HN user
https://maxhodak.com
For large corporates and other entities of any size, the threat of the core of your infrastructure getting suddenly disabled because of something like this is going to be untenable. I predict the pressures for on-prem, offline access (whether by licensing weights or getting them in a restricted setting like TEE/CC) will be overwhelming and one the players will fill the need.
Personally knowing four people with GBM and not being an oncologist is exceptional and worrying. That feels like it should be raised to… someone. It is very possible something bad is happening and a commonality needs to be tracked down urgently.
Someone please make a player for these things for Vision Pro and/or Quest!
Some quick googling does seem to lend at least some basic credibility: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiktokhelp/s/Y4RCSS6jqk
Fun story I heard recently: apparently a bunch of pigs were placed on various small islands in the pacific in the 19th century so in case sailors were running out of food, they would have a known self-sustaining backup option.
Many of those pigs were completely isolated for over a hundred years and entirely missed out on the globalization of tons of infectious diseases.
A while ago a group of them were picked up and brought to a special protected refuge in New Zealand, where they are being used for artificial organ research (https://nzeno.nz/) basically for the reasons you highlight.
You should find a camp to join that can help coordinate tickets. (Whether Directed Group Sale or just having the network for overflow tickets.) Unless you’re prepared to spend $$$ and suffer through figuring out a lot to truly DIY it, it’ll be a much better experience to be part of a camp that knows what it is doing anyway.
Right, if our best regular conductors (used in your ohmmeter) are ~10^-8 and superconductivity is (by convention) less than 10^-11, one can see right away the simple regular methods won’t work and some cleverness is needed.
These pictures are my favorite of this phenomenon: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/01/2...
After running into these issues a few others and I wrote a typescript agent framework that I think significantly improves on LangChain in many ways: https://github.com/sciencecorp/buildabot/
It’s still very early days for software composing AI models and we almost certainly don’t have all the right metaphors yet. And I think there is a lot to be said for strong typing and simple, robust code!
Unfortunately I can’t share specifics about Neuralink. But the general points I will make are:
- in this field, monkeys are high value animals and experimenters will often work with the same ones for many years; they are not, generally speaking, a high throughput model.
- to the extent a company does need to go through a large number of animals for a study, the way this works is you start by figuring out all of the problems you might be worried about, and choosing some rarity threshold to verify absence of (safety against), and then animal numbers are derived from the power calculation. For example, to rule out a potential complication to no more than 1% of patients with 95% confidence… you need a lot of animals, especially considering multiple study arms. This is the values tradeoff we as a society have chosen to make and empower our regulators to enforce. There is often a negotiation for the least controversial species to use that will satisfy the scientific goals.
All I’m saying is that I think it will be challenging to produce a commercial product that achieves product-market fit for an application other than basic neuroscience research. It’s a cool tool but the practical drawbacks are myriad, and when you say “the brain is the single existing example of general intelligence,” that’s true of the whole thing, with glial ion buffering, ephaptic coupling, global oscillations, and so much more. We should be honest here: the system being studied in DishBrain is very far removed from that, so it’s tough to use the existence proof like you are doing.
I hope I don’t come across as uncivil, but you guys alienated a lot of people both in how you talked about “sentience” and also seemed to heavily hype this as totally novel.
I would never root against cool progress in neural engineering, but I would be curious as to what you think your first big product will be based on this. Past attempts have usually ended up pivoting to stuff like artificial noses.
Edit: I tried to ignore it but the bad faith attack on neuralink, which, look, I have complicated feelings about too — you should know the animal use data in the press is extremely out of context (to the point of simply being wrong) and also neuralink has had zero chimpanzees in its entire history.
Interestingly, this is not a new result; people have been doing stuff like this since at least the 90s, most notably Steve Potter at GA Tech and Tom DeMarse in Florida.[1][2] (I built a shitty counterstrike aimbot using a cultured neural network in college based on their papers.)
There was a lot of coverage back in 2004 when DeMarse hooked it up to a flight simulator and claimed it was flying an F-22 [3] (lol, but I don't blame him too much...)
The basic idea is that if you culture neurons on an electrode array (not that hard) you can pick some electrodes to be "inputs" and some to be "outputs" and then when you stimulate both ends the cells wire together more or less according to Hebb's rule[4] and can learn fairly complex nonlinear mappings.
