Ero

If your body disappears when you fall asleep, how come it's real and not 'fake'? Sober or high, everything is a state of consciousness. Hah, this is very accurate. You, on the other hand, seems to have transcended the countable infinity (aleph_0) and are possibly into the realms of aleph_1, the uncountable infinity. I would suggest a reading for the Euclidian-minded individuals - consider the Nobel Laureate Illya Prigogine's ''The End of Certainty". The 'Probability Revolution' or the 'Chaos, Entropy, Order' paradigm as I like to call it is one that lives beyond Euclidian space and into hyperbolic space - determinism and reductionism are metaphysic illusions masked in scientific clothes, but that is not the actual nature of dynamic and complex systems.

I wanted to write my two cents in support of Leo's most recent post about every intelligence agency in the world being 'basically a collection of clinical psychopaths and sociopaths'. First of all, for context, my country is the only other one from the Soviet Bloc outside of Russia that enacted a 'privatization' through the direct influence of State Security (Държавна Сигурност), closely allied with the KGB. What occurred is that several officers from the KGB-equivalent , now remembered as the 'puppet masters', were responsible for allocating nearly 95% of all national resources (factories, mines, etc.) to a select few of those close to the nomenclature. Most of those were former wrestlers and fighters, who now started receiving millions from the liquidated assets in suitcases. Self-selected for sociopathy/psychopathy, they started creating 'insurance/security' companies that began enacting racketeering methods by the book. Some of the largest oligarchs owned 15-20% of the GDP. What followed were the years of the 'mafia wars' from 1995 to 2005, marked by hundreds of assassinations using snipers, AKs, grenades and bombs in a fight to consolidate power. The one 'clan' that triumphed eventually graduated to politics and has since then extracted hundreds of billions from our country, which is where we currently find ourselves at, under the veil of 'democracy' only in name. It was precisely that sociopathic lust for power that lead to the current situation and one that, regretfully, does not have a solution that is less sociopathic than its origin. This kind of system has lead to the corruption of every government branch, to the point where if you are affiliated, the rules just don't apply. There are examples (as recent as last year) of people committing straight up murders and sadistic torture who were walking free, until the general public protested in the tens of thousands and out of fear they locked them up. The latter story is an ongoing one. It has directly affected me and my family in more than one way. The 'truth and consciousness' of the matter is something I realized in my most recent LSD trips - that consciousness brings the chaos and horror with it. Whilst most nature documentaries are of butterflies and colorful birds, there are also the parasites, bacteria and viruses, the hornets and centipedes, and, of course, the crocodile that will bite your head off. And when you sit at the edge of chaos, it is hard to not be consumed. The security apparatus is essentially the immune system of the collective intelligence that is a country. It must address the internal health of society, fraught with terrorists, rapists, serial killers, as well as the external - hostile foreign nation-state actors, neo-liberal corporations and sometimes even cartels. And, as the analogy goes, the immune system needs the T-killer cells. But if not properly aligned, these T-killer cells become the source of autoimmune diseases, killing the cells of their own organism.

There's a comma there

Depends on the strain, but it generally makes everything 'softer'. Slows you down. Music sounds so good when high.

Hah, no bias here. Hornets are necessary for the ecological balance of insects. Got a tattoo of one. Might get a centipede soon.

To a large extent, yes. Even though philosophically I don’t agree with reductionism, i.e that chemistry and biology are best explained through physics, the latter is still quite OP due to it being the basis for engineering. Furthermore, you can use its intuition to solve mathematical systems, similar to what Edward Witten and Martin Hairer did to win the Fields medal. Statistical physics for example is one of the most powerful frameworks that has inspired a lot of work in math with the study of phase transitions - case in point is the work of S.Smirnov, W.Werner and H.Duminil-Copin (all Fields medalist).

Just a recent example - when the Oracle deal for the Memphis Datacenter broke down, he instead decided to build it himself. In 19 days, he now has the most powerful computing cluster in the world, sitting at around 2.5 exaflops.

@Ayham I am referring to classes/fields of physics that predominantly rely on solving PDEs, such as fluids, plasma physics, heat transfer etc. The approaches are mostly numerical, i.e you predominantly use software for simulation (hence computational). It would be considered more Applied Physics, which sits in contrast to Theoretical Physics, where the end goal is to study the Standard Model in its Gauge Theory format, i.e utilizing Abstract Algebra and Representation Theory/Lie groups to describe the non-abelian U(1) x SU(2) x SU(3) symmetry. I will answer your third question with a quote from Gauss, which says 'Mathematics is the queen of the sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics '. The reason for the first part, is because it sits at the foundation of modern science. For example, having studied Abstract Algebra and Complex Analysis at a graduate level, it took me like 2 weeks to pick up the Gauge Theory formulation, whereas you would normally spend about 6 months building up the pre-reqs to get to that. So, with math, I essentially shrink my time of learning new adjacent topics exponentially. I actually skipped CS50 for CS51, I felt it too cult-like and without sufficient focus. But if you don't know python or C/C++, it's actually not a bad way to learn it.

