amatic

I don't know if I can "will" myself to go on autopilot. It seems like if there is a conflict in some meta-reasoning level, in values, life principles or general beliefs, I might be experiencing more depression-like symptoms until I try to resolve the conflict. Sometimes I can resolve the conflict myself, reflecting or journaling, and sometimes I need a professional therapist to guide the process. So, I'd say it's not that reflection leads to depression; more likely it is depression that leads to reflection, or some internal conflict that causes both depression and increased reflection. Then reflection by itself does not consistently solve the problem, but only a specific kind of reflection.

At the moment, Deep Think is only available with the ULTRA subscription ($250 per month).

There is a mistake right in the beginning, not sure how it affects the conclusions yet. The variables given are S - System variable (some kind of disturbance), Z is the outcome ( a controlled variable) and R is the action of a controller. The causal relations between them are S affects Z, S affects R, and R affects Z.

The archetypal example for this is something like a thermostat. The variable S represents random external temperature fluctuations. The regulator R is the thermostat, which measures these fluctuations and takes an action (such as putting on heating or air conditioning) based on the information it takes in. The outcome Z is the resulting temperature of the room, which depends both on the action taken by the regulator, and the external temperature.

The problem here is that the regulator R does not measure external temperature. It just measures the controlled variable - the temperature Z, so the causal arrow should go from Z to R too, and the arrow from S to R does not exist.

This is not new ground. See Cybernetics

Control theory and cybernetics were supposed to transform psychology in a much more dramatic and all-encompassing way, as argued by W.T. Powers, for example[1]. In modern psychology, the concept of negative feedback control is treated like a metaphore, a vague connection between machines and living things (with the possible exception of the field of motor control) . If psychology would take the concept seriously, then most research methods in the field would need to be changed. Less null-hypothesis testing, more experiments applying disturbances to selected variables to see if they are controlled by a participant or not. That is the meaning I'm getting from the call to revolution.

[1] https://www.iapct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Powers1978....

Not seeing the revolution here. Most of the ideas here have been seen before. Did I miss something?

The reviewer is a psychologist, with some interesting opinions and criticisms of psychology. My impression is that applying control theory to study human behavior should be the revolutionary thing, for psychology.

I'm not sure I had the same issue, it is a different laptop, but it would not go to sleep. The current solution is to make it hybernate instead of sleep.

Every time you order an "expresso", an Italian falls off a vespa.

The scientific community, or the ministry of science of some country, or a university - might find that paying for peer review, for example, might be more effective in promoting good science than paying for publication.

This sounds amazing! Are there any metrics on how often different models pass tests? Has someone used a similar process to finetune an LLM?

Where is the author's name? Strange editorial. Neuroscientists should "involve participants"? What if they cannot speak, like that guy Broca's area was found in?

>Without a doubt, human neuroscience is entering a new and important era. However, it can fulfil its goals of improving human experiences only when study participants are involved in discussions about the future of such research.

I think it's just that bouba has o, and kiki has k. Also the b is half-round, and I is more spiky. Visual differences, not auditory. edit: You make a round shape with your mouth in o

Check out the Analog Museum https://www.analogmuseum.org/

I started in 1934, [... ] At that time, the computing industry was limited to mechanical calculators using the decimal system.

That seems a bit biased toward discrete systems. Engineers and scientists of the time used mechanical and (later) electric analog computers, and they were more powerful than the new discrete systems, for most purposes. For example: Helmut Hoelzer’s Fully Electronic Analog Computer used in the German V2 (A4) rockets https://www.cdvandt.org/Hoelzer%20V4.pdf (text in German, but has some pictures and diagrams)

In a controlled environment - where the object to pick up, for example, is always in exactly the same location - you could do that. If there is any variation in the location of the object, you need vision to localize it each time. You need a camera, maybe two, and probably some kind of 3d perception, which is an unsolved problem at the moment (well, not solved in a general way, there are some solutions for specific objects).

That is also a difficult problem - how do you know beforehand, that a problem is worthwhile? That someone else thinks it is important? Or how high is "ambitious" if you never tried to do a thing? There is a lot of luck in that system.

Well, it is not "brain activity alone", there are always light waves, forces, chemicals, and a lot of other things, acting on the brain from "outside" of the body, through some very strange receptor routs, but the "information" somehow travels. And we know 100% that for a lot of receptors, the firing rates depend on the intensity of the stimulus. So, we can see a direct correlation between, say, an applied force and golgi tendon organ firing. And at the same time, we discovered some types of radiation that we cannot see, and yet they can influence distant objects. I think that is pretty weird. So, we found a lot of direct correlations between brain activity and the outside world. Is there some need for an additional invisible field, not covered in current physics?

