paulrudy (u/paulrudy)

paulrudy commented on Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org giuliomagnifico.blog/post... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

In over 6 years of using Mailbox, I only remember one website that rejected the domain. It's a government website and they only started rejecting "invalid" (non-duopoly) domains sometime this year.

I do occasionally get emails that take longer to arrive into my inbox (between 5 minutes up to 1 hour), but the emails always arrive eventually. Or maybe I haven't noticed...

Do you remember which websites rejected your Mailbox address?

paulrudy · 6 days ago

I've been on mailbox for 6 years and I think the only issue I've had with rejections has been the email confirmation from some Discourse-based forums. But after I contacted the hosts and was added manually, the forums' emails made it through with no issue

paulrudy commented on Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet bozmen.io/fhe... · Posted by u/barisozmen

dachrillz · a month ago

A very basic way of how it works: encryption is basically just a function e(m, k)=c. “m” is your plaintext and “c” is the encrypted data. We call it an encryption function if the output looks random to anyone that does not have the key

If we could find some kind of function “e” that preserves the underlying structure even when the data is encrypted you have the outline of a homomorphic system. E.g. if the following happens:

e(2,k)*e(m,k) = e(2m,k)

Here we multiplied our message with 2 even in its encrypted form. The important thing is that every computation must produce something that looks random, but once decrypted it should have preserved the actual computation that happened.

It’s been a while since I did crypto, so google might be your friend here; but there are situations when e.g RSA preserves multiplication, making it partially homomorphic.

paulrudy · a month ago

Thank you, this really clarified things for me!

paulrudy commented on Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet bozmen.io/fhe... · Posted by u/barisozmen

pluto_modadic · a month ago

a simple example of partial homomorphic encryption (not full), would be if a system supports addition or multiplication. You know the public key, and the modulus, so you can respect the "wrap around" value, and do multiplication on an encrypted number.

other ones I imagine behave kinda like translating, stretching, or skewing a polynomial or a donut/torus, such that the point/intercepts are still solveable, still unknown to an observer, and actually represent the correct mathematical value of the operation.

just means you treat the []byte value with special rules

paulrudy · a month ago

Thank you. So based on your examples it sounds like the "computation" term is quite literal. How would this apply at larger levels of complexity like interacting anonymously with a database or something like that?

paulrudy commented on Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet bozmen.io/fhe... · Posted by u/barisozmen

paulrudy · a month ago

> FHE enables computation on encrypted data

This is fascinating. Could someone ELI5 how computation can work using encrypted data?

And does "computation" apply to ordinary internet transactions like when using a REST API, for example?

paulrudy commented on Lucid dreaming app triples users' awareness in dreams, study finds psypost.org/lucid-dreamin... · Posted by u/mikhael

grugagag · 9 months ago

I wonder what are the benefits from lucid dreaming. I read some claims that it’s possible we could gain access to some ‘hidden registry’ figuratively speaking by using methods such as lucid dreaming. However, I had a few lucid dreams in my life, all without any deliberate effort, they just happened and it’s nice to have them and all, but I don’t see myself getting out of my way to have lucid dreams. Does anyone get any substantial benefit from lucid dreaming out there?

paulrudy · 9 months ago

In Robert Waggoner's book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, the author, who was a very skilled lucid dreamer from childhood, describes how he had a moment of insight after waking from a lucid dream. He had been thinking of himself as the controller of his dreams, and treated them mostly as entertainment. But he realized that for everything he "decided" in his lucid dream, there was far more content that arrived, unplanned--scenery, characters, events, and so on.

This made him curious about using awareness within the dream not just for entertainment, but to conduct experiments and tests, to research what was and wasn't possible, what dream characters and dream consciousness knew or didn't know, all from within the dreams themselves. He's spent decades doing that, and comparing notes with other skilled lucid dreamers.

It's an incredibly fascinating book, a sort of natural history of the dream world by a seasoned traveler within it.

Also has a bunch of useful tips on cultivating lucid dreaming, which I remember working pretty well a few times when I had been disciplined enough to practice them.

paulrudy commented on macOS Sequoia is available today apple.com/newsroom/2024/0... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

Daub · a year ago

From TFA: ‘Highlights automatically surfaces directions for a location’

Is that a mistype? In an apple advertisement? Regardless, the whole thing feels like it has been written by a high school student. Try reading the following without wincing:

‘A redesigned Reader allows users to read articles more quickly with a streamlined view, a summary, and a table of contents, and a new Viewer helps users put videos front and center while still giving them full access to system playback controls.’

paulrudy · a year ago

"From TFA: ‘Highlights automatically surfaces directions for a location’ Is that a mistype? In an apple advertisement?"

"Highlights" as a singular brand/product/whatever name. Like saying "Postmates delivers stuff"

paulrudy commented on Space is a latent sequence: A theory of the hippocampus science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

K0SM0S · a year ago

Agreed.

Anecdotal (but deep) research led me to postulate that our entire "inner world", for lack of a better word, is an emergent construction based on a fundamentally spatiotemporal encoding of the external world. This assumes that feeding and motility, i.e., a geometric interpretation of the external world, is among the first 'functions' of living organisms in the evolutionary order. They subsequently became foundational for neuronal systems when these appeared about 500 million years ago.

