/computing/

The third-worldification of the global internet: are private network enclaves the answer?
Following recent anon discourse on the general third-worldification of the internet, I've been pondering potential solutions.... (yggdrasil-network.github.io) posted 2mo ago with 31 replies received politics technology computing

The third-worldifica received

Urbit is a prime illustration of the limits of the theorycel.... 2mo ago received

Urbit is a prime ill received

I could absolutely imagine this being something real, but as others have pointed out in the Urbit case, architecture astronautics like implementing a Yggdrasil style overlay network must absolutely be entirely abstracted away from the people actually using... 2mo ago received

I could absolutely i received

This describes almost exactly what is explored in this: https://thebutlerian.com/posts/a_case_study.html... 4w ago received

This describes almos received

Curtis Yarvin's New Discussion App
A long description from Curtis Yarvin of the discussion app ("Moses") that he is proposing the Urbit Foundation build. It competes with Tlon's Messenger app. I'd be interested in assessments of the proposal, both from Urbiters and non-Urbiters.... (x.com) posted 2mo ago with 9 replies received technology computing

Curtis Yarvin's New received

Some context here is that Curtis was recently fired from his role by the Urbit Foundation's Executive Director. The UF board then fired the ED and replaced him with Curtis. There's presently a vote to now reform the board here: https://master-malwyl.cypher... 2mo ago received

Some context here is received

There are only 16384 two-syllable nyms. There are 128 syllables. When we run out, we will get three syllable nyms. Some day there may be a recycling scheme if we had a way to reap the old ones. But just having them grow is fine too. 2mo ago received

There are only 16384 received

Democracy After the Bitter Lesson: Advisory Voting
Democracy has problems: the masses are low-information, voting systems get captured by parties and perverse incentives, voting becomes crudely ethnic or handout oriented, and giving everyone a slice of power just opens things up to manipulation and sybil a... posted 2mo ago with 10 replies received technology computing supercoordination

Democracy After the received

I think "projecting the wisdom of the crowd onto the vector of the sovereign's will" is beautifully put, but I'd love you to justify your core narrowing assumption a bit more - the question of sovereignty is the important one! Democracy without sovereignty... 2mo ago received

I think "projecting received

the backend is non-anonymous. You put in your email, it creates a persistent account that accumulates your reputation. I will at some point make it so identity data is destroyed once the reputation data is accumulated. But with occasional changes to the ar... 2mo ago received

the backend is non-a received

Study claims -20% productivity loss from use of AI tools. Huge if true.
They tried to measure how much LLM assistance actually speeds up technical work but it came out negative! Programmers thought they would get +20%, they actually got -20%. What do you guys make of this?... (x.com) posted 2mo ago with 4 replies received superintelligence computing

Study claims -20% pr received

The study is never sound. The results never generalize.... 2mo ago received

The study is never s received

Do we need a study to really know this? Search your feelings, you know it to be true 2mo ago received

Do we need a study t received

Email deliverability improvements and crushing the bots. Should sofiechan have an IQ captcha?
As many of you know, it has been annoying to log in to sofiechan as the code may not arrive or may end up in spam folder. Yesterday we finally looked at the logs and realized hundreds of login emails were being sent and only about 3% resulted in successful... (iqcaptcha.us.to) posted 2mo ago with 2 replies received meta computing

Email deliverability received

Well you seemed to have passed our new captcha alright, but you're going to fail the written portion of the test if you're not careful. I'm inclined to accommodate you because I can tell who you are from your writing style and you are a good friend, but yo... 2mo ago received

Well you seemed to h received

Liquid (Gl)ass and the future of technical aesthetics
(God forgive me for posting an OP link to macrumors)... (www.macrumors.com) posted 2mo ago with 3 replies received gnon computing

Liquid (Gl)ass and t received

So let's imagine future sofiechan in 3d cyberspace. I imagine it as a city one can explore. Tags are neighborhoods. Threads or posts are buildings. Position is calculated by linguistic topical proximity. This could be styled with infinite character like so... 2mo ago received

So let's imagine fut received

The right abstraction for text itself, as we have figured out over many hundreds of years, is glyphs on a page. The page is a thin, flat featureless surface on which text and images are laid out. It ideally has minimal physicality of its own except maybe t... 2mo ago received

The right abstractio received

Life, Intelligence, and Consciousness are NP-Complete?
A know what you're thinking: anon's gone all kooky mashing together a bunch of mysterious things, wrapping it in some gold foil, and worshipping it as an idol. Maybe, maybe not. Hear me out.... posted 2mo ago with 16 replies received technology gnon computing

Life, Intelligence, received

An off-topic comment but important to bring up: I saw the best minds of my generation get nerdsniped for years by category theory. Complexity theory, especially after attending Charles’ talk, seems to me to be another one of these ‘highly ontological u... 2mo ago received

