popcorncolonel's comments

On: New Nick Bostrom Paper: Optimal Timing for Superintelligence [pdf]

[popcorncolonel]

Individual particle interactions are not chaotic. Simulating them one timestep at a time would take linear time in the number of particles.

They're only chaotic if you treat them in aggregate, which a superintelligence wouldn't do. It would be less lossy to get all the positions of the particles and figure out exactly what each one would do.

Something has to compute the universe, since it is currently running...

[jibal → popcorncolonel]

A superintelligence isn't a genie or magic wand ... it can't make a computation that cannot be completed in a feasible amount of time run any faster. This is precisely what makes systems chaotic--they are fully deterministic but not predictable in a timeframe shorter than their execution.

And no, nothing has to compute the universe ... e.g., the path of the Earth through space can be computed, but it will follow that path as a consequence of the forces acting on it whether it is computed or not.

On: Why GPT-3 Matters

[popcorncolonel]

Not necessarily. There have been a number of papers trying to emphasize the generalization power of a network rather than "it got a SOTA number", and so leave off fine tuning results. Because that would distract from the point of the paper.

On: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

[popcorncolonel]

Do you really think most smartphone users look at the URL anymore? Or even know what a URL is?

From the non-technical people I've talked to, the answer is no, they don't know what a URL is, and that was happening before AMP came around.

[acdha → popcorncolonel]

You might want to back that up with research: people don’t look at full URLs but that’s exactly why it’s so important that the highly-prominent domain name display is accurate.

[TLightful → popcorncolonel]

Are you sh!tting me?!!?

Had enough of HN ...

This place is bullsh!t.

Ban me.

On: U.S. arrests former Green Beret, son, in connection with Ghosn escape from Japan

[popcorncolonel]

Ah our favorite third world countries, like China, Japan, and Israel.

On: Why does the Wuhan coronavirus genome end in 33 A’s?

[popcorncolonel]

What's the point of this comment? Isn't this pretty much exactly what's in the answer linked?

[Yetanfou → popcorncolonel]

The generally accepted term for this type of comment is "karma whoring", an attempt to garner upvotes for the erudite and enlightening explanation of the phenomenon by quoting the article itself. This works for those who suffer from 'TL,DR' but it fails on those who actually read before they comment.

On: Mathematician Wins $3M Prize for 'Magic Wand Theorem'

[popcorncolonel]

Great visualization, thanks!

On: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

[popcorncolonel]

This article comes at the perfect time for me, while I'm about to choose a tool to read Japanese sentences!

On: Ask HN: What are you thankful for?

[popcorncolonel]

That's great! It feels so good to be doing something you want to do.

On: Mathematician-M.D. claims to have solved the 110-year-old Lindelöf hypothesis

[popcorncolonel]

Pretty much all of the relationship to practical stuff in papers like this related to the RH are "it gives us information about the prime numbers, and those are used in cryptography".

It's really just about getting people to perk their ears up rather than true implications about crypto.

On: My account is sending spam emails

[popcorncolonel]

I checked that and the only one that had email access was my Windows desktop. This led me to assume my PC had a virus, until I saw this thread.