All of bhishma's Comments + Replies

Probably do a screen recording to scale later with AI

Slides for my talk

Jeffrey, I appreciate your points about fusion's potential, and the uncertainty around "foom." However, I think framing this in terms of bottlenecks clarifies the core difference. The Industrial Revolution was transformative because it overcame the energy bottleneck. Today, while clean energy is vital, many transformative advancements are primarily bottlenecked by intelligence, not energy. Fusion addresses an important, existing constraint, but it's a step removed from the frontier of capability. AI, particularly AGI, directly targets that intelligence bot... (read more)

I think a crucial distinction, which you touch on but perhaps don't fully emphasize, lies in the downstream consequences of success in each field. While both are transformative, the nature of that transformation is radically different.

Fusion, if achieved at scale, primarily addresses the energy sector. It's a substitutional technology. It replaces fossil fuels with a cleaner, more abundant alternative, mitigating climate change and potentially altering geopolitical power dynamics related to energy resources. This is undeniably significant. However, beyond ... (read more)

Have you looked into https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04378

Looks like there might be some test data leakage https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/123035

This is very similar to the Julia Galef's framing of Hayekians vs Central planners, which I have found to be quite useful to look at these sort of dynamics. It's also a bit like the exploration/exploitation tradeoff. Initially when you have high uncertainty, it makes a lot of sense to wander and follow your curiosity as that would be more productive. And once you've gathered enough about something, it's much easier to apply the said knowledge. 

. Before the toddler ever hears the word,

It goes even back for certain visual stimuli 

We examined fetal head turns to visually presented upright and inverted face-like stimuli. Here we show that the fetus in the third trimester of pregnancy is more likely to engage with upright configural stimuli when contrasted to inverted visual stimuli, in a manner similar to results with newborn participants. The current study suggests that postnatal experience is not required for this preference.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)30580-8#secsectitle0015

Kudos to the speaker, as a (physics) layman I found it really well explained. The connection b/w Renormalization flows and phase transition was really elegant. 

Alas, being slightly over the subtly-warped-judgment line is like taking one drink – sure it only impairs your judgment a little, but, the one of the things you might do with slightly impaired judgment is to take another drink. (Or, say, foster more emotional closeness with someone who you wouldn’t endorse eventually having sex with).

This is sort of the situation where you need to erect Shelling fences

One aspect of schooling which is not easily available in home schooling is peer/social learning. Did you find that being a problem? 

s-risks?

In case you're fine with an approximation, you could try modelling the #P problem as a CNF (check this paper for more info) and use an approx model counter such as https://github.com/meelgroup/approxmc . 

Ahh that's because in India we have a graduate entrance exam called GATE (for admission to IITs and other institutes). And ToC carries a lot of weight-age.

I found Introduction to Automata theory by Ullman on EdX to be extremely useful. It covers most of the basics and there's also a book by the same author. Apart from the lectures you also get access to high quality assignments, problem sets which I think are very essential for a course like ToC.