An off-topic comment received

You're on to something, but I think B-SAT is the wrong problem to work with. If you want to apply modern deep learning to an NP-complete problem that can serve as general target for problem translations, you want a problem that has a natural metric on solu... 2mo ago received

You're on to somethi received

The sofiechan tag system: Name your tags or the AI will do it for you
We've been slaving away for you in the code mines over the past few weeks trying to polish up the sofiechan tag system and UI, and we have some new gems. I'll focus on the tag system stuff today:... posted 2mo ago with 2 replies received meta technology computing

The sofiechan tag sy received

I should have called this post "the tag apocalypse". We're going to be in tag chaos for a while as the autotagger is fast and opinionated and we're not yet in equilibrium with it, so it's going to do things like rewrite the tags on all posts as it figures ... 2mo ago received

I should have called received

Ideas for tag renaming and ghost tag lifecycle
Hey anons. We've got the tag word frequency stuff running smooth now in the lab, but we need to add tag renaming to really make it useful. Let's talk about how to do that.... posted 3mo ago with 3 replies received meta computing

Ideas for tag renami received

This is true. I agree it's good for a chuckle first time around, but then you start wondering why there's greentext in the middle of the page. I also wouldn't exactly call it elegant to have such a large amount of army green next to the hierarchical tags i... 3mo ago received

This is true. I agre received

We're liking it with grey preview style quoted words. Fits better with the style of index pages while still getting the point across. Will probably randomize the selection too. 3mo ago received

We're liking it with received

Towards a supercoordination protocol
Inspired by >>2513 and >>2589 I have been thinking about what a software implementation of a supercoordination protocol might look like. Specifically, this is based on the signal/impact model presented in >>2570. I would be interested to hear what other an... posted 3mo ago with 4 replies received computing supercoordination

Towards a supercoord received

Hard agree. That remains an unsolved problem for me. I imagine a world where that process is semi-automated via APIs -- as a crude example, maybe liking a tweet automatically registers a signal/impact loop with a very small positive weight.... 3mo ago received

Hard agree. That rem received

Designing a word frequency auto-tagger for sofiechan
Let's talk about the upcoming auto-tagger architecture. All it has to do is produce affinity scores between threads and tags, and our now existent smart tag selector will select a high-affinity set of tags that also make a good index. To do this, it's goin... posted 3mo ago with 3 replies received meta technology computing

Designing a word fre received

It works! But slow as all hell. Right now we fully rebuild the "taste machine", which now includes this word frequency tagger, about once a minute. That used to do 50 iterations of the expectation-maximization algorithm we use to refine everyone's tastes, ... 3mo ago received

It works! But slow a received

Supercoordination: A Specific Strategy
How do we get there from here? How might we grow pockets of supercoordination even as AI rapidly becomes more capable and the people behind it consolidate their power, proactively countering this precise type of threat?... posted 7mo ago with 7 replies received computing supercoordination

Supercoordination: A received

Sure, I wanted to continue the discussion in >>2513 which this thread was branched from. The message was something along the lines of 'this thread is too long or your account is too new, post elsewhere first'. 3mo ago received

Sure, I wanted to co received

Alt-social failures, coolness, and Good work
The central issue with all these 'alt-social' sites is coolness. A quick binary measure of coolness for websites is the existence of an /about page. Radiopaper has one, as does Uptrust, so they go immediately in the bin.... posted 4mo ago with 9 replies received meta gnon computing

Alt-social failures, received

I think the dopamine binky shortform video crowd is a write off and should be ignored. Writing, specifically essays and forums, remains the most powerful technology for serious socially transformative thought ever invented. We should double down on the wri... 3mo ago received

I think the dopamine received

This 100%, but also I actually do not want to know what sofiechan is. Is any decent social media platform definable? Its indescribability is what lets it hold power over us. Magic is not defined; it is ingraspable.... 3mo ago received

This 100%, but also received

A Primer on E-Graphs (A technique to control combinatorial blowup in term rewriting systems)
About 10 years ago I was very interested in term rewriting as a basis for exotic programming languages and even AI. One of the big problems in term rewriting is that without a canonical deterministic ordering, you rapidly end up with an uncontrollable numb... (www.cole-k.com) posted 4mo ago with no replies received superintelligence computing

A Primer on E-Graphs received

Radiopaper
Radiopaper is an interesting data point in the design space of social media. They've put some thought into it and landed someplace very different from Sofiechan. Their goal is to "improve conversation quality," which sounds goods, but they do it buy leanin... (radiopaper.com) posted 4mo ago with 2 replies received computing

