The sibling comment gives a wider perspective. I’m going to only respond narrowly on that final paragraph’s original point.

String theories arise naturally from thinking about objects vibrating in spacetime. As such, they’ve generally been included in tests of particle physics whenever feasible. The LHC tested and (statistically) falsified some string theories. String theorists also have a sort of self-regulating ratchet which excludes unphysical theories, most recently excluding swampland theories. Most money in particle physics is going towards nuclear power, colliders like LHC or Fermilab’s loops, or specialized detectors like SK (a giant tank of water) or LIGO (artfully-arranged laser beams) which mostly have to sit still and not be disturbed; in all cases, that money is going towards verification and operationalization of the Standard Model, and any non-standard theories are only coincidentally funded.

So just by double-checking the history, we see that some string theories have been falsified and that the Standard Model, not any string theory, is where most funding goes. Hossenfelder and Woit both know better, but knowing better doesn’t sell books. Gutmann doesn’t realize, I think.

It’s been frustrating to watch Gutmann slowly slide. He hasn’t slid that far yet, I suppose. Don’t discount his voice, but don’t let him be the only resource for you to learn about quantum computing; fundamentally, post-quantum concerns are a sort of hard read in one direction, and Gutmann has decided to try a hard read in the opposite direction.

Page 19, complaining about lattice-based algorithms, is hypocritical; lattice-based approaches are roughly as well-studied as classical cryptography (Feistel networks, RSA) and elliptic curves. Yes, we haven’t proven that lattice-based algorithms have the properties that we want, but we haven’t proven them for classical circuits or over elliptic curves, either, and we nonetheless use those today for TLS and SSH.

Pages 28 and 29 are outright science denial and anti-intellectualism. By quoting Woit and Hossenfelder — who are sneerable in their own right for writing multiple anti-science books each — he is choosing anti-maths allies, which is not going to work for a subfield of maths like computer science or cryptography. In particular, p28 lies to the reader with a doubly-bogus analogy, claiming that both string theory and quantum computing are non-falsifiable and draw money away from other research. This sort of closing argument makes me doubt the entire premise.

Look, I get your perspective, but zooming out there is a context that nobody’s mentioning, and the thread deteriorated into name-calling instead of looking for insight.

In theory, a training pass needs one readthrough of the input data, and we know of existing systems that achieve that, from well-trodden n-gram models to the wholly-hypothetical large Lempel-Ziv models. Viewed that way, most modern training methods are extremely wasteful: Transformers, Mamba, RWKV, etc. are trading time for space to try to make relatively small models, and it’s an expensive tradeoff.

From that perspective, we should expect somebody to eventually demonstrate that the Transformers paradigm sucks. Mamba and RWKV are good examples of modifying old ideas about RNNs to take advantage of GPUs, but are still stuck in the idea that having a GPU perform lots of gradient descent is good. If you want to critique something, critique the gradient worship!

I swear, it’s like whenever Chinese folks do anything the rest of the blogosphere goes into panic. I’m not going to insult anybody directly but I’m so fucking tired of mathlessness.

Also, point of order: Meta open-sourced Llama so that their employees would stop using Bittorrent to leak it! Not to “keep the rabble quiet” but to appease their own developers.

West Coast of USA, late 2000s to early 2010s, yes, the thick squared dark eyeglass frames were popular. Every time I see photos of these folks, I’m reminded of a couple people I know IRL as well as folks I know professionally who still prefer the thicker frames. Personally, I’ve always needed a very heavy prescription, and so I’ve always looked for the thinnest frames, but it really was a trend a decade ago.

Somebody pointed out that HN’s management is partially to blame for the situation in general, on HN. Copying their comment here because it’s the sort of thing Dan might blank:

but I don’t want to get hellbanned by dang.

Who gives a fuck about HN. Consider the notion that dang is, in fact, partially to blame for this entire fiasco. He runs an easy-to-propagandize platform due how much control of information is exerted by upvotes/downvotes and unchecked flagging. It’s caused a very noticeable shift over the past decade among tech/SV/hacker voices – the dogmatic following of anything that Musk or Thiel shit out or say, this community laps it up without hesitation. Users on HN learn what sentiment on a given topic is rewarded and repeat it in exchange for upvotes.

I look forward to all of it burning down so we can, collectively, learn our lessons and realize that building platforms where discourse itself is gamified (hn, twitter, facebook, and reddit) is exactly what led us down this path today.

Elon is an Expert Beginner: he has become proficient in executing the basics of the craft by sheer repetition, but failed to develop meaningful generalizations.

The original Expert Beginner concept was defined here in terms of the Dreyfus model, but I think it’s compatible with Lee’s model as well. In your wording of Lee’s model, one becomes an Expert Beginner when their intuition is specialized for seeing the thing; they have seen so many punches that now everything looks like a punch and must be treated like a punch, but don’t worry, I’m a punch expert, I’ve seen so many punches, I definitely know what to do when punches are involved.

There’s a good insight from this armchair psychoanalysis. The typical narcissist is technically capable of performing the whole pretend-to-care-for-game-theoretic-reasons behavior, provided that there is an incentive for them. However, if Elon genuinely believes himself to be Christ or Buddha or Roy, then his abilities don’t matter, because he will never have the incentive to deflate his beliefs and face his own limitations and mortality. In short, Elon’s attitude can’t be adjusted and his mental health will never improve.

You may have heard that Catturd doesn’t have any fiber in his diet and was hospitalized for bowel blockage. (Best sneer I’ve seen so far: “can’t turd.”) Along similar lines, Srid isn’t taking his statins for high cholesterol caused by a carnivore diet.

Meta: I’m kind of pissed that Catturd is WP notable but laughing my ass off at the page for carnivore diets. Life takes and gives.

I’m imagining no fewer than three fictional versions of Eris/Discord laughing at this orange-site fool:

Meanwhile I cannot turn my living room LED lights on or off because I control them through discord.

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.” Some corporations are criminal enterprises and should have their tax numbers revoked. Some corporate officers are criminals and should be prosecuted. Some are complicit in crimes against humanity or war crimes and should be internationally prosecuted.

Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…

Bezos’ open interference in the Washington Post’s editorial section has pushed Walter Bright into a very funny series of public admissions that he did not have to make. See the orange site here for his ongoing libertarian meltdown.

Meanwhile, actual Pastafarians (hi!) know that the Russian Federation openly persecutes the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for failing to help the government in its authoritarian activities, and also that we’re called to be anti-authoritarian. The Fifth Rather:

I’d really rather you didn’t challenge the bigoted, misogynist, hateful ideas of others on an empty stomach. Eat, then go after the bastards.

May you never run out of breadsticks, travelers.

It’s almost completely ineffective, sorry. It’s certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.

On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasn’t yet been invalidated and there’s no upcoming mathematics which tilt the scales in favor of anti-training techniques. In general, scrapers for training sets are now augmented with alignment models, which test inputs to see how well the tags line up; your example might be rejected as insufficiently normal-cat-like.

I think that “force-feeding” is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that “forced” input is destined to be discarded or retagged.

You’re right. I incorrectly believed that hexa had signed based on their comments elsewhere, but I was wrong.

The original signers include members of the infrastructure and moderation teams. You can find about half of them on Mastodon. They’re all well-established community members who hold real responsibility and roles within the NixOS Foundation ecosystem.

Also note that Eelco isn’t “a maintainer” but the original author and designer, as well as a de facto founder of Determinate Systems. He’s a BDFL. Look at this like the other dethronings of former BDFLs in the D, Python, Perl, Rails, or Scala communities; there’s going to be lots of drama and possibly a fork.