Ero

That is absolutely true. Genetics play an enormous role, however you look at it. Question is, what is your talent? Nobody’s asking the horse to fly or the duck to eat rats.

Watched the Obamas, it really was a thrill. Feeling more and more hopeful.

Check out Leo’s and Daniel Schmactenberger’s Book Lists. Enough gold in them to last you a decade.

My first trip was at 16, I’m 22 now and have had about 30 total between LSD and mushrooms. I have prolonged periods of focus without much psychs, and it works for me to come back from time to time, but I don’t go as deep as say Leo or other psychonauts here do. I know I will eventually, but this is the age for foundational ‘grind’, sorting out one’s future. Totally understandable to leave psychedelics for a few years until you build a foundation. You are already ahead of the curve.

This is in general a good way of thinking. I have tried different substances when socializing, but still think it has to be in your base state. Microdosing is probably the best in terms of social benefit, alcohol is the millenia-old social lubricant. Weed works only if the other people are also high, otherwise it is really out of tune.

@r0ckyreed Ego ('The Self') is deeper than just 'personality' (lower-case ego). It is the unique crystallization of your consciousness that allows you to perceive anything at all. Psychedelics make it more fluid, allowing to transform and morph into higher order structures, loosing the 'personal' form. Alcohol, amphetamines and other dopamine-active substances on the other hand make it more rigid, dropping you to a lower 'survival frequency' per say. Two frameworks to consider on reading are Jung's Model of the Psyche and the Active Inference (Free-Energy Principle): Jung differentiates between the 'ego' and the 'Self' ('ego' + 'unconscious' = 'Self). Substances/States of Consciousness tune the latter 'equation', expanding or shrinking either element of the Left-hand side. The Right hand side is the totality, within which the entirety of existence resides. Interestingly, there is a somewhat novel concept in science that can serve as a basis for a yellow-stage model of the 'ego', i.e Active inference and the Free-energy principle by Karl Friston. Whilst a finite and resource-constrained organism, you need to continuously craft a model of the world, the reflection of which you perceive as the 'self'/'ego', a reflection that nonetheless never stops flowing.

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.

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.

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.

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.