carl feynman
@carl_feynman
I’ve spent a lifetime switching my Special Interest every year or two. By now I’m surprisingly knowledgeable in a lot of fields— a skill now obsoleted by AI.
This is a very well-written article about a rapidly developing subfield of biophysics + applied math. I didn’t know anything about it half an hour ago and now I’m fascinated! Good for people who like molecular biology, algorithms, optics or machine learning.
A primer on ML in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) owlposting.com/p/a-primer-on-… confused about cryo-EM??? i explain why people do it, how it works and some ML problems in the area via explanations of 3 @ZhongingAlong papers 7.9k words, 36 minutes reading time. ToC in thread❄️
Behold! The first practical monostable tetrahedron! Why? Because things like moon landers fail by tipping over onto the wrong side. Solution: Give it a shape where only the right side on bottom is stable. First explored by John Conway and Richard Guy in the 1960s (!) and solved…
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
Nice story about how Boaz Klartag came up with a radical new result in sphere packing. I’ve been a fan of his for years because he’s a titan in the world of convex and asymptotic geometry. I didn’t realize that he’s an interloper in sphere packing. quantamagazine.org/new-sphere-pac…
EXCLUSIVE: Carl Feynman warns that building AGI likely means human extinction. (Yes, son of Richard Feynman & Al engineer of 45 years.) He's known Eliezer Yudkowsky since the '90s and was initially optimistic about building AGI. Today his P(Doom) is an alarming 43%. Thread 👇
"Nor, again, do I now miss the bodily strength of a young man … any more than as a young man I missed the strength of a bull or an elephant. You should use what you have, and whatever you may chance to be doing, do it with all your might." -- Cicero
If you can view stereo pairs with crossed eyes, here is Proxima Centauri seen from two locations 47 astronomical units apart: Earth, and the New Horizons spacecraft.
Don't miss out on parenthood. I guarantee you that no amount of "personal freedom" is worth more than the existential delight of embracing your offspring like this.
Daughter freaks out with excitement as her dad gets off his shift from work
It’s a one-axis on-chip rate gyro, with each signal connected on two surfaces so it can be mounted to be sensitive to either yaw or pitch. Clever! analog.com/media/en/techn…
Alien chip packaging.
"Hello I'm Mr. Papadapoulous of Athens. This is Mr. Papadapoudis of Thessalonike." "Nice to meet you, I'm Mr. Papadapas of Ephesus. Have you met my friend Mr. Papadapadakis from Crete?"
Fuligin.
Got a sample of Wile E. Coyotes ACME portable hole aka Musou Black FABRIC KIWAMI for a microscope wall reflection issue
I’m frustrated that some microbe a billion years ago didn’t figure out how to make carbon-halogen bonds. Living things would have so many more possibilities! (Also technology would be able to use chlorocarbons with impunity because they would be biodegradable.)
I recommend highly @michael_nielsen's new postscript to his superintelligence risk essay. (QT is a thread with link to the whole thing.) "Fear power, not intelligence" as I put it in _Better without AI_; Michael makes a more detailed case for that. x.com/michael_nielse…
I added an extended postscript to this essay, discussing questions and criticisms, especially the question: "Are you saying alignment work is bad? Do you want misaligned ASIs running around?" No, I don't. But it's also a bad fallacy to confuse control with safety.
"the birds in the war zone make nests from the fiber optic cables left by the killer drones" is the kind of thing you'd expect as a throwaway line of background in a cyberpunk story, and yet
Fiber drones are literally changing the landscape in Ukraine, and brining a new level of threat -- my take for Forbes in comments below
I also had a great serendipitous time at Less Online. And of the fourteen great experiences listed here, I only had one (asked to provide relationship advice). That suggests that we both randomly sampled from a space of about two hundred good activities.
what made LessOnline especially great for me was the high level of serendipity. i planned basically nothing, and here's some cool stuff that happened anyway: - met a guy who might have a lead on getting my book published - saw a video of person having surgery while awake!
Categorical imperative is exactly this without the “who is like …you” proviso. Has Yudkowsky improved Kant or was it implicit in the original? (Sincere question, it’s been decades since I read Kant.)
Yudowsky also extends his decision theory to "you should do x if it means everyone who is like you and who is in a similar situation should also do x" (he talks about this for things like voting) which seems like at least a cousin to the categorical imperative
They say if everywhere you go you encounter assholes then that means you’re the asshole. Well, everywhere I go I encounter really nice people. So I guess we can all deduce what that means.
Commutative diagrams are great because they summarize a whole series of equations in a single diagram. But I think this monstrosity indicates that we need some way of summarizing the commutative diagrams themselves.
I think it commutes
Growing up with a physicist parent who *actually could respond to most of my questions* was an interesting experience ~5 year old octo would go into his parents' room crying bc he was thinking about the eventual heat death of the universe