Hah, I can. I am sure you are responsible, I am not saying otherwise, but I am just giving a little pushback so you don't fall prey to the current FOMO which will undeniably wipe out a lot of wealth/investments if you are not careful. Good intuition. A technological innovation is normally an agglomeration of separate S-shaped curves that build on top each other until all the vertical and horizontal growth is exhausted. AI is supposedly different due to the fundamentally different end-case scenario, which is the so-called 'superintelligence explosion'. We are undeniably headed there, however, imo it will take a lot longer than Musk or Leopold are currently predicting. Absolutely. AI has a lot of room to grow, but for that to happen, LLMs and Transformers need to stop sucking all the air (talent and investments) out of the room, which is why I think a bursting of the bubble will be useful in the long run.

The IMO result is extremely impressive. I am waiting for the paper to dig a little deeper into their exact method, outside of what we already know about the Lean-based RL. This is an interesting inquiry. Having worked with Lean in academic setting, my general impression is similar to that of the following paper about the proof as a social process. There is a disconnect between the human-centric proofs we write and the computationally verified proofs by Lean. The transfer in both directions is non-trivial, and I wonder if at a certain scale it would be possible. (I can see for example from the AlphaProof IMO files that the annotations are human-made) Most of the times the approach/ framework used is far more important than the proof itself, as was the case for example with Grothendieck's etale cohomology, which had an impact far wider than just its use for the Weil conjectures. I am not yet certain myself how much of that can be supplemented by formal verification tools. Lean itself is also very definition-dependent and sometimes it is precisely the reworking of the definitions that is needed, instead a procedural generation based on it as an axiom.

Fif is on a different level. His trolling also deserves an award lol.

This feels like a solid plan. I think physics is a very solid background because it gives you the ability to transfer knowledge in a manner comparable to mathematics (you learn a lot of math purely from studying physics). My advice is to skew towards the computational and engineering physics, since that would provide you with most applicable/ transferable skillset. I also agree with your approach to self-teaching yourself CS, that's what I did. Udemy is superb, but you can even do with YT freecodeacademy. Python is mandatory for research and ML stuff, C++ is a very good physics and analysis tool, JavaScript is useful if you are interested in web apps. As far as philosophy, my advice is to not even take classes in it. You will be surprised how little academic philosophy has to do with what I suppose your interested is as it relates to deeper topics of epistemology and ontology. Reading and contemplating with an open mind will be more than enough. Btw, I sympathize with your visa situation, I have had some issues myself, but not to the extent that your citizenship brings.

Thank you! One thing that helped me is that I hid my debit/credit cards from myself (I don't use cash). The smoke shops didn't accept iPhone tap to pay, so it created enough distance/resistance to be able to realize and stop myself.

My personal 'cocktail' was Caffeine, Alpha-GPC, Omega-3, Lion's Mane and Gingko Biloba. It definitely helped with the consistent 10-12h/day of math lol.

That's such a funny thing to say. I drink like half a liter the moment I wake up. Never thought I was addicted hah Black coffee smells and tastes so good.

Do you plan on opening straight from the start with 'You are God' or are you planning to warm him up first lol

Predicting outputs from inputs is what all ML models do (that's why they are called models). They need this much compute, because they are 'searching' a parametric space of trillion parameters - it comes from the sheer size of the models. You are intuition is on point IMO. Similar to Gary Marcus, and more recently Yann LeCunn, I am a proponent of the idea of 'embedding' the representations of human thinking/ knowledge to achieve immense efficiency speed-ups. I am quoting the Lie-Poisson paper in my previous post for this: 'The advantage of PINNs is their computational efficiency: speedups more than 100,00x for evaluations of solutions of complex systems like weather have been reported' - referencing Accurate medium- range global weather forecasting with 3d neural networks and Fourcastnet: A global data-driven high-resolution weather model using adaptive Fourier neural operators

How could I? I am writing a thesis, referencing many of those papers. Nowhere did I say it is the end of the process. GPUs will always help, but what I was pointing at is that alone won't be enough. There are physics- and biology-related systems that are provably unsolvable by Transformers (part of what I am working for my thesis). That is what I meant by that not being sufficient, no matter how much compute you throw at it. Again, you seem to take for granted 'new paradigms' coming along. As someone who works on the categorical/reasoning side of AI, I can tell you that their construction would be painstakingly slow, utilizing all the domain-specific knowledge we have. An example are Lie-Poisson Networks, part of a broader class of PINNs. Embodied AI would definitely be a revolutionary technology, but you won't achieve it without having first some breakthroughs in the PINNs and Reasoning paradigms. I agree with the AI ecosystem vision, moreso than singular foundational models. Local domain-optimized models would be far more effective for the wide range of scenarios that would cause the disruption you are foreseeing. The thing is, when you say exponential, then you assume a multiplicative improvement year-by-year, similar to the AGI by 2027 wacko, whereas I am predicting more a cycle-like trend with general improvements with two important notes: first, the current peak is not the final, and second, the 'intelligence explosion'/ 'run off' scenario is almost impossible, considering the underlying energy constraints - with the current Energy production, there is just not enough to handle such a scenario (Wells Fargo predicts a 550% surge by 2026 to 52 TWh). We gotta scale up 5-10x Nuclear and work towards Fusion to have even a remote chance of satiating the upcoming energy demand.

