tikwidd (u/tikwidd) - Readit News

tikwidd commented on Show HN: Whataaabout.com – unique activity ideas for the holiday break whataaabout.com/... · Posted by u/erkjs

erkjs · 2 years ago

Ouch! I was not sure about it. Is english your first language? I'm asking out of curiosity, I'm italian

tikwidd · 2 years ago

It's because the first vowel in 'about' is an unstressed schwa. It sounds unnatural in English to stress or lengthen a schwa.

(The only exception I can think of is 'evennn'. e.g. Bob and Sue are at a dinner party with friends. Bob tells everyone that he likes all vegetables. Sue knows he doesn't like broccoli, so she nudges Bob and says "evennn...?". This makes sense if 'even' in fact contains a syllabic nasal consonant rather than schwa: /'ivn=/.)

That said, I don't think it's a big deal!

tikwidd commented on XState v5 Is Here stately.ai/blog/2023-12-0... · Posted by u/davidbarker

tikwidd · 2 years ago

Is anyone else using XState on the backend?

At work we have an interactive guided process/wizard that is currently implemented with an unwieldy low-code engine. I've been replacing this with a Node API that uses XState to encode process states. The API endpoints wait for XState to enter a 'ready' state (calling out to external services in the process), then pass meta properties of the current state back to the client.

One nice thing about this is that I can translate the existing low-code model into XState more or less directly. And the state machine can be rendered as a process flow diagram using viz tools in the Xstate ecosystem or some straightforward custom tooling.

tikwidd commented on Is the Physics of Time Changing? wired.com/story/physics-o... · Posted by u/fortran77

GnarfGnarf · 2 years ago

Time does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative movement of matter. Every way we measure "time" involves the movement of matter: sun dial, pendulum, spring & gears in a mechanical watch, vibrations of electrons in an electronic watch.

When you say that an hour has elapsed, it simply means the earth has rotated 15°. When you go 60 mph, you have moved 60 miles while the earth has rotated 15°.

The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Time is a creation of the mind.

If there were no matter, there would be no time.

tikwidd · 2 years ago

Matter does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative progress of time. Every way we measure "matter" involves the progress of time: microscope, telescope, ruler, calipers, vibrations of photons hitting the eye.

When you say that the earth has rotated 15°, it simply means an hour has elapsed. When you move 60 miles while the earth rotates 15°, you have gone 60 mph.

The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Matter is a creation of the mind.

If there were no time, there would be no matter.

(sorry)

tikwidd commented on US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/bloak

tikwidd · 3 years ago

We now know that exoplanets and the conditions for life abound in the universe. Where the conditions for life abound, the null hypothesis ought to be that life abounds. In discussions of alien life and intelligence, we are often biased by earlier states of knowledge about the universe and our position in it. When we first started digging up dinosaur bones, we came up with fantastical notions of creatures to explain these artifacts that were mysterious to us. Notions that fit into our existing worldview, drawn from folk knowledge and cultural history. Once archeologists started studying the bones carefully, they gave us stories more fantastical than we could have ever imagined in the framework of our folk knowledge. I suspect the same will turn out to be true of UAPs.

For example, UAP stories are often ridiculed on the premise that intelligent alien life would not bother to come all this way just to hide out in the ocean. That's our folk knowledge of aliens: they like to travel, are eager to make contact with other life forms and are capable of doing so. But the elusive behaviour of UAPs is exactly what we would expect from an "unmanned" scientific probe. The home planet would be dozens or hundreds of light years away, so the craft would need to be completely autonomous in the absence of any communication system. Where does an autonomous probe go to look for signs of life? Oceans.

tikwidd commented on OpenAI's plans according to sama humanloop.com/blog/open_a... · Posted by u/razcle

twobitshifter · 3 years ago

Left the best part until the end. Scaling models larger is still paying off for openai. It’s not AGI yet, but how much bigger will a model need to get to max out?

