captainclam

7 ms·

31.
by captainclam 2y ago
I am sincerely curious about your thoughts on the origins of mitochondria, and how you came to feel so strongly about it.
32.
by captainclam 2y ago
Pens are all well and good, but what are people's favorite notebooks? I've found that the paper is perhaps just as important as the pen in a satisfactory writing experience.
33.
by captainclam 2y ago
Hmmm...this wasn't at all my point, but I understand why I my comment could be read this way (the failure to communicate is mine). I am not suggesting an equivalency between all efforts at all levels, or that innate talent doesn't
34.
by captainclam 2y ago
A really fascinating corollary I've observed since I've gotten into more advanced maths, or even doing actual research as a PhD student, is that there's nothing special going on at the higher levels. You're just working
35.
by captainclam 2y ago
"Classic Wolfram — brilliant, reimplements / comes at a current topic using only cellular automata, and draws some fairly deep philosophical conclusions that are pretty intriguing." Wolfram has a hammer and sees everything as
36.
by captainclam 2y ago
“Mimicry of mechanisms left by evolution” would be a much less parsimonious explanation than just having those mechanisms, i.e. Occam’s razor.
37.
by captainclam 2y ago
Addressing your first thought…anything that you would call “objective” can be “doubted” by ceding the tiny tiny possibility that you are a simulation or Boltzmann brain or brain in a vat. The evidence before you may not actually be represen
38.
by captainclam 2y ago
Op writes "I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic." They very
39.
by captainclam 2y ago
I guess you could say I don't know RWP from Adam! :D My og comment wasn't to accurately explain gradient optimization, I was just expressing a sentiment not especially aimed at experts and not especially requiring details. Though
40.
by captainclam 2y ago
Ugh, exactly, it's so cool. I've been a deep learning practitioner for ~3 years now, and I feel like this notion has really been impressed upon me only recently. I've spent an awful lot of mental energy trying to conceive of
41.
by captainclam 3y ago
Haha, good point. I'm not a hopeless case after all.
42.
by captainclam 3y ago
I've never used social media or had a "problem" with my phone. So I used to read articles like this a little smugly, but I'm growing increasingly discomfited by the notion that I'm...out of touch..? Yeah, it's
43.
by captainclam 3y ago
Same here. The notion of wolves as a safety issue has literally not occurred to me until this person asked. I'm very alert to grizzly, moose, and mountain lions. Is there evidence that I should add wolves to that list?
44.
by captainclam 3y ago
In Montana, where this is a very hot issue, I have never heard of any concerns about the safety of humans around wolves, even from very vocal anti-wolf parties. The conflict arises from wolves' impact on our hunting and ranching intere
45.
by captainclam 3y ago
Right, I do agree that the current LLM paradigm probably won't achieve true AGI; but I think that the current trajectory could produce a powerful enough generalist agent model to seriously put AI ethics to task at pretty much every ang
46.
by captainclam 3y ago
1) It may be possible to brute-force a model into something that sufficiently resembles AGI for most use-cases (at least well enough to merit concern about who controls it) 2) Deep learning has never been terribly scientific, but here we a
47.
by captainclam 3y ago
Wow, are you me? I also experience this specifically. The hallucinations tend to be "spiders" or intruders (spiders in quotes because they're more shadowy and ephemeral than your standard tarantula) and incidentally, it'
48.
by captainclam 3y ago
Interesting! I like that thought. I enjoy thinking about how surprisingly good we are at predicting trajectories, good enough that we can throw, catch, and dodge small objects with remarkable accuracy. I wonder if our internal calculations
49.
by captainclam 3y ago
Thank you so much for the links! I just happen to be endeavoring to seriously learn this stuff at the moment, driven by interests in physics, differential geometry, and gamedev. I'm seriously jazzed to check these out, thank you.
50.
by captainclam 3y ago
I have, and I totally agree with your critiques, but I still enjoyed it. Do you have any suggestions for really good science fiction?
51.
by captainclam 3y ago
As evidenced by lots of people enjoying it.
52.
by captainclam 3y ago
Waaay harder than meth.
53.
by captainclam 3y ago
Correct, it is an enormous amount...Under Everett, the "number of worlds" practically exists on a continuous spectrum, so basically an infinitude of worlds. But this doesn't violate parsimony in terms of building a model of r
54.
by captainclam 3y ago
I think because of the abuse of "many worlds" in science fiction media (especially as of late) as a convenient plot device, people develop this idea that it's an unserious proposal wrt the foundations of physics. As far as I
55.
by captainclam 3y ago
I think this question stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the Everett interpretation...the idea of "many worlds" (a phrase I do not favor specifically because of this very misunderstanding!) evokes this imagery of an enti
56.
by captainclam 3y ago
It's an awfully important distinction for the purported zombie!
57.
by captainclam 4y ago
I see this comment getting downvoted, but I agree with the sentiment; it suffices to say that if there a compelling mathematical structure exists, there will be people studying it. I imagine most graph theorists are hardly interested in the
58.
by captainclam 4y ago
I've never understood why alien bacteria are a perceived threat. Viruses and bacteria share the same genetic material as we do, and literally evolved to infect organisms of that ilk. I have always supposed that alien viruses would just
59.
by captainclam 4y ago
Doesn't this just completely dodge/dismiss the original question? If I asked how biology worked, you wouldn't say "Survivorship bias: if biology didn't work, you wouldn't be here to ask the question."
60.
by captainclam 5y ago
But that’s medical research. This is just a hobby project. It seems completely reasonable to object to using mammals in one’s tech projects, while admitting the value to using animal models to advance medical science.

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