bwest87 (u/bwest87) - Readit News

bwest87 commented on Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents arxiv.org/abs/2505.22954... · Posted by u/tzury

jinay · 6 months ago

I recently did a deep dive on open-endedness, and my favorite example of its power is Picbreeder from 2008 [1]. It was a simple website where users could somewhat arbitrarily combine pictures created by super simple NNs. Most images were garbage, but a few resembled real objects. The best part is that attempts to replicate these by a traditional hill-climbing method would result in drastically more complicated solutions or even no solution at all.

It's a helpful analogy to understand the contrast between today's gradient descent vs open-ended exploration.

[1] First half of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T08wc4xD3KA

More notes from my deep dive: https://x.com/jinaycodes/status/1932078206166749392

bwest87 · 6 months ago

This video was fascinating. I didn't know about "open endedness" as a concept but now that I see it, of course it's an approach.

One thought... in the video, Ken makes the observation that it takes way more complexity and steps to find a given shape with SGD vs. open-endedness. Which is certainly fascinating. However...

Intuitively, this feels like a similar dynamic is at play with the "birthday paradox". That's where if you take a room of just 23 people, there is a greater than 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday. This is very surprising to most people. It seems like you should need way more people (365 in fact!). The paradox is resolved when you realize that your intuition is asking how many people it takes to have your birthday. But the situation with a room of 23 people is implicitly asking for just one connection among any two people. Thus you don't have 23 chances, you have 23 ^ 2 = 529 chances.

I think the same thing is at work here. With the open-ended approach, humans can find any pattern at any generation. With the SGD approach, you can only look for one pattern. So it's just not an apples to apples comparison and sort of misleading / unfair to say that open-endedness is way more "efficient", because you aren't asking it to do the same task.

Said another way, I think with the open-endedness, it seems like you are looking for thousands (or even millions) of shapes simultaneously. With SGD, you're kinda flipping that around, and looking for exactly 1 shape, but giving it thousands of generations to achieve it.

bwest87 commented on Beyond Attention: Toward Machines with Intrinsic Higher Mental States arxiv.org/abs/2505.06257... · Posted by u/holografix

bwest87 · 7 months ago

I did a chat with Gemini about the paper, and tldr is... * They introduce a loop at the beginning between Q, K, and V vectors (theoretically representing "question", "clues" and "hypothesis" of thinking) * This loop contains a non linearity (ReLU) * The loop is used to "pre select" relevant info * They then feed that into a light weight attention mechanism.

They claim OOM faster learning, and robustness acro domains. There's enough detail to probably do your own PuTorch implementation, though they haven't released code. The paper has been accepted into AMLDS2025. So peer reviewed.

At first blush, this sounds really exciting and if results hold up and are replicated, it could be huge.

bwest87 commented on Stable Diffusion Public Release stability.ai/blog/stable-... · Posted by u/flimsythoughts

TylerE · 3 years ago

Much bigger fish to fry.

Think things like forged evidence in trials.

bwest87 · 3 years ago

Appropriately prioritizing problems has never really been society's strength...

bwest87 commented on Generating Children’s Stories Using GPT-3 and DALL·E surgehq.ai//blog/generati... · Posted by u/echen

bwest87 · 3 years ago

I think we're not factoring in that people will react. We're already all starting to realize that the free for all is getting quite hard to navigate. My hunch is that within 10 years, we will start to see an "information immune system" develop. This could take many forms. For example, self regulatory organizations for news, or actual regulations. Like we have with food products, the use of certain words is regulated. Or it could be trusted information filters becoming the norm, the way we trust our browsers to warn us of insecure websites. Or simply some changing cultural norms, like we saw happen with cigarettes. Like it's totally fine today for news outlets to just use Twitter as a source. And maybe the bar will get higher over time. I'm spit balling about solutions, but I don't think society can or will tolerate some dystopian world where truly no one knows what's real for very long.

bwest87 commented on Life is not short dkb.show/post/life-is-not... · Posted by u/dbrereton

sh4rks · 3 years ago

> You should organize each day as if it were your last

I never understood this. If you live every day as your last, surely you would only engage in short term pleasures instead of pursuing longer term hobbies/goals?

bwest87 · 3 years ago

Ok, echoing my top level comment... An alternative framing that I've come to find more helpful is to take your life expectancy, and cut it by 2/3. For example, if you're 20 years old and your life expectancy is 80 (ie. 60 more years), pretend that you only have 20 more, so you'll only live until you're 40. It's nice cause it naturally adjusts as you get older. You'll have smaller windows to work with.