On the other hand, these cultures have essentially no advantage over digital computers and modern machine learning models. Once you get through the initial cool factor, you realize it's a pain to keep the culture perfectly sterile, fed, supplied with the right gases, among many other practical problems, for a model which is just much less powerful, introspectable, and debuggable than is possible on digital computers.
[1] https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/f/516/fi...
[2] https://potterlab.gatech.edu/labs/potter/animat/
$10B isn’t even in the ballpark. We should be willing to pay $1T to fully onshore TSMC, if that were magically an option.
Is there anything actually released here? Just a paper? No weights, not even code?! No interactive product of any kind? The degree of Google’s inability to actually ship anything even now is totally mindblowing
Imagine you want to calculate what frequencies are present in a sound. At the width of the time window you are looking at goes to zero, you just have a single point. There's no frequency content of a single point! It's just a number. As you look at a longer time window, you can see what frequencies are present over the window, but you lose some sense of time "resolution" over which that is meaningful. This is fundamental and inherent in the Fourier transform.
Put differently, you can't have a signal that is simultaneously both "band-limited" and "time-limited". Other conjugate variables, like position and momentum, work the same way.
For the prosumer smart home, I highly recommend going with the low end industrial automation (ie https://automationdirect.com, https://findernet.com, etc) rather than “IoT” brands. Way more powerful, everything is interoperable, and the business model is much simpler. No phoning home.
The new Bill Campbell.
Zelenskyy's political party is essentially a PR firm: he became famous by starring in the _Servant of the People_ TV show playing the Ukrainian president, and then after the show ended the production company Kvartal 95 [1] became the Servant of the People party [2]. I bet this is a big reason they're so amazing at communications - the party was literally born out of a hit TV studio!
What is he even arguing here? That he has been cheated out of some kind of credit? Credit for what? Afaict he has never actually shown something novel based on his ideas to work in a way that has mattered.
How many days, cumulatively, has Gary Marcus held the SOTA record for any well known machine learning task?
I mean ... yes?
Honestly Peter stepping down from the board was a larger signal to me. But it’s just the totality of the data points.
I increasingly believe that Facebook’s pivot to Meta will end up going down as one of the biggest misses in the history of business. The metaverse is a real idea yes - but strapping a phone to your face and walking through your coffee table isn’t it. Especially not with a mediocre centralized FB owned “virtual world” where they inflict heavy taxes and content moderation. Facebook has neglected its core businesses for years and seems to have real trouble shipping hardware with reasonable spending.
Now they’re scrambling to ship an iPhone alternative to get out from under Apple policy, but it really seems like they’re on constant defense now and have a very tough lift to actually get something truly mass market. I would be shocked if Apple, Microsoft or Google were irrelevant in 2030, but it is really possible (if not yet necessarily probable) that Facebook/Meta might actually just not exist in the same kind of way anymore then.
When they first announced the rebrand I actually thought it could be genius and that there’s no way they could have been doing it without a really well considered, heavily backstopped plan… but epic strategic miscalculation seems to be going around a lot this year.
Rome wasn't found upon rebellion, it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america
The founding of Rome involved one brother killing the other over a hill… and if you don’t think they had large scale civil war, you simply haven’t read Roman history
I get that Shackleton is an icon of persistence, but counterpoint, his voyages and business ventures mostly ended in failure, and at one point while stranded in the ice he shot the ship's cat which he thought was a 'weakling'. I get he survived harsh conditions, but I'm not sure he's a role model to look up to.
I just hope that moxie's replacement is someone with as strong a reputation for fighting for the principles at stake and the ability to defend them. How many people could have written the Cellebrite blog post? Probably not many. The hidden pressures on Signal staff must be enormous, as likely the the world's single most valuable surveillance target.
You could check a lot more than 1B address per second.
This raises a really interesting question. Though it’s essentially impossible to figure out the key for any given wallet… if you download the blockchain and generate private keys as fast as you can, how often do you find one that has a balance? Will there just be some ongoing very low but decidedly nonzero risk of all of your assets vanishing some day if you’re not using multisig?
Visualizing is something that we all think we can do normally... we are actually terrible at it
leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity
Want a really trippy realization? All you ever see is brain activity! Sounds obvious, but most people haven't really internalized it. That's all regular perception, which feels totally real and solid, is. The psychedelic just gave you a greater ability to volitionally influence the percepts.
Donuts isn't a registrar, they're a company that got setup when ICANN started allowing anyone to apply to create gTLDs, and they really innovated on setting up tons of them for profit. They own the .company TLD.