Ludwig Yeetgenstein
@yeetgenstein
I prefer nothing, unless it is true.
Moore’s law for GPUs shouldn’t be called Huang’s law — it should be called Jensen’s inequality!
I genuinely think "consciousness" is simply the modern, secular term for "soul". Both refer to unfalsifiable concepts used to determine who is in or out of our moral ingroup. Neither are empirical designations discovered through experiment, but socially constructed categories.
This kind of makes me love Ira Glass for being so "committed to the bit" of "being Ira Glass". He's a walking meme. He's art. You can't hate art. I bet, as his life was ruined, he imagined his own voice, on the radio, telling this incredible story ❤️😇📈 x.com/simonsarris/st…
this is actually more insane than I even remembered
It’s absolutely true that older generations were more articulate. It’s something that’s still worth aspiring to, even if it’s underappreciated now. I personally make a concerted effort to speak with elevated diction — because why tf not? It’s more beautiful and hurts no one.
There's a mild relief and a mild terror when you read old letters and novels
Fun fact: When you're using a good learning rate, the gradient should be almost *perpendicular* to direction of the last step (opposite of the intuition of many gradient descent diagrams that make it look like the gradient is following a smooth path). You can derive this by…
The LLM is the obelisk. We gather around it like monkeys. One day, one of us will figure something out.
A bad thing about this site being more identified with the letter X is that it diminishes the utility of using X as a generic variable name in informal conversation. Anyway, RIP Rene Descartes.
Turing comparing building thinking machines to biological procreation: "we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."
The baby hates eating his dinner sometimes but he sure does love eating the bits of his dinner he threw on the ground the next morning.
Thinking that LLM-ish AIs could soon lead our science and philosophy and art is tied to thinking we already reached the end of science and philosophy and art anyway. Nobody thinks an LLM-ish AI trained only on variations on 17th century texts could get us to 21st century civ
Ultimately, concepts aren’t vectors — concepts don’t in general add or subtract or scalar-multiply — which prevents LLMs from becoming AGI.
My guess: Numbers do not have much semantic value hence their latent vectors will be ~randomly distributed. Owls (or any other single concept) have latent vectors in some direction and some numbers will be more aligned with them than other numbers. That’s all.
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. 🧵
!!! I belong to a (rapidly vanishing) generation that memorized all sorts of things including multiplication tables, the alphabet, poetry, even Bible verses (once, I could recite 100 verses like a robot beginning with "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was...") & of…
My father in law was a university Physics professor. He related that he was concerned about letting students use calculators. However he found that students made just as many mistakes as before.
did math instructors think that the end of the world was imminent when calculators were introduced? those of us who'd learned to do arithmetic with paper & pen have been replaced by persons who just use calculators. not sure that this is anything to be upset about--the device is…
why? did using a calculator instead of doing math with a pencil crush civilization? what's to stop anyone from writing a book, reading a book? the AI prose which I have read is not particularly engaging but it is just prose.
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. 🧵