misterman0

I'm fascinated by Chaitin's Constant and his use of the word "elegance". His ideas challenge my current belief system.

From the article:

>> [what is] the probability that a randomly constructed program will halt [?]

Where are you in life when this is a question that needs to be pondered? My bet is you're at a point where (when?) you question nature and/or human nature.

>> Real numbers are real

I meant to say, real numbers existed all along and were discovered, as opposed to being an invention.

What made me come to this conclusion? Here's Chaitin (paraphrased):

- run a process that through a series of operations produces a scalar, deterministically.

- alter that process.

- observe that the scalar has increased/decreased in value.

I.e. numbers are "real".

>> His precise theorem is this: Define "LISP program-size complexity" to be the size of a LISP subroutine that examines a proof, determines whether it is correct, and returns either the theorem established by the proof (if the proof is correct) or an error message (if the proof is incorrect). Then, given a formal axiomatic system A, with LISP program-size complexity N, A cannot be used to prove that any LISP expression longer than N + 356 characters is elegant.

Doesn't this in fact prove that numbers are discovered, not invented?

He defines elegance to be "N". He defines

N = 1

356 + N != N

Thus, real numbers are real.

>> there’s no time to recall

Why do you think that? A Boltzmann brain will immediately start to degrade but that does not mean there is zero time for thought.

If I were a Boltzmann brain, I would spend most if not all of my existence dwelling, contemplating, ruminating over the things that took me to my current point in space and time. Then I would quickly type something up and post it on a forum to confirm that I

OT, but his style is so dense in that book. Why did he write it like that? I've never been able to finish it. I find it almost impenetrable. The Hobbit I read with joy and ease even as a young child. In LOTR, sometimes after reading a paragraph I needed to pause to digest and to connect the dots. In The Silmarillion I need that pause after each clause.

This sucks, because I _need_ to know what's in the book.

I feel your bro science makes a lot of sense. I'm someone who's been identified as being bipolar and put on Lithium, which I quickly dropped (because it made me feel suicidal) and I instead turn to illegally acquired cannabis, which helps me to not feel the anxiety of not yet having solved a problem, something that these days freak the living shit out of me, if I'm not doped up.

No one is more influential than Google.

- Google

At my day job, the meme that won and now dominate is "the percieved performance of a SPA is greater than that of a non-SPA". My calls for making our backend more performant are ignored (and probably ridiculed, because of how out-of-the-loop I seem). React for the win!

I hardly belong anywhere, it sometimes seems.

The progress academics continuously make in NLP take us closer and closer to a local maxima that, when we reach it will be the mark of the longest and coldest AI winter ever experienced by man, because of how far we are from a global maxima and, progress made by academically untrained researchers will, in the end, be what melts the snow, because of how "out-of-the-current-AI-box" they are in their theories about language and intelligence in general.

Can we also have some sort of a scrumish gathering, ASAP, to declare the correct use of the word "definition", because sometimes it seems we use this word arbitrarily.

But is the parent really needed here? This discussion seems to have become "how dare you take a stance in this issue that we cannot fully understand"?

How about, while hungry they are sickened by the cruelty involved in producing food, but while full, they simply have other, more important things on their mind?

Or, instead of porting Lucene, just take its main concepts such as analysis, tokenization, an in-memory trie or binary search tree, query parser, term, query and collector and implement them the way _you_ would and using whatever bit maps and other file formats _you_ see fit when serializing to disk. If you iterate enough times you'll realize that as you have grown in your capacity of understanding these concepts your code base has turned into quite an approximation of Lucene, with the same flaws and the same strengths.

If you feel Lucene is close to a global, or at least a very high local optima, then by now you know search.

Now the real fun begins, because now you get to implement your own search model as either a Lucene model or one that is supported by your own code.

There are ten or twelve really interesting problems to solve before you can call it a day. Before you're done, you'll start to see everything and I do mean everything as a search problem. Use Wikipedia as your tutor but prepare yourself to have your current world view become completely transformed, because what's a search problem, really?

What's a word? What's a phrase? What's their meaning? What's this word's meaning in the context of these other words? What's a paragraph? What's the meaning of this paragraph, in the context of these other paragraphs? What are some of the patterns we can perceive in the binary representation of our data? What are some of the patterns we can perceive in the vector space representation of our data? The answers to these questions and more lies in the search model and implementing one is the most fascinating thing there is, because no one, not even Google's top engineer, knows what the correct set of questions are.

I think it's wrong to celebrate a company that claims 80% of what it is to be you, even when other companies claim even more. I question the reason behind us devoting ourselves to these undemocratic structures.