I don't think it was ever proven in an experiment that an out of body experience or an NDE got some information from the real world, as opposed to information originating in the person's "brain". I don't know, but before there is confirmation in a controlled experiment, I just don't believe them. Much more likely is that their information is imagined and their certainty is a feeling they should not trust.

That's interesting, I've never heard of Milton Friedman's thermostat, but there is a procedure called "The test for the controlled variable" intended to find if a system is controlling one variable or another, invented by W.T. Powers sometime in the fifties, I think. You make a hypothesis about what is the controlled variable, then you apply a disturbance. If the variable stays relatively undisturbed, the correlation between the disturbance and the controlled variable will be nearly zero.

That will solve the criminality problem, but not the drug problem.

That is exactly right. The drug problem, like the alcohol problem, on the level of personal suffering should be addressed by other means, like support groups, therapy, ban of advertising, ban on selling to minors, etc. It will not stop the drugs, but it will remove the criminality from the production and distribution. Don't you think the tradeoff was worth it for alcohol?

There is Soroka 1954 - Analog methods in computation and simulation. Includes mechanical and electrical analogs

Could you share some references, like a recent review or consensus? I've seen different takes on the causes of megafauna extinction, and one story is that the extinction lines up pretty well with the arrival of humans to North America. But recent evidence seems to put the arrival of humans to a few thousand years before the Younger Dryas?

"what's so special about x ?" Does f(x) mean one function, whereas f(y) means a completely different function?

This looks like the difference between parameters of a function and arguments. In the definition, you have the parameter x, used internaly and, when calling the function you use an argument - located in the calling context. In python: def f(x): return 2*x ## x is a parameter x = 3 y = f(x) # x in an argument

For partial derivatives, it may be ok to use 1 and 2 to show they are the first and second parameter, but maybe they could also be named by some convention, like x and y or alpha and beta or whatever

A tuned PID loop should follow a moving target with no issues and no advanced control theory. Here is a similar example from a Lego robot with a pixi camera [1]. The pixi camera recognizes the ball location in 2D, sends to arduino. There are two independent loops, one keeping the ball in the center of the horizontal visual field, by rotating the camera left-right, and the other is keeping the ball in the center vertically, by tilting the camera via two levers. One thing you might notice is that the ball sometimes goes too fast for the robot to follow - this is due to the limitations of the power of the motors, and the rate of sampling in the loop. Games usually don't have the limitation of the power, but I suppose the rate of sampling and updating the loop could be limited by the game loop. In that case, it might be useful to update the PID multiple times per loop.

Other than that, there are some tricks to make the loops more stable. Limiting the error can be useful. Limiting the action of the actuator. Smoothing the action of the actuator is very useful. I tend to think of PD loops as damped springs. The P term is like the spring constant, and the D term is like friction or viscosity. The first one determines the speed of reaching the goal, and the second one reduces the oscillations when reaching the goal. I rarely use the I term.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_IZb0RJN_U

I'm getting close to 40, have been studying for the driving exam since last May. It's terribly boring and tedious, and I guess that attitude is not helping, but it doesn't seem that much different than studying for an exam in my teens or twenties. I don't think there is any escape from it sucking at times, so, just, you know, make peace with that. Also, I'm not sure I'm buying any of that "plasticity" talk.

I've been thinking about the same concept, and trying to find a way to introduce analog computing as something that goes together with the story in the game. Analog computing was historically used to solve differential equations, and differential equations can describe most of physics, so one idea was to make a "history of scientific modelling" as a game, where you take the role of say, Newton, and try to find an equation of some orbital motion, given a table of observations.

I'm also building a circuit simulator (stuck on that for a while, tbh), although not necessarily simulating electronic analog computers, but rather the computational principles that could also be applied to mechanical circuits, or just numerical computation.

As for abstraction, I really like the approach of Pure Data, you can group some nodes into more abstract ones.

If these drugs cure trauma-derived addictive behaviors, that's just so extremely interesting, mechanistically.

So much this. I think going off semaglutide makes the weight come back, so it would seem that semaglutide doesn't change the circuits of trauma and addiction permanently, but it does something to them. The theory that obesity is a result of food addiction is pretty revolutionary, and now having alcoholism confirmed to respond to the same drug really supports the theory. Additionaly, if both are caused by childhood or development traumas, that opens other treatment options, and maybe some forms of change in how we as a society look at addictions. But maybe I'm going too far.

My problem is how to stay in science, and outside of academia? Not sure.

When I was growing up, in eastern Europe, we had a small potato plot and every few days during the growing season, we would go to the plot, scrape the little red eggs from the leaves, and hand-pick the larva and adult beetles, then crush everything with our feet. I'm guessing this wouldn't scale too well for larger producers, but seemed to be working well for us.

Do they also use assembler in HFT?

Apparently, there were horses in the Americas, but they went extinct about 12k years ago, along with the other megafauna. What I understand is that different images could have been made in multiple time periods, from the first inhabitants up to today.