michael_nielsen

6 ms·

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by michael_nielsen 6mo ago
Thank you for sharing. And I'm very sorry for your loss.
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by michael_nielsen 8mo ago
A few comments have been kind enough to recommend the textbook I wrote with Ike Chuang. I'm glad they find it useful! It's worth noting: the book assumes a fair bit of mathematical background, especially in linear algebra. If you
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by michael_nielsen 11mo ago
Timothy Chow has a wonderful phrase for this - he describes one of his papers (on forcing) as solving an "open expository problem": https://timothychow.net/forcing.pdf
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by michael_nielsen 1y ago
Agreed, & flagged the submission. The actual article is of interest, but I really don't want to reward inflammatory titles.
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by michael_nielsen 1y ago
I've been wondering at what point AI assistants are going to reduce that to a manageable level? It's unfortunately not obvious what the main bottlenecks are, though Chris and Shan might have a good sense.
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by michael_nielsen 2y ago
I see virtually no politics. Maybe don't follow accounts which post about politics?
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by michael_nielsen 2y ago
A good brief overview here from Tim Gowers (a Fields Medallist, who participated in the effort), explaining and contextualizing some of the main caveats: https://x.com/wtgowers/status/1816509803407040909
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by michael_nielsen 2y ago
You have not understood the statement.
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by michael_nielsen 2y ago
Just so you know: you've completely misunderstood the statement.
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by michael_nielsen 2y ago
There's (at least) two meanings for AI: (1) Software systems based on extensions of the LLM paradigm; and (2) Software systems capable of all human cognitive tasks, and then some. It's not yet clear what (1) has to do with (2). M
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by michael_nielsen 2y ago
There goes 50+% of my use. "LLMs are no good for [use case X]" often means "I aren't very good at using LLMs for [use case X]". With many powerful tools - violins, say, or carpentry tools - we know that it takes a l
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by michael_nielsen 2y ago
It was the records of $100 billion dollars in retirement assets that was deleted by Google. Not a small deal, and far more than many small banks. I am, unfortunately, a customer of the retirement firm, UniSuper.
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
Stoll has written a lovely 2010 mea culpa, originally a (now-vanished) comment at: http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html , I saved the comment. Quoting: "Of my many mistakes, flubs, a
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
I flagged this - it seems too clearly flame bait. If it was an honest mistake, my apologies. Disney had three movies in 2023 which took more than $200 million at the US box office
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
I mostly agree with this. Certainly the last line! I've been reflecting on Jeremy's comments, though, and agree on many things with him. It's unfortunately hard to tease apart the hard corporate push for open source AI (mos
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
I'm not sure why they're so often so bad. I wonder if it's the Upton Sinclair effect; to paraphrase slightly: "It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when their hoped-for future wealth depends on not un
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
So are the rules of the road.
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
We have extremely detailed and well-tested models of climate. It's worth reading the IPCC report - it's extremely interesting, and quite accessible. I was somewhat skeptical of climate work before I began reading, but I spent hun
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The Friendship That Made Google Huge (Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat)(newyorker.com)
1 points by michael_nielsen 3y ago|0 comments
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
I co-authored that book (written in the late 1990s). I don't know when quantum computing will happen - I only follow developments very, very loosely now - but think you're being much too pessimistic. It is a very (very!) chall
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
Quantum computers won't search unordered databases with fewer than ~ sqrt(N) queries. Proved in: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9701001
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
The title is "These scientists aren't using ChatGPT - here's why", which is meaningfully different, and better
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
Fair enough. I suppose the useful bit is that lots of ignorant people have gone nuts ("OMG this is AGI!") without any details. That's just hype. But, yes, to your point, there is also some substantive and interesting specu
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
LeCun at least knows a lot about AI. Most of the Q* stuff is coming from people who know almost nothing.
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
"What's an instance where you gave up power for principle?"
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
I imagine the journalist at some point said: "Just how far do you now walk", and he replied "Oh, I often go for a 6km walk on Sunday." It's a newspaper article, not a technical spec.
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
I expect to see one every few minutes in San Francisco. When I counted in August, 4 of 100 vehicles going past my house were self-driving ( https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/16873429948135628... ). I don
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
It's likely somehow a reference to the Emperor. Purple cloth was extremely rare and expensive, and it was the colour worn by the Emperors. Indeed, it eventually became a capital crime for people outside the Emperor's family to wea
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by michael_nielsen 3y ago
There's a great video of a frog (and several other items) floating in a strong magnetic field, from 1997: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlJsVqc0ywM&ab_channel=APArc... Lots of objects are diamagnetic, including h
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A frog levitating in a strong magnetic field (1997) [video](youtube.com)
50 points by michael_nielsen 3y ago|42 comments

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