Hacker News: popcorncolonel

New comment by popcorncolonel in "New Nick Bostrom Paper: Optimal Timing for Superintelligence [pdf]"

popcorncolonel — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:31:30 +0000

Individual particle interactions are not chaotic. Simulating them one timestep at a time would take linear time in the number of particles.

They're only chaotic if you treat them in aggregate, which a superintelligence wouldn't do. It would be less lossy to get all the positions of the particles and figure out exactly what each one would do.

Something has to compute the universe, since it is currently running...

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Why GPT-3 Matters"

popcorncolonel — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 12:19:08 +0000

Not necessarily. There have been a number of papers trying to emphasize the generalization power of a network rather than "it got a SOTA number", and so leave off fine tuning results. Because that would distract from the point of the paper.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?"

popcorncolonel — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 11:40:02 +0000

Do you really think most smartphone users look at the URL anymore? Or even know what a URL is?

From the non-technical people I've talked to, the answer is no, they don't know what a URL is, and that was happening before AMP came around.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "U.S. arrests former Green Beret, son, in connection with Ghosn escape from Japan"

popcorncolonel — Wed, 20 May 2020 15:58:33 +0000

Ah our favorite third world countries, like China, Japan, and Israel.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Why does the Wuhan coronavirus genome end in 33 A’s?"

popcorncolonel — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 03:11:13 +0000

What's the point of this comment? Isn't this pretty much exactly what's in the answer linked?

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Mathematician Wins $3M Prize for 'Magic Wand Theorem'"

popcorncolonel — Sat, 07 Sep 2019 01:52:48 +0000

Great visualization, thanks!

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo"

popcorncolonel — Sun, 25 Nov 2018 20:02:07 +0000

This article comes at the perfect time for me, while I'm about to choose a tool to read Japanese sentences!

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Ask HN: What are you thankful for?"

popcorncolonel — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 21:52:59 +0000

That's great! It feels so good to be doing something you want to do.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Mathematician-M.D. claims to have solved the 110-year-old Lindelöf hypothesis"

popcorncolonel — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 03:05:07 +0000

Pretty much all of the relationship to practical stuff in papers like this related to the RH are "it gives us information about the prime numbers, and those are used in cryptography".

It's really just about getting people to perk their ears up rather than true implications about crypto.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "My account is sending spam emails"

popcorncolonel — Sun, 22 Apr 2018 16:40:27 +0000

I checked that and the only one that had email access was my Windows desktop. This led me to assume my PC had a virus, until I saw this thread.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "California should emulate Tokyo, where housing stayed ahead of population growth"

popcorncolonel — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 02:06:08 +0000

Hence the "pretty much". Clearly Japan has numerous numerous social issues, but other than that they're doing much better than we are over there.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "California should emulate Tokyo, where housing stayed ahead of population growth"

popcorncolonel — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:26:49 +0000

Everything in America should emulate Japan, pretty much.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Neural Network Quine"

popcorncolonel — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 22:45:55 +0000

So genetic programming, but for NN's? Hasn't that been done?

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Life Exists in the Driest Desert on Earth. It Could Exist on Mars, Too"

popcorncolonel — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 13:50:32 +0000

This is why whenever I see news like this, I get nervous.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "NVIDIA GeForce driver deployment in datacenters is forbidden now"

popcorncolonel — Mon, 25 Dec 2017 04:23:46 +0000

Quick question: Why? What does NVIDIA have to gain by forbidding people from using GeForce for ML in datacenters?

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Attention Is All You Need"

popcorncolonel — Sat, 16 Dec 2017 16:12:37 +0000

Agreed. Plus, its really annoying to open it on mobile and my phone starts downloading the pdf file immediately, which I don't want to have to manually delete in the future.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30?"

popcorncolonel — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 15:05:43 +0000

Wow, great comeback

New comment by popcorncolonel in "Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?"

popcorncolonel — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 06:09:20 +0000

Classic Microsoft. See the Windows Phone as well.

New comment by popcorncolonel in "How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)"

popcorncolonel — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 22:19:44 +0000

Can you elaborate? How do you know they're thinking abstractly?

New comment by popcorncolonel in "How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)"

popcorncolonel — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 22:18:37 +0000

A related idea that I had while reading the article is this: it's easy to get computers and machines to talk to each other both unnaturally (with our own protocols) and naturally (using a randomly initialized and then learned/iterated upon version - see https://blog.openai.com/learning-to-communicate/ or Facebook's recent experiment. It's also easy to imagine such a scenario).

But computers are nowhere near being able to have conscious thought. So what's the difference? Clearly it's not just natural language that differentiates the conscious from the unconscious.