The hypothesis was informed by language notably, where most things are defined in spatial terms and concepts (temporal too, though more rarely), as if physical experiences of the world were the building blocks of thinking, really. A "high" council, a "sub" culture, a "cover", an "adjacent" concept, a "bigger" love, a "convoluted" or "twisted" idea, etc.

Representations in one's inner world are all about shape, position, and movement of things in some abstract space of sorts.

This is exactly how I'd use a 4D modeling engine to express a more 'Turing-complete' language, a more comprehensive experience (beyond movement: senses, intuitions, emotions, thoughts, beliefs…): use its base elements as a generator set to express more complex objects through composition in larger and/or higher-dim space. Could nature, Evolution, have done just that? Iteratively as it conferred survival advantages to these genes? What would that look like for each layer of development of neuronal—and later centralized "brain"—systems?

Think as in geometric algebra, maybe; e.g., think how the metric of a Clifford algebra may simply express valence or modality, for those neuronal patterns to trigger the proper neurotransmitters. In biological brains, we've already observed neural graphs up to 11 dimensions (with a bimodal distribution peak around ~2.5D and ~3.8D iirc… Interestingly for sure, right within the spatiotemporal ballpark, seeing as we experience the spatial world in 2.5D more than 3, unlike fishes or birds).

Jeff Hawkins indeed strongly shaped my curiosity, notably in "A Thousand Brains" and subsequent interviews. The paper here immediately struck me as very salient to that part of my philosophical and ML research—so kinda not too surprised there's history there.

And I'm really going off on a tangent here, but I'm pretty sure the "tokenization problem" (as expressed by e.g. Karpathy) may eventually be better solved using a spatiotemporal characterization of the world. Possibly much closer to real-life language in biological brains, for the above reasons. Video pretraining of truly multimodal models may constitute a breakthrough in that regard, perhaps to synthesize or identify the "ideal" text divisions, a better generator set for (any) language.

paulrudy · a year ago

Since I only partly understand your comment, I'm not sure if this pertains, but the phrase "spatiotemporal encoding" caught my attention. It makes intuitive sense that complex cognitive function would be connected to spatiotemporal sensations and ideas in an embodied nervous system evolved for, among other things, managing itself spatially and temporally.

Also, Riccardo Manzotti's book "The Spread Mind" seems connected. Part of the thesis is that the brain doesn't form a "model" version of the world with which to interact, but instead, the world's effects are kept active within the brain, even over extremely variable timespans. Objects of consciousness can't be definitively separated from their "external" causes, and can be considered the ongoing activity of those causes, "within" us.

Conscious experience as "encoding" in that sense would not be an inner representation of an outer reality, but more a kind of spatiotemporal imprint that is identical with and inextricable from the activity of "outer" events that precipitated it. The "mind" is not a separate observer or calculator but is "spread" among all phenomenal objects/events with which it has interacted--even now-dead stars whose light we might have seen.

Not sure if I'm doing the book justice here, but it's a great read, and satisfyingly methodical. The New York Review has an interview series if you want to get a sense of the ideas before committing to the book.

paulrudy commented on Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908) scentofdawn.blogspot.com/... · Posted by u/ahiknsr

d-z-m · a year ago

For those with whom this resonated, you may also like the writings of Jacques Lusseyran.

Some selections from his works can be heard here[0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn4SHdeVz-o

paulrudy · a year ago

His autobiography, And There Was Light, and a collection of talks, Against the Pollution of the I, are wonderful

paulrudy commented on Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908) scentofdawn.blogspot.com/... · Posted by u/ahiknsr

smeej · a year ago

I don't know that he meant to teach me a lesson. I think it was just a mentalist-style magic trick, not unlike pulling a quarter out of a kid's ear. Just for fun.

I guess it was useful to know people are alike enough to be predictable, but I don't think he was trying to teach me that necessarily.

Unfortunately I also have to interpret everything through the lens of, "He's an insecure narcissist, so he might just have been trying to keep me in line by proving he was smarter than me." Things changed a lot after this event. He intensified his efforts to isolate me from other people, even convincing my own mother I was so much smarter than her that she would never understand me. I was a three-year-old child. I don't care how smart you are when you're 3, most of what you need at that point is basic and common among all humans. But this gets back to seeing me as a threat to his own sense of safety, thus trying to make sure I felt small for the rest of my life.

paulrudy · a year ago

Whew. I'm sorry you had that situation to grow up in, caught up from an early age in maneuvering relative to a parent's insecurities and emotional blindness. I can relate in some ways. I hope the clarity with which you wrote about it now is an expression of having come to some healing and peace!

paulrudy commented on Scientists Find an 'Alphabet' in Whale Songs nytimes.com/2024/05/07/sc... · Posted by u/tintinnabula

motohagiography · a year ago

like the weather, restaurants, and plans for the summer, or even breeding opportunities? (will admit to missing the subtlety of the joke tho)

maybe they're complaining about how the options on whale tinder are too blubbery, but he categories for living things to talk about are definitely shared, and dividing phenomena into them is pretty straightforward. the real risk might be that the next iteration of GPT simulates an always just out of reach imagined better option and whales stop reproducing in pursuit of it. we should try it on another species first.

paulrudy · a year ago

Good point, yeah, generally the basic survival topics are still in play even when we're busy with finer details! Still, giving an intelligent species the credit for (perhaps) engaging in the final details seems like something generous to leave on the table! Like whale dating apps, exactly.

Maybe the trees would show something useful to GTP