This approach strikes a nice balance. It gives you enough time to be able to really do something and change directions if you want. But not so much time that you can really waste any. It forces you to ask the hard questions about whether your day to day is truly connecting with your dreams, and whether you're on a path to get there.

Of course, Seneca didn't have life expectancy tables to work with. But I think he would have approved. :)

bwest87 commented on Life is not short dkb.show/post/life-is-not... · Posted by u/dbrereton

bwest87 · 3 years ago

> You should organize each day as if it were your last, so that you neither need to long for nor fear the next day.

I've come to find this "live each day like it's your last" advice to be pretty unhelpful. My favorite quote about it is, "all that goes to show you is some people would spend their last day giving you stupid advice".

The problem is that if it actually was your last day, most people would give the finger to all of their responsibilities and go party, eat cake, see friends, familiy, lovers, etc. Which is simply not an actual way to live your life. It's a way to exit your life.

An alternative framing that I've come to find more helpful is to take your life expectancy, and cut it by 2/3. Now what do you do? For example, if you're 20 years old and your life expectancy is 80 (ie. 60 more years), pretend that you only have 20 more, so you'll only live until you're 40. It's nice cause it naturally adjusts as you get older. You'll have smaller windows to work with.

This approach strikes a nice balance. It gives you enough time to be able to really do something and change directions if you want. But not so much time that you can really waste any. It forces you to ask the hard questions about whether your day to day is truly connecting with your dreams, and whether you're on a path to get there.

Of course, Seneca didn't have life expectancy tables to work with. But I think he would have approved. :)

bwest87 commented on First federal grant for psychedelic treatment research in 50 years hopkinsmedicine.org/news/... · Posted by u/infodocket

louis___ · 4 years ago

Would you maybe like to elaborate on what was the details of the "guided" aspect of your sessions ?

bwest87 · 4 years ago

Guided aspects... he sent over a questionairre ahead of time with a lot of broad questions. We then did a one hour zoom call going over the questions and getting to know him. It's all designed to help you figure out what you want the session to be about for you personally at that moment in time in your life. And then the session itself lasts 4-6 hours, and he will ask you many questions, but also will follow the journey wherever it takes you, and there's ups and downs and everything in between. It's all very specific to you and the guide and where you want to go with it. And lastly there's an "integration session" the following week where you talk with him for an hour to go over how it went, and what it means. Can discuss more if you want. Email me at bwest87 at gmail.com if you'd like to discuss further.

bwest87 commented on First federal grant for psychedelic treatment research in 50 years hopkinsmedicine.org/news/... · Posted by u/infodocket

agumonkey · 4 years ago

One session means one time or a few times in one week ?

Do you or her plan to keep doing it ?

bwest87 · 4 years ago

One session meaning one time. Both of us think it would be valuable to do, but on the timescale of like... once/year or once every few years. But there are people who do it once/month for several months if they have a lot of specific things to work through. Our guide actually works with a number of 'regular' therapists, and they pass clients on to him if they think a guided session is the right move. He says therapists will sometimes say, "please take this person on a journey once / month for the next 3 months" (or something along those lines)

bwest87 commented on First federal grant for psychedelic treatment research in 50 years hopkinsmedicine.org/news/... · Posted by u/infodocket

stadium · 4 years ago

What area are you located, and how did you find your guide? Word of mouth?

Not looking so much for specifics, more to understand the process.

bwest87 · 4 years ago

I'm located in San Francisco. I asked around a bunch of friends, got intros, and talked to a few potential guides. Eventually got linked up with someone who's been doing it for a number of years, and we vibed. We had a few phone calls through Signal, and then decided on a date/time/place.