Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
This is so alien to me. Why not plug into the machine matrix when out in the great outdoors enjoying sublime nature? Why not!
Comment · 1 year ago
Given the number of paying subscribers versus total users of ChatGPT, this isn't the case.
Comment · 1 year ago
> Let's hope Trump's administration presents a more EU friendly view on this issue.

Is that likely?

Comment · 1 year ago
I mean HH is an elaboration of the LIF with the addition of several equations for the various ion channels, but yeah I see what you mean.
Comment · 1 year ago
So, if I understand correctly they're using Hodgkin-Huxley LIF neurons but trained end-to-end in a graph neural network. Through training to reproduce the neural data, the network learns the underlying connectivity of the neural system?

This seems very cool, but I'm surprised this kind of thing attracts VC money! I'm also skeptical how well this would scale due to the inherently underdetermined nature of neural recordings, but I've only skimmed the PDF so may be missing their goals and approach.

Comment · 2 years ago
This feels naive, especially given what we now know about Open AI.
Comment · 2 years ago
None of these are negative results in the sense of being a 'null' hypothesis?

In the language of hypothesis testing you have your null and alternative hypotheses.

So for alternative hypothesis that the sun comes up in the morning, the null hypothesis would simply be that the sun does not come up in the morning.

Each of the negative results, reads to me like a separate 'alternative' hypothesis.

Comment · 2 years ago
I don't think that's entirely fair. There does seem to be something distinct about mental disorders - namely, they are defined by the symptoms.

With physical ailments, symptoms are surface manifestations of an underlying physical cause. For example, fever and fatigue in flu are the result of the influenza virus. Crucially, you can have the physical cause without symptoms (such as in the presymptomatic period), so the two are dissociable. Even where the physical cause is unknown, there's still this symptom-cause distinction.

In the case of mental disorders, they're essentially defined by the symptoms. To have depression is to be depressed. To have anxiety is to be anxious. What would it even mean to have depression without being depressed?

While on some level these are physical in a sense (insofar as they result from brain activity), I don't necessarily think we should think about their cause in the same way as a physical ailment.

More to the point, there's a much more obvious sociocultral element to mental disorders. There's no 'objective' line between being sad and being depressed so while we clearly can and should treat depression, it seems to be very different from other diseases.

None of this is to take away from the real suffering people undergo with these disorders. I just don't think that treating them through a strict biological-pathological lens is as useful as people think it is.

Comment · 2 years ago
Sure, but a direct forwards pass of the book would surely require more compute than simply loading and setting the hidden state?

The second doesn't require any matrix operations, it's just setting some values.

Comment · 2 years ago
Normally, the LLM is composed of multiple transformer blocks, where each block consists of the (mutli-head) attention and fully-connected feedforward components. These are then stacked on top of each other to give the final output of the network.
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
I have to say I can't think of a worse outcome than Wikipedia becoming advertising- or subscription-funded.

At best, it will be less useable and more liable to influence once its source of funding is at the behest of advertisers. And with a subscription model, presumably it would then be pay-to-play which is antithetical to the idea of Wikipedia in the first place.

I also don't agree that Wikipedia has to a significant degree departed from "impartiality, openness and academic freedom", or at least I'd need some sources/examples.

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