Hacker News: pretendscholar

New comment by pretendscholar in "Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind"

pretendscholar — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 06:24:36 +0000

It’s funny though you can learn to visualize in chess through solving puzzles. I couldn’t do it at all at first but after awhile it clicked and I could just move pieces in my head.

New comment by pretendscholar in "AI is exhausting the power grid"

pretendscholar — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 11:25:59 +0000

Let me just spin up a nuclear powerplant on my laptop here

New comment by pretendscholar in "Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth"

pretendscholar — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 19:46:33 +0000

They should call it non-translating-to-protein-but-probably-has-some-function DNA

New comment by pretendscholar in "Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs"

pretendscholar — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 20:33:08 +0000

Okay yes so not really having an artists vocabulary I couldn't compress it as well as someone who has a better understanding of Starry Night. An artist that understands what makes Starry Night great could create a work that evokes similar feelings and emotions. I know this because Van Gogh created many similar works playing with the same techniques, colors, and subjects such as Cypresses in Starry Night and Starry Night over the Rhone. He was clearly working from a concise set of ideas and techniques which I would argue is understanding/compression.

New comment by pretendscholar in "Boeing Starliner launches first crewed mission"

pretendscholar — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 20:09:37 +0000

When we say life on earth we mean human life and civilization. Prokaryotes, while alive, are not really what people mean. Yes they would survive asteroids, nukes, possibly nanobot swarms.

New comment by pretendscholar in "Boeing Starliner launches first crewed mission"

pretendscholar — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 19:35:03 +0000

They are in 0g environments presumably having 1-6th isn't as bad and there might be ways to prevent/mitigate those issues.

New comment by pretendscholar in "Boeing Starliner launches first crewed mission"

pretendscholar — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 17:50:01 +0000

That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids. We can improve our understanding of ecology by trying to design such systems for lunar colony artificial biospheres.

I do agree that we should better manage our impact on the only system that we know works.

New comment by pretendscholar in "Boeing Starliner launches first crewed mission"

pretendscholar — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 17:43:47 +0000

Distributing human populations to ensure survival. With current tech the lunar colony couldn't be self-sustaining but the ideal is that humans would be able to propagate and sustain themselves outside of Earth so that a single event couldn't end human civilization. Also creating a jobs program that will produce the technology necessary for a lunar colony will improve materials science, medical understanding, logistics.

New comment by pretendscholar in "Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs"

pretendscholar — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 16:59:58 +0000

The best compression is some form of understanding

New comment by pretendscholar in "Shinzo Abe's Assassination"

pretendscholar — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 17:53:14 +0000

They don’t actually share an alphabet if the letters don’t correspond to the same sounds.

New comment by pretendscholar in "Shinzo Abe's Assassination"

pretendscholar — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 17:00:24 +0000

I should say a lot of this is internal as a form of social signaling about worldliness. Also not against loan words its just that you should adjust loan words and concepts to fit the phonetics and grammar of the language.

New comment by pretendscholar in "Shinzo Abe's Assassination"

pretendscholar — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 16:57:33 +0000

One of the most annoying things about speaking the dominant world language (obviously it is also great in many respects) is that there is some pressure to change your language rather than just adjusting the sounds and spelling to the pre-existing phonetics. Erdogan is pronounced closer to erdoyan and Türkiye insisting on the umlaut. Nguyen and Pho rather than wynn and pha. Gyro instead of hyro. Blonde vs blond (WHY would we just have adjective modification for that word and none other) and colonel. You have to know a lot about so many different culture when a language should be self contained. I don't tell the Chinese what name to use for my country (I think they call USA something like Beautiful Land) in their language or the Spanish or another group for any word.

New comment by pretendscholar in "John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI"

pretendscholar — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 16:16:10 +0000

What exactly are these first principles everyone keeps talking about? Kind of like how everyone keeps talking about updating Bayesian priors without ever actually using bayes rule.

New comment by pretendscholar in "Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings"

pretendscholar — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 03:25:56 +0000

Preferably not all at the same time

New comment by pretendscholar in "How Do You Learn and Retain Things in Middle Age?"

pretendscholar — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 21:39:33 +0000

sonsick?

New comment by pretendscholar in "ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words"

pretendscholar — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 02:27:57 +0000

As an amatuer I think Markov chains are explicitly a crude frequency association whereas what exactly a neural network is storing to predict the next token involves stored representations in neural weights which can be far more nuanced.

New comment by pretendscholar in "Open Flamingo – open framework to train multimodal LLMs"

pretendscholar — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 22:18:46 +0000

Furthermore the man on the scale is faced the other way and wouldn’t know someone is stepping on the scale. There’s an element of theory of mind there. You would have to understand that the man on the scale is unaware of Obama’s action.

New comment by pretendscholar in "Open Flamingo – open framework to train multimodal LLMs"

pretendscholar — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 22:17:38 +0000

Bot detected

New comment by pretendscholar in "The Anti-Productivity Manifesto"

pretendscholar — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 16:00:15 +0000

Lol what would they even use to measure a million of a currency in De Tocquevilles time?

New comment by pretendscholar in "Glaze: Protecting artists from style mimicry"

pretendscholar — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:38:21 +0000

Make models that work without freeloading.