun, 31 Mar 2019 04:33:05 +0000

If Mark Zuckerberg had the best interest of other people, like, all of humanity and the world writ large, in mind, I think it would probably be apparent.

Rather, it actually appears as though he is being intentionally deceitful.

Perhaps his rationale is based on some measured or calculated outcome, maybe he actually thinks he's doing some good in the world. Hopefully his intention is positive!

Or, maybe he is beholden to investors.

He seems to be a fool with power, not someone with anything meaningful to say.

Is he a classic case of the old adage: "absolute power corrupts absolutely"?

Platform! Graph! Stream!, and, abuse people for profit!!

Are Facebook/Insta/Wechat/etc. good for the long term prosperity of humanity? I would argue that the answer is a hard "no", and I think there's ample evidence.

If he were a noble person, he'd shut his harmful systems down.

Shame on Mark Zuckerberg. History will not remember him kindly.

New comment by ohum in "Reflections on the State of AI: 2018"

ohum — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 14:49:56 +0000

environmentally responsive guided objects, ERGO

It's always possible to imagine bad and worse scenarios. Fear is always available, and can be applied to any situation. Believing that technology is the tool of an "evil" system, or that it facilitates "evil" is not healthy for the believer or anyone else.

Naturally, we are all aware of the power of tools and especially modern "smart" systems. How can we trust anything? We can imagine how things could be as bad as we can imagine! I've decided, even at the risk of being naive, that I must not fear the machine, fear the network, fear anything. We living beings all basically want the same outcome- happiness. Having convenient tools help us actualize that outcome is a good thing. Just because we can imagine some deep dark conspiracy of "evil", behind the scenes, deceiving and manipulating us, doesn't mean that there is any such thing. Nor, of course, that there isn't. Since we can't know, let's just enjoy all of our cool gadgets while being happy...

Although, I'm also beginning to feel as though the best decision will be exiting the information super-highway :)

If y'all haven't read it, The Joy Makers is a pretty fun sci-fi exploration of technological routes to happiness, and possible downsides to "plugging in".

New comment by ohum in "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics"

ohum — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 08:20:21 +0000

There are defined ways of simplifying mathematics, computationally, such as via the CSP-NT computational laws

New comment by ohum in "Ask HN: How to find employment when your proprietary speciality has disappeared?"

ohum — Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:45:59 +0000

SequenceL is translated to C++ (or others). It's especially well-tailored, still, to time-critical and performance optimal multi-core systems. For HPC, no better alternative atm imho

Ask HN: How to find employment when your proprietary speciality has disappeared?

ohum — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 21:32:46 +0000

I am proficient in the proprietary SequenceL language.

"SequenceL is a concise, high-level language with a simple semantics that provides for the automatic derivation of many iterative and parallel control structures"

I can re-code your existing algos and make them fast.

I'm available for hire, NYC or remote only.

My preference is science and not for profit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18685014

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by ohum in "Show HN: PageFish search algorithm"

ohum — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 17:55:29 +0000

It could be made into a real meta search engine, and you could have layers of searchers, a network of searchers, with a common memory space, and parallelize the whole thing in sequencel, throw it on a vps with a few hundred/thousand cores, index the entire ipv4... You would probably need to use a big cloud

Ask HN: What Happened to SequenceL (Texas Multicore Technologies)?

ohum — Sat, 28 Apr 2018 00:37:37 +0000

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945496

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ohum in "Science’s Pirate Queen"

ohum — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 08:14:50 +0000

Sci-hub, and the availability of research, have been and is, something to be grateful for.

It seems like fear is the motivating function for restriction of knowledge, and that is understandable.

"Science's...Queen"