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vingt_regards commented on Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models   simonwillison.net/2024/Se... · Posted by u/loganfrederick
flanked-evergl · a year ago
> The failure is in how you're using it.

People, for the most part, know what they know and don't know. I am not uncertain that the distance between the earth and the sun varies, but I'm certain that I don't know the distance from the earth to the sun, at least not with better precision than about a light week.

This is going to have to be fixed somehow to progress past where we are now with LLMs. Maybe expecting an LLM to have this capability is wrong, perhaps it can never have this capability, but expecting this capability is not wrong, and LLM vendors have somewhat implied that their models have this capability by saying they won't hallucinate, or that they have reduced hallucinations.

vingt_regards · a year ago
> the distance from the earth to the sun, at least not with better precision than about a light week

The sun is eight light minutes away.

vingt_regards commented on On the Double-Slit Experiment and Quantum Interference in the Wolfram Model (2020)   wolframphysics.org/bullet... · Posted by u/floobertoober
danbruc · 2 years ago
I just skimmed the article for sanity checking and it looks more like crackpottery than science to me.

Looking at the numbers on the graphs for single-slit diffraction, they are just binomial coefficient, at least mostly, not sure why there are pieces missing in the last rows. That is also what you expect when you repeatedly make binary decisions to go left or right. The article does not mention the binomial distributions once, it only appears in a comment.

And then they claim that it converge to the actual single-slit diffraction distribution, something with a Chebyshev polynomial and the sinc function, according to the article. Seemingly without justification besides looking at graphs and noting that they are both bell shaped. As said, not sure what is going on in the last rows of the graphs, but I would almost bet that the two functions are not the same, even in the limit as it becomes a Poisson distribution plus whatever the last rows do.

Why do they not just proof that the two are the same? The entire article seems to be about getting numbers out of their multiway system and then concluding that - if you squint hard enough - they look somewhat like diffraction patterns.

vingt_regards · 2 years ago
> I would almost bet that the two functions are not the same, even in the limit as it becomes a Poisson distribution plus whatever the last rows do.

A Gaussian distribution, I think. But they're certaintly not the same function, and it should be immediately obvious to a math grad with experience in physics. The sinc function, for one, has secondary maxima (its plot in the article is very convenienty cropped to allow pretending those don't exist). Just put a hair in the path of a laser beam and you will see the local maxima in light intensity! Their "single-slit" string procedure, on the other hand, can only generate a single central peak. This really makes no sense at all.

vingt_regards commented on Sora: Creating video from text   openai.com/sora... · Posted by u/davidbarker
sva_ · 2 years ago
I found the one about the people in Lagos pretty funny. The camera does about a 360deg spin in total, in the beginning there are markets, then suddenly there are skyscrapers in the background. So there's only very limited object permanence.

> A beautiful homemade video showing the people of Lagos, Nigeria in the year 2056. Shot with a mobile phone camera.

> https://cdn.openai.com/sora/videos/lagos.mp4

vingt_regards · 2 years ago
There are also perspective issues: the relative sizes of the foreground (the people sitting at the café) and the background (the market) are incoherent. Same with the "snowy Tokyo with cherry blossoms" video.
vingt_regards commented on Observation of zero resistance above 100 K in Pb₁₀₋ₓCuₓ(PO₄)₆O   arxiv.org/abs/2308.01192... · Posted by u/segfaultbuserr
aziaziazi · 2 years ago
> human tissues > isolated wires > alternated sheets

The thinks you describes are systems made of multiple materials. Are you aware of a materials that behave that way by its own ?

vingt_regards · 2 years ago
Graphite
vingt_regards commented on How to store a permutation compactly (2022)   hackmd.io/@dabo/rkP8Pcf9t... · Posted by u/velmu
CrampusDestrus · 2 years ago
Well, I used F@H as an example. Are there truly no PoW algorithms that satisfy both conditions and actually represent some useful IRL result?
vingt_regards · 2 years ago
The more "useful" you PoW algorithm is, the cheaper 51% attacks on your chain will be. To be maximally secure, a PoW algorithm should only generate useless data.
vingt_regards commented on Surprise computer science proof in combinatorics   quantamagazine.org/surpri... · Posted by u/theafh
claytongulick · 3 years ago
The mathematical realm is a purely human construct.

There's no such thing as "one" in nature: there's not "one" apple. An apple is a monstrously complex collection of cells and dynamic chemical processes, it's not "one".

The concept of numbers are a tool that humans use to categorize, summarize and model the world around us.

The "truths" we discover in math are only true in the mathematical realm, which is an inexact model of the physical realm. Useful, but undeniably a human construct.

So yes, math is invented.

Though we constantly discover new ways to use it in the physical world.

vingt_regards · 3 years ago
> There's no such thing as "one" in nature: there's not "one" apple. An apple is a monstrously complex collection of cells and dynamic chemical processes, it's not "one".

> The concept of numbers are a tool that humans use to categorize, summarize and model the world around us.

By the same argument, aren't apples invented too?

u/vingt_regards

KarmaCake day6December 4, 2022View Original