/computing/

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 3d 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... 2d 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 3d ago with 3 replies received gnon computing

Liquid (Gl)ass and t received

Liquid glass is definitely cool. Too bad they weren't able to make it more usable. You're right that video-game style UI rendering with custom geometry, shaders etc is the future. I have only done a comparatively small amount of CSS and html and it already... 3d ago received

Liquid glass is defi 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... 3d ago received

The right abstractio received

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 5d ago with 12 replies received politics technology computing

The third-worldifica received

Urbit is a prime illustration of the limits of the theorycel.... 5d 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... 4d ago received

I could absolutely i received

Until there's a particularly elegant technical solution one can always fall back on defense-in-depth. It's great that this forum has a nuclear option for handling an influx of noobs or raids or what have you, but the form keeps most of the wrong sort of po... 4d ago received

Until there's a part 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 1w ago with 16 replies received 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... 1w 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... 5d ago received

You're on to somethi 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 1mo ago with 4 replies received computing

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.... 1mo 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 1mo ago with 3 replies received meta 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, ... 1mo ago received

It works! But slow a 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 2mo 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 2mo 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... 2mo ago received

interesting indeed. received

Paper: Minimal physicalism as a scale-free substrate for cognition and consciousness
I just came across this paper from theoretical biologist Michael Levin, et. al.... (academic.oup.com) posted 9mo ago with 1 reply received computing

Paper: Minimal physi received

Not done yet but reading through. Some of this is above my level, some sems frustratingly preliminary and not getting into the meat of things (maybe later in the article?). One claim i found interesting is i think the author’s other paper claiming a cell... 9mo ago received

Not done yet but rea 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... 14mo 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

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 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 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

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