laughingman2
Joined 9 years ago
Karma
228
Submissions
147
Member since
Dec 30
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
by James Bridle. James pulls an brilliant move of using various examples in technology as a tool to help us rethink our place in nature & reconnect with the (beyond human) world.
He weaves a fascinating tale with myriads of threads such as Cybernetics, Neural Nets, Internet, Random Numbers, Analog computers, Slime molds, Sortition vs Voting, Mycelium, Mysticism in animals, Turing machines, Personhood of non-humans etc.
A nice summary to whet your appetite, https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/07/more-than-human/#umwelt
Comment · 3 years ago
Search/Reasoning/Inference time compute, however you phrase it is still essential. You need search to improve upon learning to work in novel situations.
Comment · 3 years ago
Can't unseen the amount of double negatives in this article.
Comment · 3 years ago
I am working on RL and robotics. I came across Levin in Lex's podcast. And then went on a binge of his other podcast appearences. I agree totally with you, I would very much like to build agents that adapt to different circumstances like "simple organisms". I am not familiar with biology, but I plan to build competence here to follow Levin's work to a point that I could potentially collabrate with biologists or learn from their work. Any suggestions (books etc) that would be salient towards this goal is much appreciated!
Comment · 3 years ago
Have you checked RSSM approach in DreamerV1,V2,V3,PlaNet? It uses deterministic (GRU hidden state) and discrete stochastic latent states. The deterministic and stochastic (sampled) latent state are used to predict the next state. I think the stochastic state might help with your problem a bit.
Comment · 3 years ago
One interesting research group tackling this question is ex-computer engineer, currently biologist Prof. Micahel Levine's group.
They built xenobots (biological robots) from frog cells which are not evolutionarily programmed to do tasks which they accomplished. Their research in part deals with emergence of agency at multi-cellular level. And they want to get at the fundamental signatures of what makes some collection of agents into a new single agent at an higher level.
Checkout, https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c
And a new research paper (inhavent had the time to read yet) on this question of how coherent higher order agents emerge from underlying sub-agents.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0268...
Comment · 3 years ago
Worth checking out farcaster (farcaster.xyz). They are working towards a solution where things are "sufficiently decentralised". The server admins can't prevent users from following one another etc.
https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...
Comment · 3 years ago
Farcaster(farcaster.xyz) is working towards sufficiently decentralised social network (https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...). It aims to have a model where server admins don't get the power to prevent users from following one another.
Comment · 5 years ago
Does apple even encrypt the actual image data on device? Their system document says "payload = visual derivative + neural hash" and only that is encrypted with a secondary level encryption. And they didn't go through with e2ee for icloud last I heard. This elaborate system makes no sense if they very well could have done it in cloud.
It feels like elaborate privacy theatre trojan horse to introduce in device surveillance.
Comment · 5 years ago
His narrative pushing feels nefarious to me. I think he is using his new tech podcast (all-in) as a new platform to build a image of a pragmatic do-gooder billionare (to whomever who would buy that shtick), spin a new narrative and test out few ideas like (remove capital gains tax, he running for governorship) for approval.
If GME debacle taught us (again?) anything, it's that markets are moved by narratives. And those raccoons who control the narrative can move the market towards their favour.
Great post on epsilon theory on this https://www.epsilontheory.com/hunger-games/
Comment · 5 years ago
I have experience in deep learning research/engineering in NLP and am getting into ml for robotics.
Really excited for this course + hardware. I think one top value for me personally is that more time could be spent on hacking the ml algorithms, replicating and comparing with real research work (https://www.duckietown.org/archives/63665).
I live in India and find the shipping costs of MOOC Founder's Edition Kit (369 USD + 49 USD) a bit expensive. Just the Duckiebot MOOC Founder's Edition costs 14 USD to ship.idk what custom duty would the govt put on it :(.
1. Is there any alternative to shipping it? 2. Is there anyway to build similar bot from parts for the course? 3. I guess, since you're non-profit it's made such that it's cost effective rather than for profit. It would be great if you describe why you chose each of the component for the current bot.
Comment · 6 years ago
If uber/lyft doesn't allow their drivers to price themselves and not treat them as employers, they are more or less a cartel rather than a marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of a service.
Maybe they can show a optimal price and allow drivers to change that and charge drivers for the customers they get from the platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTXXYi75QCU
He has lots of good threads distilling his research. https://twitter.com/rao2z