Radiopaper received

interesting indeed. They seem to be building on the substack idea of bringing money into it. I think this results in slop incentives. My usual argument against that is this: High quality thought and speech is a luxury activity for the idle rich and ascetic... 4mo ago received

interesting indeed. received

Improved compose UI features
The new post compose ui (for new threads and for replies to posts) has some improvements today:... posted 5mo ago with 9 replies received meta computing

Improved compose UI received

Very happy to contribute to a worthwhile project. Hope you all enjoy the feature, and let me know if you run into any issues. 5mo ago received

Very happy to contri received

I really like this idea of extending community curation to the newsletter and I’m excited to see the first one. Here are some thoughts I have:... 4mo ago received

I really like this i received

Matching for anonymous private messages now works
We've been talking about this one for far too long, but now finally it's here: you can dm with other anons. Right now the only way to dm is to get matched by liking/following each other's nyms. This is neat but not as useful as it could be. We're also goin... posted 5mo ago with 6 replies received meta computing

Matching for anonymo received

Yeah its a bit awkward still. “Follow” is probably the wrong concept, the UI needs an overhaul, and i’m going to add other features that clarify things and reduce need to run around “following” people (eg manual dm requests). Anonymous social net... 5mo ago received

Yeah its a bit awkwa received

How to build better anonymous social media: curation and tags
Back in 2014, moot banned gamergate discussion from 4chan. This led to an exodus of the most adventurous and curious channers to 8chan, which had a strict free speech policy. For a few months at least, 8chan was a haven of smart free discussion on all sort... posted 5mo ago with 13 replies received meta technology computing

How to build better received

Very cool, guys. Let a thousand alt social media flowers bloom. I look forward to seeing your respective attempts. I hope you’ll still want to come visit us here. 5mo ago received

Very cool, guys. Let received

more useful nyms dashboard in "you" page
One of you asked for more clarity on how nyms work, and when I explained it, we realized it was all quite un-inituitive and the UI didn't lead naturally to figuring it out. Now if you go to the "you" page to check it out, it will tell you about your nyms a... posted 5mo ago with 7 replies received meta computing

more useful nyms das received

yeah good ideas on how to use the nym feature. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with. Some of it might end up having to be nerfed but for now go wild.... 5mo ago received

yeah good ideas on h received

I don't mean to send a strong signal against namefagging. I built the feature so you could namefag. It was just some mild bullying over the particular choice of name.... 5mo ago received

I don't mean to send received

The plan for anonymous mutual matching dms
Let's talk about how anonymous dms with mutuals will work. Thanks everyone for the feedback on the proposed follow functionality in >>2622. Having now thought about it and pushed up the prerequisites, it's time to plan out the details.... posted 6mo ago with 11 replies received meta computing

The plan for anonymo received

The way I see, there are only two coherent possibilities. Either you are really matching with:... 6mo ago received

The way I see, there received

We're going to do a dumb nym-to-nym dm system to cover the cases where there is a clear intention from the users. But also, it will occasionally hit you with something like "nym abc (you) and anon xyz follow each other. You can DM here". The algorithm is a... 6mo ago received

We're going to do a received

Help me figure out sofiechan poster vouching
Sofiechan's backend technically has the capability to consider not just a poster's posts and votes, but other user's direct assesments of that poster. That is, if you were to vouch for someone, the algorithm would take that as evidence that they are solid,... posted 7mo ago with 7 replies received meta computing

Help me figure out s received

Yeah thats the idea. I just deleted the twitter app because its so overrun with retarded shill bots. I want a social network, even a small one, where we can be quite sure that we are all free men, and not robots or shills. We need some density of good vouc... 6mo ago received

Yeah thats the idea. received

Not Superintelligence; Supercoordination
Everyone seems to be trying to arms race their way to superintelligence these days. I have a different idea: supercoordination.... posted 8mo ago with 34 replies received superintelligence rationality computing

Not Superintelligenc received

This was the program of Ramon Llull (1232–1316) in his Ars Magna, which was an inspiration for Leibniz.... 8mo ago received

This was the program received

I've been looking at what you're calling supercoordination for a while now. As I see it, the primary function of the digital tech that supports supercoordination should be to establish and maintain a supermemory.... 7mo ago received

I've been looking at received

Memory is requisite to supercoordination, no doubt. Tho my gut is that the key to the first visceral supercoordination system will be synthesis over that memory.... 6mo ago received

Memory is requisite received

Introducing Sofiechan Prototype Tag System
Over the past few weeks I've managed to find a few days in which to build a prototype tag system for sofiechan. In comparison to other forums, this will be our equivalent of "boards" "subreddits", etc.... posted 8mo ago with 11 replies received meta computing

Introducing Sofiecha received

I don't see the connection. Tags are for organizing the index of threads so we can have multiple conversations going on at once. The thread length limit is so that threads don't get too long to read and navigate. The thread limit might be a bit busted righ... 8mo ago received

