This article starts off well enough and covers some things I had been thinking about myself: exploring the many-dimensional space of an LLM. But then I think it veers into good old human hallucination (buzz-words disconnected from realities).
It even mentions my favorite show "Connections," but gets it wrong: it wasn't showing obscure or unlikely ideas, it was highlighting under-appreciated historical paths of developmnent. The one I remember (and have seen repeated on youtube since) was how the lathe boot-strapped the industrial revolution, crude ones at first helping to build more accurate replacements for themselves.
I want to give the author some credit for exploring some of the new possibilities that the LLM constructs offer. But the second half just veers into unreal territory. Typically, the author takes the words "latent space" and divorces them from their actual meaning to just make up stuff.
"Retro latents": nobody except historians will want to revisit the uncanny valley.
"simulate all possible latent spaces": that's just n-dimentional random matrices, for n trending to infinity, computationally infeasible. "computationally sweep through the space of all possible latent spaces, in a sense mapping the nature of latent space itself": no for the same reason. A "latent space" is only significant because it is based on a reality. It makes no sense to us to make a random "latent space" and ask what reality that corresponds to.
"create simulations of various propositions by moving through the latent space": there was already a documentary about this, it was called "The Matrix."
"Latent spaces contain all parallel worlds": if properly constructed and queried, it seems they would really only contain our reality. A parallel world would be a different "latent space" (ie big matrix) with different values.
The "Personal latent space" does make me think there might finally be a way to "download" our brains into silicon, but you'd really have to train it with google glasses running 24/7 from birth, and nobody wants that. Plus, it would be a security nightmare: unless you could carefully guard all access in an air-gapped container only you control (a bit like your brain in your body), you could be duplicated and your virtual duplicate could drain your bank accounts, be easily blackmailed, steal your IP, etc.
Just like planting trees, the second best time is now. Travel (with sensitivity and understanding) to see cultures and places that are at risk: glaciers, savanna, wildlife parks, minority cultures, and dare I add Western democracies.
Edited to add: maybe the computer history museum as well.
Also note that due to isotope decay in the ore, a natural reactor is no longer possible. From the wikipedia article:
"A key factor that made the reaction possible was that, at the time the reactor went critical 1.7 billion years ago, the fissile isotope 235U made up about 3.1% of the natural uranium, which is comparable to the amount used in some of today's reactors. [...] the current abundance of 235U in natural uranium is only 0.72%. A natural nuclear reactor is therefore no longer possible on Earth without heavy water or graphite."
Another fascinating detail from the article, due to our understanding of fission, we can get some incredible results:
"The concentrations of xenon isotopes, found trapped in mineral formations 2 billion years later, make it possible to calculate the specific time intervals of reactor operation: approximately 30 minutes of criticality followed by 2 hours and 30 minutes of cooling down"
Another example is the Honeywell corporation: from thermostats to computers, then parts of defense/aerospace. Looking at its wikipedia, it also seems like one factor of diversification was the WWII war economy where the government paid lots of different corporations to build new stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell
hacker news really needs a best-of page the way craigslist did (sorry, does), just so I can nominate this. Made me discover a great song (and a great cover), with such a wry commentary (the song's and your own comment being spot on for the original drivel). Or like we used to say, you win the internet for today.
The island of Kaua'i in Hawaii has both tours of a chocolate farm (Lydgate Farms) and a coffee plantation (Kaua'i Coffee) with a visitor center. Just gotta find a conference out there, then hop on a Southwest flight.
Why make (wrong) guesses when you can find the answer in minutes on Wikipedia? Plus it doesn’t make sense to do a TEI with unnecessary mass. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module :
“The six landed descent stages remain at their landing sites; their corresponding ascent stages crashed into the Moon following use. One ascent stage (Apollo 10's Snoopy) was discarded in a heliocentric orbit after its descent stage was discarded in lunar orbit.“
Elsewhere, I read that the ascent stages were crashed into the moon to provide impulses for the seismometers left on the moon. Snoopy is still in orbit around the sun. And the one from Apollo 13 is in the Tonga Trench. Two fascinating lists:
As for littering the surface of the moon, I was surprised to see in videos that in addition to the scientific equipment ( and golf balls) they left on the moon, there was a lot of other little pieces. In one of the videos on the rover, they literally remove the cover off something and just throw it aside on the ground.
I was on my phone (materialistic app) so even a wikipedia search is difficult :) I hate using the web on a mobile, it feels like I'm looking through a toilet roll.
But I mentioned it was an assumption... The parent poster mentioned that the ascent stage was carried into TEI so I assumed that was true.
It even mentions my favorite show "Connections," but gets it wrong: it wasn't showing obscure or unlikely ideas, it was highlighting under-appreciated historical paths of developmnent. The one I remember (and have seen repeated on youtube since) was how the lathe boot-strapped the industrial revolution, crude ones at first helping to build more accurate replacements for themselves.
I want to give the author some credit for exploring some of the new possibilities that the LLM constructs offer. But the second half just veers into unreal territory. Typically, the author takes the words "latent space" and divorces them from their actual meaning to just make up stuff.
"Retro latents": nobody except historians will want to revisit the uncanny valley.
"simulate all possible latent spaces": that's just n-dimentional random matrices, for n trending to infinity, computationally infeasible. "computationally sweep through the space of all possible latent spaces, in a sense mapping the nature of latent space itself": no for the same reason. A "latent space" is only significant because it is based on a reality. It makes no sense to us to make a random "latent space" and ask what reality that corresponds to.
"create simulations of various propositions by moving through the latent space": there was already a documentary about this, it was called "The Matrix."
"Latent spaces contain all parallel worlds": if properly constructed and queried, it seems they would really only contain our reality. A parallel world would be a different "latent space" (ie big matrix) with different values.
The "Personal latent space" does make me think there might finally be a way to "download" our brains into silicon, but you'd really have to train it with google glasses running 24/7 from birth, and nobody wants that. Plus, it would be a security nightmare: unless you could carefully guard all access in an air-gapped container only you control (a bit like your brain in your body), you could be duplicated and your virtual duplicate could drain your bank accounts, be easily blackmailed, steal your IP, etc.
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