brianush1's comments

brianush1 | 3 months ago | on: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought (2024) [pdf]

One could make the argument that higher-level thought is not the same as awareness of higher-level thought; perhaps language only affords the latter.

brianush1 | 4 months ago | on: Signs of introspection in large language models

What would you title this article to make it less "clickbait"? This is one of the least clickbait headlines I've seen, it's literally just describing what's in the article.

brianush1 | 5 months ago | on: The Demon-Haunted World

> Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe

My belief on this is not entirely rational, of course, but it seems to me that there's probably a sort of Turing-completeness for intelligence/understanding, where as soon as a mind starts being able to understand abstraction, given enough time and resources, it can probably understand the entire universe.

It would also be presumptuous to say that brainfuck is equally powerful to every other programming language that exists, and yet we know it to be true. The fundamental reason we can prove that Turing-complete languages are equivalent to each other is that we can build the same abstractions in both, so intuitively it feels like a similar principle holds for human intelligence.

brianush1 | 11 months ago | on: CSS Hell

apparently the pegs only have to touch the holes, they don't have to line up perfectly

brianush1 | 1 year ago | on: Tencent's 'Hunyuan-T1'–The First Mamba-Powered Ultra-Large Model

I'm not seeing anything in that graph that implies that o1 ever fails on "what is 6*1?" The chart is graphing the number of digits on each axis; it fails on "what is (some 6 digit number) * (some 1 digit number)"

brianush1 | 1 year ago | on: The UnitedHealthcare Gunman Understands the Surveillance State

https://archive.is/xe2V5

brianush1 | 1 year ago | on: A liar who always lies says "All my hats are green."

Your initial translation into JavaScript is a representation of the statement "All my things are green hats", which is not the same as "All my hats are green."

The statement "All my hats are green" would map to

    things.every(thing => thing.type != 'hat' || thing.color == 'green')

i.e., everything the person owns must either be green or, if it isn't green, it must not be a hat since all hats are green.

The negated form would then be

    things.some(thing => thing.type == 'hat' && thing.color != 'green')

i.e., there are some hats that are not green.

brianush1 | 1 year ago | on: A joke in approximating numbers raised to irrational powers

pretty sure you have a typo, should be "If not, consider (sqrt(2) ^ sqrt(2)) ^ sqrt(2)."

brianush1 | 1 year ago | on: The joy of reading books you don't understand

it works with textbooks too though

brianush1 | 1 year ago | on: Here comes the Muybridge camera moment but for text

Why does there need to be an "I" that uses language to transmit information? Language itself encodes information. I can read a piece of text and gain something from it. Where the text came from is irrelevant.

brianush1 | 1 year ago | on: The Pen, Mightier (2011)

> Put the pen between your index and middle fingers.

I'm genuinely curious, how else could you hold a pen?

brianush1 | 2 years ago | on: Counting the Hard Way

Learning up to 12x12 is commonplace in the U.S., and apparently in other English-speaking countries, too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplication_table#Modern_ti...

brianush1 | 2 years ago | on: Ocean Temperature

Primary sources are not allowed on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a tertiary source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

brianush1 | 4 years ago | on: Driving with D

> such as the fact that a safe subset exists, but depends on GC,

@safe works perfectly fine and exactly the same in @nogc code as in GC-enabled code.

brianush1 | 5 years ago | on: Erlang Garbage Collection Details and Why It Matters (2015)

I use Refined Hacker News[0] to get a list of past threads at the bottom of the page. dang himself has said[1] it overlaps surprisingly with their internal extension, so it might prove useful

[0]: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20176460

brianush1 | 5 years ago | on: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT

For me, this was caused by a buggy service worker; unregistering the service worker (from about:debugging > "This Firefox" > "Service Workers" on Firefox, dunno how on Chrome) should fix the issue

brianush1 | 5 years ago | on: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT

From further down in this thread: https://decrypt.co/62217/monty-pythons-john-cleese-mints-bro...

brianush1 | 5 years ago | on: Spectre in JavaScript

From what I understand, Firefox has a lower precision timer, which means you need to do more cache timer repetitions; try increasing it to 400,000, it should look more like the demo (though it still doesn't generate two entirely separate curves).

brianush1 | 5 years ago | on: 20% of requests for Wikimedia Commons are for one image of a flower

If Chrome suddenly stopped sending referrer headers, let's be real here, 99% of websites would be fixed within a couple of days at most.

brianush1 | 5 years ago | on: Processors Under Pillows

Restoring the internet would be a pretty geeky and tinker-y mission on its own