_A_ purpose in life: continuously sharpening the mind to put it to use to make the world a better, bearable place continuously

Rush are doing all of Moving Pictures in order on night three of their tour

TL;DR: A single cortical pyramidal neuron is not a point; it's a powerful, noise-robust, general-purpose computational unit. Dendrites are not just wires to help neurons connect; they are the substrate for complex nonlinear computation. (15/15) preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…

What can a neuron compute? Real biological neurons are complex, but how capable are they? Using a new method, we found that a single cortical neuron can classify cats vs dogs, recognize spoken words, and solve 10-bit parity, all tasks thought to require entire networks. (1/15)

An unusual title and an unmistakable voice helped make “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” one of the most distinctive hits of the 1990s. Released in 1993, the song paired Brad Roberts’ deep baritone with stories of outsiders and misfits, turning the Canadian band into unlikely international stars.

In Rush's first show without Neil Peart since 1974. Anika Nilles absolutely crushing Tom Sawyer!

Listen to the way the crowd responds to drummer Anika Nilles during the solo section of “Tom Sawyer” at Rush last night. A huge arrival.

#NeilPeart Tom Sawyer

One could easily imagine the assisted coding to have been a marketing trick to boost the sales of @mfeathers's "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" book

This Primus video is proof that you can never really change who you are…🤣

Day one of GitHub Copilot token-based billing and the customers LOVE IT! They're all celebrating the power and value of generative AI!

The Pope is making exactly our point. LLMs “may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand.” This is the core epistemic fault line. Most AI evaluation is still based on one assumption: if a system statistically approximates human behaviour, then it is close to human intelligence. But approximation is not intelligence. Simulation is not understanding. LLMs can produce the right answer without knowing why it is right. They can simulate empathy without feeling. They can imitate judgment without responsibility. They can generate coherent explanations without having a world to which those explanations are accountable. Stop confusing behavioural similarity with cognitive equivalence. Human understanding is embodied, affective, relational, motivational, and normative. It is not just the production of plausible text. * Full paper in the first reply

A fractal requires a couple of parameters to reveal its infinite beauty. A generic deep learning model will need an infinite number of parameters to represent a negligible part of that infinity.

Can someone explain why you need a third-party service to generate your SDK, instead of using libraries, you can ideally run inside your infrastructure? It could even be a paid local tools. Not being sarcastic.

What I am about to describe ain’t AGI; it’s a sign of a trillion dollar trainwreck. If I had told you in 2022 that the 2026 version of GPT (which by the way would only be GPT 5.5 and not GPT-6 or 7 like many people fantasized about) would still have strange quirks like inserting the word “goblins” in random places, y’all would have called me either “crazy” or “a hater” or both. “Scaling”, you would have shouted. “Deep learning is conquering walls!”, you would have said. And yet here we are. OpenAI can’t even align their systems well enough to get them to stop talking about goblins without putting a bunch of utterly hack-y goblin-specific crud in their system prompts like (and I am not making this up) “never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query." Meanwhile, this nonsense varies by “persona”. An actual quasi-scientific report on their website reports, without humor, “Across all datasets in the audit, the Nerdy personality reward showed a clear tendency to score outputs to the same problem with “goblin” or “gremlin” higher than outputs without, with positive uplift in 76.2% of datasets.” Instead of actual computer science, we are left with alchemy. Might as well be chanting magic incantations. Good luck solving AI safety with this tech. 🙄