danwills

9 ms·

91.
by danwills 2y ago
I could not agree more! Some of my very-most-favorite tracks ever, ultimately got to me via https://www.pouet.net and by being a demo soundtrack!! Demo music utterly rules!!!! Especially so if you're into electronic styles,
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by danwills 2y ago
I loved the article that this links to about 'Jump Flood Algorithm'!: https://bgolus.medium.com/the-quest-for-very-wide-outlines-b... So fascinating! Thanks for indirectly leading me to this! I love thinking about
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by danwills 2y ago
Self-organization of replicators FTW! Reminds me of this part of a quote from Douglas Adams[0]: "Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again." [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes&#x2F
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by danwills 2y ago
Certainly, the best way to browse these days is on Flickr I think: https://www.flickr.com/photos/57934548@N02/ There's also this old blogger blog where I waffle-on about them: https://ultraiterator
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by danwills 2y ago
I have invested quite an unreasonable-amount-of-time rendering fractals, (just on 1 node so far) myself, mostly only at 2k (square) pixels but really quite a few at 16k (16384x16384 pixels) and I'm also hoping to figure out how to do s
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by danwills 2y ago
Happy 2025 all HN'ers! I'm a daily HN'er - It's my only source of news apart from occasional YT vids, but what a brilliant source of news it is!!! I frequently find myself saying: 'Yeah that was on HN a few weeks ag
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by danwills 2y ago
Looks like it has both CA and particle-based. Sure it's cool but personally I'm a huge fan of a related type of simulation: 'Reaction Diffusion' both in terms of the less-aliasy (more continuous, and usually band-limited
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by danwills 2y ago
Yeah I think that's correct. It's the combined effect of being able to read the syntax of whatever language it is (Ie understanding code at a small-scale, which is different for all langs), and also to be able to understand/i
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by danwills 2y ago
Yeah I think we are mostly on the same page for sure, I would nearly go so far as to say that self-replicating with variation is 'essential' for intelligence.. and I do utterly love evolution as an idea - but maybe it's just
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by danwills 2y ago
I loved this paper, below is the punchline for me I reckon (and summarizes where-they-are-at nicely too I think - finding out a lot of possibly very important things!): ""The discovery of unexpected problem-solving competencies (s
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by danwills 2y ago
I'd love to know more about what you mean! Is it that with a bit more upfront investment (or 'delayed gratification'), a system might be able to find shorter (or less energy-intensive) paths through the space that they are na
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by danwills 2y ago
Yes I agree there's little point in instantiating arbitrary abstract structures, however that isn't what I was suggesting. The related structures and properties identified in Levin's work are specifically those of the 'a
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by danwills 2y ago
I think if you 'just apply physics' (let's say 'just apply computation' shall we?) then an array of numbers can only hope for this to happen In a kind of bogosort-style way?: Shuffle them all, and if now sorted, ret
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by danwills 2y ago
I just loved this bit in the paper, could be so easily taken on so many tangents!: ""Delayed Gratification is used to evaluate the ability of each algorithm undertake actions that temporarily increase Monotonicity Error in order t
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by danwills 2y ago
One of Levin's main points is to describe agency/intelligence as a continuous spectrum rather than an on/off thing so within the framework of thought that this paper exists in, it's no longer meaningful to treat the answ
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by danwills 2y ago
While I agree with your general sentiment I think that there is a possible type of government where we are no-longer forced to vote for individual humans (or indeed groups of humans: political parties) but can instead vote on the actual ide
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by danwills 2y ago
I think the folding/etc would all be mirrored as well if all the components were on mirror-chirality and the overall molecular-kinetic behavior of the result would in-theory be the same when zoomed-out too (assuming it doesn't enc
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by danwills 2y ago
I think that's a great question! But I also think it's similar in a way to 'why matter and not antimatter' or 'why ~3d space rather than no structure' (much less obvious the second one!). But I think the real a
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by danwills 2y ago
I reckon I generally agree that it's very unlikely that mirror-bacteria would be viable in the wild! This is covered in the article in 2 ways though: It says that some nutrients (like glycerol) are achiral - this might mean they could
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by danwills 2y ago
I don't think it does, but rather says whatever direction the first one is pointing in is exactly the same as the direction the second one points in.
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by danwills 2y ago
I've sometimes thought it might be reasonable to think of a single cell in the system as an 'automaton' which might make it somewhat ok to call the whole collection of cells 'automata'. I accept that there's tw
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by danwills 2y ago
Thanks, hehe yeah it does seem a bit like writing over the inputs isn't really a great plan in general, except in rare cases where it's a total escape-hatch! (probably amazingly useful then!) I think I mostly agree about the 10+ l
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by danwills 2y ago
What's an "ETL" job? Totally get your point about being able to go faster with tight specification of the expected inputs! And yeah awk is renowned for being able to crunch through things (especially huge volumes of text) at
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by danwills 2y ago
"|sh" is such a great thing I completely agree! I'm so glad to have opened your eyes to it! I use it all the time! (And it's not even specific to awk at all really! (xargs/sed/grep/tr/etc are all so h
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by danwills 2y ago
I learned from the article that one can assign to the dollar vars like: $0="bye bye input line" It seems like this could be a bit of a footgun!? I'm sure it must be helpful in some cases though! Has anyone used it? Could you
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by danwills 2y ago
In my job in VFX we are dealing with sequences of files constantly, and sometimes being able to do things to parts of the frame range is extremely helpful, and awk is great for that! Let's say U wanted to delete exr files named like fi
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by danwills 2y ago
I would be very curious to hear if anyone knows how the color names are assigned?.. Is there any link to frequencies/spectra of light or is it kinda arbitrary?
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by danwills 2y ago
Really great talk! I have so much love for the demoscene and how constraints like retro hardware or executable size pushes people to do amazing things like this! Great post! Shame it fell off the frontpage I reckon!
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by danwills 2y ago
I think there are threads in Michael Levin's work that suggest membrane voltage potential may be able to be 'encoded' to microtubule structures and converted back into voltage potentials later. I don't think it's fi
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by danwills 2y ago
I work in VFX and am also looking forward to AI-whole movies! I remember realising that full audio with video was coming, soon after the current AI-boom started.. and wondering whether 'traditional' digital VFX will still be a thi

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