>The scaling hypothesis is the idea that we may have most of the pieces in place needed to build AGI and that most of the remaining work will be taking existing methods and scaling them up to larger models and bigger datasets. If the era of scaling was over then we should probably expect AGI to be much further away. The fact the scaling laws continue to hold is strongly suggestive of shorter timelines.

tikwidd · 3 years ago

After training my physics simulator on thousands of hours of video footage of trees moving in the wind, arborists tell me the trees are much more realistic (they are getting worried that I might put them out of business). But the physicists are still not satisfied. How many more videos do I need to generate the laws of motion?

tikwidd commented on Ask HN: What are your AI hot takes? · Posted by u/atleastoptimal

tikwidd · 3 years ago

ChatGPT-style AI should be called AC - Artificial Communication. It is trained on an extremely limited selection of utterances - most of our thinking is never written down. But no matter how many utterances are plugged in, the system will never be able to learn how to think. Its capabilities are stochastic and generalising, not systematic and generative.

An utterance is the expression or outcome of an internal thought process. A machine learning model is trained on the outcome, but not the process. Utterances look like thoughts to us; like pareidolia, we can't help but find thoughts in utterances. This is what makes ChatGPT so compelling.

People don't learn how to think either - it's a capability that grows from a genetic endowment. After the next AI winter, when we get over the spectacle of Artificial Communication, we may begin to examine our own generative capacities for thought. We'll know we're on the right track when AI is slow, uncooperative and childish, fails to thrive when exposed to nonsense training data, and requires very little of the right kind of training data to acquire its language.

tikwidd commented on “How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline” seymourhersh.substack.com... · Posted by u/hunglee2

tikwidd · 3 years ago

My thoughts on the incident, organised as a series of nested propositions.

0. The Nord Stream pipeline incident was not an accident.

1. The pipeline was sabotaged by a state actor.

   a. Only a state had the capability to carry it out undetected.

   b. The sabotage was in violation of international law.

   c. Evidence of the sabotage would cause a diplomatic scandal.

   d? Either Russia or the United States sabotaged the pipeline.

   e? The sabotage was authorised at the highest levels.

3. Russia did not sabotage the pipeline.

   a? Russia had no motivation to destroy it.

   b. Russia controls the pipeline, and could choose to turn it off.

   c. No state has presented evidence that Russia was involved in the sabotage.

   d. The area is highly monitored by US and US-aligned countries.

4. The US sabotaged the pipeline.

   a. The US had strategic and economic motivations to prevent the pipeline from operating.

   b. The US govt made public statements prior to the sabotage that, had they been made by the Kremlin, would have uncontroversially implicated Russia in the eyes of the American public.

   c. The US has the means to destroy it.

   d? The US has the means to hide their involvement in the sabotage from European allies and the US public. 

   e. The Western public have no appetite for stories which portray Russia as a victim, or US/EU as villains. Hiding their involvement is therefore trivial, since media outlets have no motivation to investigate the truth.

   f. Conversely, Russian state and media have no incentive to investigate, since the Russian audience takes it for granted that NATO was responsible.

tikwidd commented on “How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline” seymourhersh.substack.com... · Posted by u/hunglee2

dang · 3 years ago

It's no such admission. In fact it's the opposite, because if we thought the story didn't belong on HN, nothing would be easier than to let it sink without a trace.

I think the story belongs on HN because I know a little bit about the historical significance of Seymour Hersh and I think the appearance of this story is intellectually interesting. Maybe I'm the only commenter who feels that way, since most appear only to want to score points for their pre-existing political side, but it's our job to serve the intellectual interest of the larger audience, most of whom don't comment.

Re the question mark in titles, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713747. This is a longstanding practice and has nothing to do with the topic.

tikwidd · 3 years ago

Thanks for standing by your principles on this one dang.

I was hoping there would be some discussion of the SONAR buoy remote detonation story - is it plausible (from a technical perspective)? Has it been done before?