Absolutely. I agree with your frame about evading politics, I don't see how that would be productive.

Not within the current paradigm, i.e Transformer/LLM . Mira Murati, the CTO of OpenAI has already stated they don't have anything in production that is much better. Check the MMLU benchmark plateau in the second image - you can see only marginal improvements. LLMs are already at the their maximum, since they have exhausted pretty much all data, synthetic data doesn't work as yesterday's article from nature shows. What you are referring to is ASICs, or dedicated chips, such as those my classmates built for etched.ai. The problem with them is that they work only for inference and not for training. You still need GPUs for that and even with the latest H100, LLama 3 or GPT-4 is estimated to have exceeded $1B, and that is only training. So no, dedicated silicon will not solve this problem. I agree with this, but you seem to take for granted the invention of 'new more effective techniques'. The last innovation was the transformer and that was 7 years ago. We haven't had any vertical/ architectural jumps since then, it has only been scaling. And even that doesn't prevent representational collapse or incorrect reasoning.

Hows your reading comprehension? Let me do a breakdown of what you said, vs. what I said: consciousness will be heavier, anchored, simpler vs. fluid, I have had vivid dreams and spiritual experiences they will be overtly much more interested in playing and sleeping vs. mnot interested in playing or sleeping, if... interested in 'abstract stuff' will be very pragmatic and without qualms, openly selfish and in search of a "simple" paradigm vs. I study Pure Mathematics, which is as abstract as it gets (which is also as far from pragmatic as a subject can be), have a disdain for reductive and 'simple' paradigms If you really go against his interests, he can on the other hand go much further from time to time in physical violence. vs. have NEVER resorted to physical violence OUTSIDE when it has been absolutely necessary for my own and my friends' safety.

Regretfully, I this is how it had to be for me. I was smoking/ taking edibles almost daily to the point that it started directly interfering with my responsibilities for uni, so I had to a cold turkey stop. I haven't smoked in like 7 months.

@Schizophonia I have very very high levels of Testosterone naturally and almost entirely disagree with your following description: My consciousness is very fluid, I have had vivid dreams and spiritual experiences since very young. I need 3 sec to begin experiencing the 'Dancing Buddha'. I am not interested in playing or sleeping, I study Pure Mathematics, which is as abstract as it gets, have a disdain for reductive and 'simple paradigms' and have NEVER resorted to physical violence outside of being jumped or surrounded on the streets. Be careful with being this reductive or simplistic in your assumptions.

@cjoseph90 Have you been experiencing any long-term side effects? I am asking, because I was really big into tea, but when I started doing a lot of cognitive work for uni, the caffeine was just not enough. I started drinking like 3-4 cups a day for the last year or two and haven't had any problems with sleep or heart rate. I am physically active, so that might be helping, but I wonder if I should dial it back.

@RedLine That is very interesting. Mushrooms and LSD are very different for me, Haven't tried DMT yet, trying to get my hands on it. From my experience Mushrooms are very magical, almost archetypal in their imagery and messages. I have had hallucinations of serpents, pyramids, my ancestors, whilst simultaneously the experience being very blissful. My first mushroom trip was 2g, which I barely remember, same as the 5 g I did a year later. All my other mushroom trips were in the 1.5-3 g range with extremely positive impact, meta-awareness, ego death and the sort. I They feel good only when I am in nature. LSD I have probably around 20 trips, the lower doses of which are 150-200 ug and the higher doses being 250-350 ug. The lower doses are perfectly manageable, with great insights into cognition, science and technology. LSD is very cerebral and sharp for me. The sharpness gets stronger towards the higher doses. For some reason my last 4-5 trips on LSD were all chaos-like. For the first of them I made the mistake of having watched Horror (Evil Dead Rise) and researching the sigil Solomon mythos, which backfired. The subsequent ones were very much geared towards the realizations of the sheer Chaos in Consciousness. The analogy I have is that most of the nature documentaries show only the butterflies, colorful birds and puffy animals, but don't show the parasites, hornets and all the murder and death that is part of the cycle of life, the latter of which was essentially where my trips were forcing me to look at. Wouldn't call any of the latter trips 'bad', but they were definitely humbling. So much so that I haven't tripped on LSD in almost a year and I am lowkey anxious to take the one tab I got rn.