I don't see the conn received

Road Trip Week 4: The Soul of a New Taste Machine in San Francisco
We're still becalmed in San Francisco, hanging out with friends, working a bit more on Sofiechan, and this week experiencing life in "the tenderknob".... posted 1y ago with 11 replies received computing fieldtrip

Road Trip Week 4: Th received

It's a tricky balance. Discussion of taboos is a tricky balance because, on the one hand, if you’ve got politically load-bearing taboos you *can’t* discuss, then you are not intellectually sovereign, and you lose. On the other hand, if you discuss it a... 1y ago received

It's a tricky balanc received

It would be interesting to know how the use of these high-class markers played out during the COVID pandemic. Did they downgrade critical examination of vaccine efficacy and safety? Did they upgrade content on the benefits of lockdowns? 1y ago received

It would be interest received

Towards an Illegible Computational Medium of Exchange
You cannot be sovereign if you do not control your medium of exchange, if your enemies can insert themselves into every transaction and tax it or block it at will.... posted 1y ago with 12 replies received technology computing

Towards an Illegible received

Again, I really like this general idea. That's why I'm motivated to press a bit on the technical details. Please take this pressing as entirely friendly.... 1y ago received

Again, I really like received

There had been a thread on high software profit margins, which has since disappeared off sofiechan. The OP on hackernews might still be relevant (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904339):... 1y ago received

There had been a thr received

Why Momentum Really Works. The math of gradient descent with momentum.
https://distill.pub/2017/momentum/ posted 1y ago with 3 replies received superintelligence computing

Why Momentum Really received

Do you know if there is any predictability to the effect? I would guess it's related to catastrophic forgetting aka the reason stochastic gradient descent has to be stochastic. Basically if you update on one set of evidence without locking in those learnin... 1y ago received

Do you know if there received

Going to bat for "hard materialism"
The saying goes that any discussion eventually becomes about Hitler, but over in the blood and soil thread, it's become about metaphysics. Specifically the valuation of a quantitative worldview, or even "hard materialism", relative to a more holistic quali... posted 1y ago with 45 replies received rationality computing nietzsche

Going to bat for "ha received

I agree there is a vast chasm, especially right now. In particular, biolife is actually existing self-replicating self-repairing adaptive nanotechnology, and industrial computers are not. What properties are you referring to?... 1y ago received

I agree there is a v received

Cells have a self-forming boundary while proteins participate in forming that boundary. I'm not sure cells are in fact the bottom though.... 1y ago received

Cells have a self-fo received

A pinpoint brain with less than a million neurons, somehow capable of mammalian-level problem-solving.
https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem.html?fbclid=IwAR1b9QURSJnizgy7r4HD7UCYmc06A7uL5muc7igz8uJHxLAIZWEwDMSqyPk posted 2y ago with 15 replies received philosophy superintelligence computing

A pinpoint brain wit received

Aristotle described animals as having souls* capable of knowledge derived from the senses and the capability to use that knowledge to support the movements characteristic of their species.... 1y ago received

Aristotle described received

Higher-order Virtual Machine (HVM). New functional programming VM based on Interaction Nets.
https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM/tree/master posted 1y ago with 4 replies received technology computing

Higher-order Virtual received

Yeah Bend is the language built on the HVM. I haven't looked into it yet but I'd love to try it out when I get a chance. The other one I've recently been wanting to check out is Zig. It really does look like C with the problems fixed. But I have no great p... 1y ago received

Yeah Bend is the lan received

bug reports and feature ideas thread. help us get this thing ready for primetime.
posted 2y ago with 41 replies received meta computing

bug reports and feat received

PSA: running an experiment where total noobs are no longer allowed to post threads, but can still post in threads. A few well regarded reply posts or predictive votes will scoop enough reputation to post a thread. Think of it as a small hazing and enforced... 1y ago received

PSA: running an expe received

It's much easier for the renderer not to have to know what thread everything is in, but we will probably do that eventually. We have to look them up anyways to connect the back-references, so maybe we can easily reuse some of that logic. 1y ago received

It's much easier for received

Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks, a new architecture for deep learning.
https://github.com/KindXiaoming/pykan posted 1y ago with 1 reply received superintelligence computing

Kolmogorov–Arnold Ne received

This is neat. Instead of having fixed nonlinear activation functions, they have trainable nonlinear functions instead of weights. They claim it has better scalaing properties and performance for many problems, and is more interpretable (because there are f... 1y ago received

This is neat. Instea received

Hundred Rabbits' "UXN" ultra-portable personal computing stack
They made a simple VM that can be implemented in a weekend by almost anyone that can run their whole suite of personal computing, artistic, gaming, music, creative, etc apps. This is one of the coolest projects out there and it proves that computing could ... (100r.co) posted 2y ago with 15 replies received technology computing

Hundred Rabbits' "UX received