Linkpost Feb 2025
Making Computers Remember, HRT, and Capitalism's History and Future
Hierarchical temporal memory - Wikipedia
HTM is robust to noise, and has high capacity (it can learn multiple patterns simultaneously). When applied to computers, HTM is well suited for prediction,[1] anomaly detection,[2] classification…
There is a January 2025 paper on this method being used for water treatment plant online monitoring. They achieve 92% F1 (F1 is a geometric mean between precision and recall), which is equal to the state of the art.
How does this architecture compare to others time-series anomaly detection methods Time-k-means? Simple linear regression? I’m not experienced or well-read enough to say.
Think-in-Memory: Recalling and Post-thinking Enable LLMs with Long-Term Memory - arxiv
A way to get make “agents”, or at least personal assistants, that feel persistent? Sounds simple enough to pull off…
(1) before generating a response, a LLM agent recalls relevant thoughts from memory, and (2) after generating a response, the LLM agent post-thinks and incorporates both historical and new thoughts to update the memory. Thus, TiM can eliminate the issue of repeated reasoning by saving the post-thinking thoughts as the history.
Reading about adding memory to LLMs and finding out so many old architectures for AI exist. Copycat, LIDA, etc. Who is doing the work of redeveloping them, either running them with modern data and CPUs or parallelizing them and using them on modern accelerators? Because it’s very weird all the smartest models you can talk to today are based on one architecture: transformers. There’s no way that that’s the only one that works. Can an expert fill me in on why some of these ideas from the 1960s-1990s won’t scale?
“The history of technology is full of brilliant ideas that arrived decades early—only to become viable when upstream progress in materials, computation, or economics finally caught up.” - chatgpt (eigenrobot’s)
i.e. reality has a surprising amount of detail, and there is always plenty of room at the bottom for improvement.
The Bitter Lesson - Rich Sutton
A wearable aptamer nanobiosensor for non-invasive female hormone monitoring - Nature (2023)
A tiny piece of electronics and fluidics fit around a finger - someone should definitely get into and manufacture these. The strongest case is that this can measure so many more things than estradiol - this publication’s technology was repurposed from the base technology itself. There is such a massive market opportunity here.
Related? : The Enchippening (Sarah Constantin)
HRT: inside the complex global supply chain behind a $20bn market - The Guardian (2022)
the API (estradiol) is chemically transformed from similar compounds found in soybeans to be more potent (which in this case means to be bioidentical). The batch the Guardian investigated were grown in Northeast China, processed in China and further processed (“cooked”) in the Netherlands. You can see some of the machines that they use in the cover photo.
After a weekend of difficult coding a custom pipeline at the computer, this was in fact the best solution I could find to shop pieces from Pinterest photos.
In humans, “strong selection for extreme mental capacities may have given us all minds like the legs of a racehorse, fast but vulnerable to catastrophic failure.” This fits nicely with speculation about schizophrenia and autism emerging out of rapidly expanding human capacities for language, theory of mind, and other cognitive advances.
Keeping in mind schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder all exist on a scale, are heritable, massively polygenic, strongly selected against in most if not all environments, and yet stable in every population everywhere at ~1% prevalence.
I feel seen in this piece - especially at the intersection of “I am alone” and “I am a burden”. Thankfully, now I feel better - not as much of a burden anymore.
The relative benefits for environmental sustainability of vegan diets for dogs, cats and people
Dogs and cats consume 20% of all animal protein in the US and 9% in the world. Offsetting that much animal protein consumption will not have insignificant impact on all farmed animals and the environment as a whole.
The Personal Analytics of My Life - Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram is someone else who sleeps from 3am to 11am.
A History of the Future - No Set Gauge, part 1 of 3
Best Essay of February 2025.
Hymn of Breaking Strain
The careful text-books measure
(Let all who build beware!)
The load, the shock, the pressure
Material can bear.
So, when the buckled girder
Lets down the grinding span,
The blame of loss, or murder,
Is laid upon the man.
Not on the Stuff—the Man!
But in our daily dealing
With stone and steel, we find
The Gods have no such feeling
Of justice toward mankind.
To no set gauge they make us—
For no laid course prepare—
And presently o'ertake us
With loads we cannot bear:
Too merciless to bear.
The prudent text-books give it
In tables at the end–
The stress that shears a rivet
Or makes a tie-bar bend—
What traffic wrecks macadam—
What concrete should endure—
But we, poor Sons of Adam
Have no such literature,
To warn us or make sure!
We hold all Earth to plunder—
All Time and Space as well—
Too wonder-stale to wonder
At each new miracle;
Till, in the mid-illusion
Of Godhead 'neath our hand,
Falls multiple confusion
On all we did or planned—
The mighty works we planned.
We only of Creation
(Oh, luckier bridge and rail!)
Abide the twin damnation—
To fail and know we fail.
Yet we–by which sure token
We know we once were Gods—
Take shame in being broken
However great the odds—
The Burden or the Odds.
Oh, veiled and secret Power
Whose paths we seek in vain,
Be with us in our hour
Of overthrow and pain;
That we–by which sure token
We know Thy ways are true—
In spite of being broken,
Because of being broken,
May rise and build anew.
Stand up and build anew!
— Rudyard Kipling, 1935
The advertisement OpenAI put on the Super Bowl! The most expensive advertisement you can place, on a $/s basis.
I Met Paul Graham Once - Phill Mendonça-Vieira
Ada Udang di Balik Batu (There is a Shrimp Behind the Rock)
The phrase means, in Indonesian, that there is an ulterior motive.
why can’t we all live like Anson?
Levers for Progress - Kelvin Yu and Anson Yu
An explainer for the history of technological progressivism. Pretty 10/10
LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields
Find things in real, camera-input 3D space based on natural language queries!
Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology
A Standard-Model-like categorization for all psychiatry conditions we know of.
Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology
Oh, when they said neural networks are linear algebra this is what they meant!
Curius / Bookmarks for the extremely curious
A chrome and firefox extension that allows you to share bits and pieces of articles you read with all of your friends in real time! I would recommend!
Is Stephen wolfram good company? Wolfram Mathematica and alpha are lifesavers but as a guy I only know him from kook-adjacent podcasts (my vote is yes btw, he is good company)
I haven't met him irl!