Hacker News: robwwilliams

New comment by robwwilliams in "What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]"

robwwilliams — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:29:35 +0000

Completely agree. This is what Hofstadter means by a strange loop. Our current LLMs have no attentional autonomy by design. The recursion is superficial and without its own Now. Adding attentional autonomy is The frightening alignment issue.

New comment by robwwilliams in "What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]"

robwwilliams — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:04:55 +0000

You nailed it. Asking the question is asking to define from the outside what is an inner recursive process. The question is a simple confusion of domains. This is Humbert Maturana’s main point in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980, now reissued). Recommend the whole book, as does Terry Winograd. The most intense part is the appendix specifically about the nervous system. Nagel and others knew no neuroscience and are clueless about recursion.

New comment by robwwilliams in "How LLMs work"

robwwilliams — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:32:47 +0000

Great, and won’t we all be just as surprised when human self-attentional control turns out to be just as simple or just as complex! Our minds as a strange fabric built of threads of recursions without the benefit of any explicit clock.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Nabokov's pale fire: the lost 'father of all hypertext demos'? (2011)"

robwwilliams — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:48:39 +0000

Diderot’s Jacque, The Fatalist is a great example. Perhaps even moreso of endless recursion to the end.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

robwwilliams — Wed, 27 May 2026 03:36:11 +0000

Living downwind of Colossus I and Colossus II in Memphis has orders of magnitude more weight than even a convention large data center. On par with a large cargo airport like MEM (FedEx hub).

New comment by robwwilliams in "Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200"

robwwilliams — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:44:28 +0000

What was the specific mathematical or factual error? It is not theoretical for me.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200"

robwwilliams — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:21:17 +0000

The newer location is about 3 miles southwest of the Memphis Airport (MEM), one of the world’s largest cargo airports and the center of FedEx operations (500 take-off and landings per day most concentrated in a 6 h FedEx window with lots of engines running on ramps and that produces about 2000 tons of NOx per year).

I live about 18 miles downwind of the new Colossus sites, the airport, and lots of truck logistics sites, and a large refinery.

I definitely will be getting 2x exposure to ozone and particulates from both Colossi when they are running full bore. Plus an extra dose of ultrafine particulate with my morning fresh air.

Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to be in Nashville instead with HCA, Oracle, many insurance and financial institutions, and the joy of country music.

As an avid Opus user I am in an ethical Nimby bind. We do need almost any investments we can get in Shelby County TN. I’ll take Anthropic in preference to Grok NOx. And it will be my NOx.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Gemini 3.5 Flash"

robwwilliams — Tue, 19 May 2026 23:03:02 +0000

Not in my fields of science: Genetics and neuroscience. The combination of Opus 4.7 Adaptive used with well structure project folders is amazingly useful.

New comment by robwwilliams in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

robwwilliams — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:40:20 +0000

Completely on the mark! Algorithms can differ qualitatively. Recursion.

New comment by robwwilliams in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

robwwilliams — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:35:50 +0000

It would have to explain how we construct “Now” from atemporal cells that are without a clock.

New comment by robwwilliams in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

robwwilliams — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:32:36 +0000

Mainly because of recursive processes that modulate attentional focus, but of a special sort that we are just beginning to understand.

New comment by robwwilliams in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

robwwilliams — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:27:57 +0000

Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today.

Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better.

His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers.

Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli.

The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.

New comment by robwwilliams in "The AI Zombification of Universities"

robwwilliams — Fri, 15 May 2026 01:11:34 +0000

What made University of California Santa Cruz so attractive to undergraduates in the 70s was no grading of performance and engagement but instead written evaluations. I loved being able to concentrate on great subjects with the help of often excellent teachers and TAs. Swathmore is noted for this culture too.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Heritability of human life span is ~50% when heritability is redefined"

robwwilliams — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:51:32 +0000

No. Then the fraction of population variance attributable to genetic differences would tend to increase and heritably would also increase.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Heritability of human life span is ~50% when heritability is redefined"

robwwilliams — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:32:44 +0000

Agreed, the Dynomight article is on-the-mark. I work in this field and was really puzzled when I read this paper. Yes, it is obvious that excluding extrinsic causes of death will increase heritability estimates. But is death from influenza genetic or extrinsic?

The typo on the first page of the Science article is on the authors, not the editors.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Heritability of human life span is ~50% when heritability is redefined"

robwwilliams — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:25:38 +0000

We have many bits and pieces of causal structure for some human traits courtesy of GWAS and PheWAS but you are right that lifespan genetics of humans is seriously compromised by rapid changes in life styles and environments.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Foucault's Order of Things Explained with Trading Cards [video]"

robwwilliams — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:11:08 +0000

You are making a point that shares much with Foucault’s work: trying to understand why and how fields like psychology and sociology came to be crystallized into academic pigeonholes. Your frustration is what he studied.

If you want a deeper answer to your question read:

R. Rorty (1991) “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault” (in Essays on Heidegger and Others)

Rorty makes the point that there are (at least) two ways to read Foucault: both interesting and also in tension.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX"

robwwilliams — Wed, 06 May 2026 22:45:18 +0000

Urban/industrial and refinery complex; not at all rural. Located about 8 miles southwest of downtown Memphis (3231 Paul Lowery Rd) on a bend of the river.

New comment by robwwilliams in "ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips"

robwwilliams — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:37:20 +0000

Zeiss and Schott are both owned in their entirety by a foundation that is not allowed to sell shares. Most of the dividends go to larger research institutions in southern Germany (about $80 million to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Tübingen, Freiburg, Ulm, Mainz, Jena).

New comment by robwwilliams in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"

robwwilliams — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 14:34:13 +0000

Yes, and less than $1 billion/year spent on the basic biology of aging by NIH/NIA. Funding for research on the root causes of aging is decimal dust compared to distal consequences such as cancers, cardiopulmonary diseases, renal failure, immune diseases, Alzheimer’s, etc.

NIH is great at tactical research but terrible at strategic research, and politicians do not help much ;-)