Karlo @karlo@qoto.org
from phd_student import text_embedding
Interested in: physics, evolution, cogsci, programming, AI, gamedev, VR/AR
Joined Nov 2022
We can observe our thoughts without identifying with them.
We are not our thoughts, and thoughts are not our own. A thought is as fictitious as any other perception (e.g. touch, hearing, and vision), and arrives in our awareness unannounced.
When we become aware of a sound it arrives on its own and leaves on its own, we have no choice. The same is true for thoughts.
#mindfullness I guess
Karlo
boosted
I turned M. C. Escher's "Sky and Water" into a #perfectLoop
I might revisit this after #genuary to add in the missing feathers, fins, and scales transformations that were in the original
#genuary19 #genuary2023 #MCEscher #GenArt #GenerativeArt #Processing #CreativeCoding
@fractaldreams Cool!
Reminds me of slime simulations (e.g. https://youtu.be/X-iSQQgOd1A?t=911)
I always thought that apes are very intelligent, they can even learn sign language!
I always thought that insects have almost no intelligence, that they are just simple mindless drones.
Apes can learn to use sign language, but only individual symbols and words, no syntax. They never ask questions (which might imply that they do not understand that other minds can know things they do not).
Bees can learn new behaviors (e.g. they can recognize images of human faces), they can even learn new behaviors by watching other bees do a task.
Bees are not as mindless as I thought.
I wonder what does it feel like to be a bee.
A talk about bees as intelligent individuals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iut33k3MHyI
@TodePond it has cells, and is automata :D
@davidnjoku @serenebabe
There is a way :D
Preferences > other > group boosts in timelines.
Not sure if it is a functionality available on every instance though.
Karlo
boosted
#CellularAutomata modelling of snow transport by wind in the #java version of #processing .
Followed a book by Bastien Chopard and Michel Droz pretty closely for the Lattice Boltzmann model of the wind, but had to come up with my own toppling mechanics for the snow.
You can even see a tiny avalanche in the part after the time-skip.
Karlo
boosted
fun fact: even on CPU, stable diffusion images develop faster than polaroid film
Karlo
boosted
I'd like to share my favorite talks of 2022, spanning disciplines like Cognitive Science, Molecular Biology, AI, Philosophy, and Neuroscience
TALK 1: Lars Chittka showcases the remarkable bee mind through clever experiments. It is striking that a pinhead-sized brain can recognize complex stimuli, use simple tools, learn from 🐝 friends, and possibly even process basic emotions. Coolest of all is an experiment that shows bees represent shape multimodally (word is this study caused a lot of buzz). https://youtu.be/Iut33k3MHyI
TALK 2: Hessam Akhlaghpour lays out an RNA-based theory of universal computation. He first observes that actually, universal computation in Turing's sense is not all that elusive. In systems that use simple rules and in which memory usage can grow, it shows up pretty often. Moreover, universal computation is powerful and can solve a lot of problems, so it would seem odd that life would have evolved without it. His guess is that RNA may implement it, and he goes into great detail on how it could. 🧬https://youtu.be/mOTeek3eC1g
TALK 3: Sanjukta Krishnagopal shows how you can build intelligent neural networks without backpropagation. For context, in AI you can pursue engineering or science, and these are quite different projects. If you want to understand how the brain learns, then it is wise to constrain your modelling work to biologically plausible learning mechanisms. There is no evidence that the brain uses backpropagation -- the standard learning algorithm -- so exploring alternatives is a honey pot scientifically even if performance drops. Krishnagopal shows how a dendrite-inspired gating mechanism can get you learning. https://youtu.be/2Xr0XcyhMCc
TALK 4: Lauren Ross discusses causation in the life and mind sciences. Causation is front and center in science, so it's a good idea to be clear about what the concept means. Ross details a few philosophical views, and also observes that there are many causal structures in nature; we can talk about mechanisms, feedback loops, cascades, just to name a few. There was also a Q&A point that stuck with me: as we can glean from the Lyme's disease example, necessity and sufficiency do not always entail causation. I always thought those were a litmus test 🤔. https://youtu.be/w9cwZjd249c
And here a few more recommendations from the past year... 🍯
- Manjari Narayan https://youtu.be/7-TTS134DnA
- Luiz Pessoa https://youtu.be/m346unJ1yro
- Yejin Choi https://youtu.be/JGiLz_Jx9uI?t=2944
- Jeffrey Bowers https://youtu.be/7C_0vBnWDYo
- Rosa Cao https://youtu.be/gEFtH_z3_xk
After the abandoned buildings, I continued further, underneath the highway, passing a #castle, and reaching a small #waterfall finally escaping the city's noise.
I wanted to go for a #walk, but the city is noisy and foul, so I decided to follow the river to try and escape the city's anxiety-inducing hug.
The river passes through the old, #abandoned, part of the city in the river's ravine.
#walking #hike
@gordon
That's a harsh criteria: *human-built* systems and *accidentally* capable of evolution.
Maybe systems in which there is a lossy compression and reconstruction. So the evolution would not be the goal (compression is). Selection could than act on less-than-perfect reconstructions.
I can't think of any, but am curious.
If systems that we are part of count, there are many: human knowledge, music, fashion, tradition
@michael_nielsen fun paper, but isn't the p-value quite high? And only 32 subjects.
Nonetheless, always enjoy playing with these topics, and watching James Randy debunking people :D
@lritter "Chefs, they play with the raw materials of life itself. And death itself. ... It’s art on the edge of the abyss, which is where God works too."
Karlo
boosted
Happy new year! Another year means another year-long keogram! Every 15 seconds throughout 2022, my trusty all-sky camera took a picture of the sky above the Netherlands. Combining these 2.1 million images into a year-long keogram reveals this picture, which shows the length of the night change throughout the year (the hourglass shape), when the Moon was visible at night (diagonal bands), and the Sun higher in the sky during summer, as well as lots and lots of clouds passing overhead.
@nomi reminds me of horace and pete
https://youtu.be/qCscYyQNwVs?t=69
Karlo
boosted
"Webspaces: Rebooting the #3D Web - a new way to create self-hosted 3D worlds on the web using just HTML" ~ https://gfodor.medium.com/rebooting-the-web-in-3d-with-webspaces-9e58847e042c ~ is an open #metaverse closer to reality now? ~ tip @techmeme
Karlo
boosted
For the holiday, a thread on how to befriend crows.
--
Befriending crows is a wonderful thing.
I have many crow friends at home and at work. They bring joy at unexpected moments and can rescue a miserable day even without shaking down the dust of snow that Robert Frost described.
This thread is an updated version of one I posted at the bird site in July 2019.
#birding #birdwatching #birds #urbanbirding #crows #corvids #crow #corvid #crowfriends
@jaak Similar to this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.08907
from phd_student import text_embedding
Interested in: physics, evolution, cogsci, programming, AI, gamedev, VR/AR
Joined Nov 2022
