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Ósanwë is a Quenya word meaning interchange of thought, literally 'thinking together'. This is a place for thoughtful discussion, where communication is a tool to collaboratively further our understanding of life.
How Determinantal Point Processes supports Out-Of-Distribution Generalization — Introduction Deep Neural Networks are impressively good at doing human-ish things which until recently computers just couldn't do. However, one area where humans excel but DNNs are still terrible is out of distribution generalisation (OODG) - that is, applying knowledge learned in one context to another context which has never been encountered before. Now modern AI can sort of do this in practice, since presumably...
Infinite Time in Heaven and Infinite Souls in Hell? — A great thought experiment from the ACX open thread: Suppose that God could create a universe at time t=0 containing a countably infinite number of sentient beings (hereinafter "persons" or "people"). He sets up a one-to-one correspondence between the people and the positive integers: every person gets a unique integer, and all the positive integers are used. At t=0, everyone is suffering the torments of Hell, and believes that they will...
💬 satya · 3 comments · Nov 04 · 6 weeks ago
Is Voting Rational? — This post attempts to understand whether voting for a presidential candidate is rational, making several simplifying assumptions: The only reason to vote is to impact the result of the election (not because it feels good or sends a signal) There are only two candidates for president One of the candidates is better than the other and it is valuable for them to win instead of the worse candidate Background The impetus for this post came from two conflicting arguments, one...
💬 satya · Oct 24 · 8 weeks ago
Neural Nets and Non-Human Animals — The question is simple: Neural networks are thought to be a roughly decent model of how the brain works, although there's a lot we don't know. Humans can do some pretty impressive things that non-human animals absolutely cannot do when it comes to analogy and representing abstract relationships. The main way neural networks get better is scaling (i.e. bigger brains). If neural nets are a good model of brains, then why is the human/animal distinction so abrupt?...
💬 satya · 2 comments · Oct 24 · 8 weeks ago
Utilizing imperfections of pseudo-random number generators. A bad PRNg can produce visible artifacts on an image (which you might have seen if you've ever tried using your own in a ray tracer for example). It would be interesting to see these statistical imperfections utilized in a deliberate way, not by mistake. (it's kinda between programming and math, idk where to post it)
💬 vstrecha · 2 comments · Oct 24 · 8 weeks ago
Exploring Geometric Duals of Planar Graphs — There might absolutely be results answering these questions, but I'm not sure. Reading about graph theory, I learned that different planar isomorphic graphs can have non isomorphic geometric duals. This got me wondering what can we say about the possible geometric duals generated by different isomorphisms of a given graph. How many graphs unique under isomorphism can be made? What else do we know about the geometric duals of a given simple planar...
💬 satya · Oct 20 · 8 weeks ago
Writing in French vs English: Samuel Beckett — Samuel Beckett, whose first language was English, famously said that he chose to write in French because it allowed him to write “without style,” and made it easier to avoid the flourish and complexity that English allowed him. Surely part of this must have been simply that Becketts facility with French was less than with English, and perhaps a native French speaker might find a similar benefit from writing in English? Do some languages really lend...
💬 satya · 1 comment · Oct 20 · 8 weeks ago
Introducing: Ósanwë — Hello! This is a new instance of skyjake’s Bubble forum, of which the first and flagship instance is at bbs.geminispace.org. This instance Ósanwë is intended for careful and thoughtful discussion between people in an open, humble, and curious mindset. While skyjake's BBS is great for a wide variety of things, Ósanwë is meant to be a more focused space for serious (and seriously fun!) discussion as a means of...
💬 satya · 1 comment · Oct 20 · 8 weeks ago