why don't more people become zoroastrian? it's where judaism and christianity got the idea of ethical monotheism, afterlife, and final judgment but without any of their baggage (no eternal hell, no historically questionable dogmas, etc.)

If we care only about appearances, outcomes, and results then AI will outcompete humans at everything If we care about the process used to create things then humans can still have jobs and meaningful lives The idea that ends can be detached from means is the root of many evils

Strongly agree with this bill https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/29/ohio-state-legislator-ban-people-marrying-ai/86427987007/

if the laws of physics are fundamentally probabilistic, as they seem to be, that makes it easier to see how they can smoothly change over time

data attribution is a special case of data causality: estimating the causal effect of either learning or unlearning one datapoint (or set of datapoints) on the neural network's behavior on other datapoints

Neural networks don't have organs. They aren't made of fixed mechanisms. They have flows of information and intensities of neural activity. They can't be organized into a set of parts with fixed functions. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, they're bodies without organs (BwO).

This seems like a cool way to use an adaptive amount of compute per token. I speculate that models like these will have more faithful CoT since they don't get to do "extra" reasoning on easy tokens https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02258

Also chapter 10 where he discards the notion of the Soul but maintains the distinction between mind and brain

William James did a lot of good philosophy of mind in chapters 1, 5, and 6 ofThe Principles of Psychology, we've barely made any progress in 135 years 😂

I love this meme

might interest @nabla_theta

Pro tip: if you want to implement TopK SAEs efficiently, and don't want to deal with Triton, just use this function for the decoder, it's much faster than the naive dense matmul implementation https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.nn.functional.embedding_bag.html

What are the chances you'd get a fully functional language model by randomly guessing the weights? We crunched the numbers and here's the answer:

we have seven (!) papers lined up for release next week you know you're on a roll when arxiv throttles you

deepseek now largely replacing chatgpt for me

Evolutionary biology can learn things from machine learning. Natural selection alone doesn't explain "train-test" or "sim-to-real" generalization, which clearly happens. At every level of organization, life can zero-shot adapt to novel situations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ9O5H2AlWg

Truth is relative, when it comes to the physical state of the universe. But we should accept the existence of perspective-neutral facts about how perspectives relate to one another, to avoid vicious skeptical paradoxes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13819

Neural networks are polycomputers in @drmichaellevin.bsky.social's sense. Depending on your perspective, you can interpret them as performing many different computations on different types of features. No perspective is uniquely correct. arxiv.org/abs/2212.10675

If OpenAI's new o3 model is "successfully aligned," then it could probably be trusted to supervise more powerful models, allowing us to bootstrap to benevolent superintelligence.

Interesting to see @philipgoff.bsky.social go back and forth on the fine-tuning argument. I think the multiverse definitely can't explain fine-tuning, but it's also unclear we need an explanation at all. And God may be a more "complex" hypothesis than the physical constants themselves.

How do a neural network's final parameters depend on its initial ones? In this new paper, we answer this question by analyzing the training Jacobian, the matrix of derivatives of the final parameters with respect to the initial parameters. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07003

Bombshell new paper on the simulation argument, multiverses, and cosmological fine-tuning: "...self-locating credences are ‘subjective’ in the sense that they are not rationally constrained by anything at all, except possibly the requirement of probabilistic consistency." arxiv.org/abs/2409.05259

Death is just amnesia www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3MA...

I'm trying out Bluesky, using this browser extension to crosspost https://github.com/59de44955ebd/twitter-to-bsky My username is the obvious one.