michael_nielsen

7 ms·

31.
by michael_nielsen 3y ago
It's not a biography of Oppenheimer, it's a history of the making of the atomic bomb. Unsurprisingly, the parts of the book that deal with Oppenheimer - only a fraction of the book - are concerned with his involvement in the maki
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
From the HN guidelines: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
33.
by michael_nielsen 3y ago
I've heard that Murray Gell-Mann said of this book that "Jim Gleick has written a biography about Feynman's genius in order to illustrate his own". A bit backhanded, perhaps, but it captures the essence well: it's
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
He played key roles in the development of backprop, ReLU, LayerNorm, dropout, GPU-assisted deep learning, including AlexNet, was the mentor of OpenAI's Chief Scientist, and contributed many, many other things. These techniques are cru
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
You asked for examples of existing harms from AI misalignment, and now seem to define AI misalignment so that, by definition, it excludes all current systems. So tautologically the answer to your question will be "no". Brian Chr
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by michael_nielsen 4y ago
Your comment is amazing in its lack of empathy. Everything you write can be true, and this can still be disastrous for some individual, whose life may be badly damaged.
37.
Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits (1965) [pdf](cs.utexas.edu)
148 points by michael_nielsen 4y ago|18 comments
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by michael_nielsen 4y ago
I found this a surprisingly interesting discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism It includes many historical references, and an example from 1974 which may be the first use of the term; the definition giv
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by michael_nielsen 4y ago
It's textbook whataboutism.
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Adversarial Collaboration(edge.org)
185 points by michael_nielsen 4y ago|207 comments
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by michael_nielsen 4y ago
Feynman said the first thing seriously in a superb in-depth interview with the historian Charles Weiner. The second is a facetious quote from someone else (Murray Gell-Mann, who seemed rather irritated with the question, as I recall). As f
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by michael_nielsen 4y ago
You evidently didn't read the article.
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by michael_nielsen 4y ago
Curious: does anyone use this? As far as I can tell the Readme contains no pointers to anyone using the software.
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by michael_nielsen 5y ago
No worries. I'm glad you're experimenting! For myself - and I know others respond very differently - I usually want everything in an essay to serve the overarching point. So I find fictional asides pretty distracting. There are
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by michael_nielsen 5y ago
As others have pointed out (e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30324567 ), the style in this article is not what I had in mind when I coined the phrase "discovery fiction". It also has nothing to do with
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by michael_nielsen 5y ago
When I read it I presumed he was using anomie in the sense of Durkheim, usually taken to mean a kind of listlessness or alienation, from one's work and society. I really like: "the anomie and the ecstasy are inseparable".
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by michael_nielsen 5y ago
They seemed fine to me. If I was his editor I'd have changed encomium, but it's not terrible. Anomie and Antipodean seem well used. In particular, I enjoyed and found thought-provoking his replacement of the cliche "agony an
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by michael_nielsen 5y ago
Right - if the paper is really good, it might take a few years to understand. Most papers can be read in < 10 seconds ("not interesting, next"). Most pretty good papers can be read in 5-10 minutes. Very good papers might take
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by michael_nielsen 7y ago
This seems like a thoroughly detestable use of HN: a gratuitous, mean, and almost certainly uninformed (you spelled his name incorrectly) judgement of another human being as "overrated" or "underrated". Why not use your
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by michael_nielsen 7y ago
Thanks, no worries. Sorry to hear you're feeling a bit fed up with Anki / parts of Med School.
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by michael_nielsen 7y ago
Glad you like my work. To quote the essay: "these kinds of results should be taken with a grain of salt. The mnemonic medium is in its early days, has many deficiencies, and needs improvement in many ways... is this medium really work
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by michael_nielsen 8y ago
The transcript appears to be "highlights" (i.e., excerpts with gaps between), and so it wouldn't be surprising if it jumps around.
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by michael_nielsen 8y ago
Glad you enjoyed the essays. On LaTeX - I sometimes cut-and-paste screenshots, but usually just write raw LaTeX or pseudo-LaTeX (i.e., something LaTeX-like that wouldn't compile, but is easier to read). It'd be much, much better
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by michael_nielsen 8y ago
I mean diagonalizable by a unitary matrix. Fixed.
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by michael_nielsen 9y ago
Not quite true. I can think of two well funded people in 1995-2000 who either believed (or implied to funders) that scalable quantum computing was plausible within 10 years. But those people were outliers. You're correct that it was a
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by michael_nielsen 9y ago
It does. It also works in VR.
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by michael_nielsen 9y ago
Yes. Chalktalk was the main inspiration for that project.
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Chalktalk – A digital presentation and communication language(github.com)
112 points by michael_nielsen 9y ago|8 comments
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Portraits of Imaginary People(mtyka.github.io)
86 points by michael_nielsen 9y ago|15 comments
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4D Toys: visualizing in the fourth dimension(4dtoys.com)
19 points by michael_nielsen 9y ago|1 comments

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