Outside of making somewhat interesting, limited-edition product, the loose formula for breaking through and succeeding in streetwear today goes as follows: 1. Be Supreme; 2. Be Supreme alumni; 3. Be associated with Kanye West or 4. Seed clothes to influencers who are probably also connected with West.
One and Four both have great mouths with complementary taste maps. They’re eating eggs with avocado and Sriracha (spicy food tastes better to the two of them than it does to the others), along with fried bread and dark-chocolate chia-seed butter.
Despite the central role that the toothbrush plays in daily life around the world – and despite the dramatic advancements made in other areas of modern society – the toothbrush remains the most outdated device in today’s homes.
The new MIRI blog post on “Embedded World-Models” says some of the same things I (among various others) been saying for a long time about the problems with standard Bayesian rationality.
Not sure what to make of that – did they change their minds about this stuff? Were they always closer to my position than to the people who would argue against me when I said stuff like (direct quotes from the post follow):
Imagine a computer science theory person who is having a disagreement with a programmer. The theory person is making use of an abstract model. The programmer is complaining that the abstract model isn’t something you would ever run, because it is computationally intractable. The theory person responds that the point isn’t to ever run it. Rather, the point is to understand some phenomenon which will also be relevant to more tractable things which you would want to run.
I bring this up in order to emphasize that my perspective is a lot more like the theory person’s. I’m not talking about AIXI to say “AIXI is an idealization you can’t run”. The answers to the puzzles I’m pointing at don’t need to run. I just want to understand some phenomena.
However, sometimes a thing that makes some theoretical models less tractable also makes that model too different from the phenomenon we’re interested in.
The way AIXI wins games is by assuming we can do true Bayesian updating over a hypothesis space, assuming the world is in our hypothesis space, etc. So it can tell us something about the aspect of realistic agency that’s approximately doing Bayesian updating over an approximately-good-enough hypothesis space. But embedded agents don’t just need approximate solutions to that problem; they need to solve several problems that are different in kind from that problem.
[…]
Uncertainty about the consequences of your beliefs is logical uncertainty. In this case, the agent might be empirically certain of a unique mathematical description pinpointing which universe she’s in, while being logically uncertain of most consequences of that description.
Logic and probability theory are two great triumphs in the codification of rational thought. However, the two don’t work together as well as one might think.
Probability is like a scale, with worlds as weights. An observation eliminates some of the possible worlds, removing weights and shifting the balance of beliefs.
Logic is like a tree, growing from the seed of axioms. For real-world agents, the process of growth is never complete; you never know all the consequences of each belief.
Not knowing the consequences of a belief is like not knowing where to place the weights on the scales of probability. If we put weights in both places until a proof rules one out, the beliefs just oscillate forever rather than doing anything useful.
This forces us to grapple directly with the problem of a world that’s larger than the agent. We want some notion of boundedly rational beliefs about uncertain consequences; but any computable beliefs about logic must have left out something, since the tree will grow larger than any container.
[…]
In a traditional Bayesian framework, “learning” means Bayesian updating. But as we noted, Bayesian updating requires that the agent start out large enough to consider a bunch of ways the world can be, and learn by ruling some of these out.
Embedded agents need resource-limited, logically uncertain updates, which don’t work like this.
Proclaiming the precise moment that purportedly triggered the magazine’s irreversible decline is a common pastime. Among the most frequently cited “downward turning points” are: creator-editor Harvey Kurtzman’s departure in 1957;[54] the magazine’s mainstream success;[24] adoption of recurring features starting in the early 1960s;[55] the magazine’s absorption into a more corporate structure in 1968 (or later, the mid-1990s);[56] founder Gaines’ death in 1992;[56] the magazine’s publicized “edgy revamp” in 1997;[57] the arrival of paid advertising in 2001;[58] or the magazine’s 2018 move to California.
My boyfriend is trying to explain cricket to me again. “He’s only got two balls to make 48 runs”, he says. The camera focuses on a man. Underneath him it says LEFT ARM FAST MEDIUM. A ball flies into the stands and presumably fractures someone’s skull. “There’s a free six”, my boyfriend says. 348 SIXES says the screen. A child in the audience waves a sign referencing Weet-Bix
The first time he showed me this I assumed he was pranking me
I was wondering last night why stuff on my laptop was running slow, and I only just now discovered the cause: on Monday (?) I had randomly decided to start training char-rnn on Dunnett again, this time on the whole Lymond series instead of just the first two, and then I completely forgot about it, and now it’s done 11 full passes over the data and can produce eerie, frequently grammatical simulacra of Lymond dialogue:
‘I thought you brought her to his tale of the angle.’
‘But the planfour woman,’ he said carefully, ‘that Archie has left the treftileness of women. They have no wish to be tongues.’
‘I really didn’t want a message from his grace,’ said Sir George Douglas’s torn voice, ‘that I am told you think you have rather meant that I must blind against the King of France and for your highest banquet.’
‘I haven’t trusted them,’ Philippa said. ‘And so played to him he might prove it. It has noticed that it may have weight. Only the garrison of the Queen is dead. There’s no need to ancience whom and she had so considered what they wore rather proud to believe that she would be dead. Is it not enough of you?’
‘The company of me,’ Lymond said.
‘You would have gentlemen,’ said Jerott. ‘They have no more than in all that, in the end of the day, the young man did what he die.’
(next one’s with a lower “temperature”)
“No. Lady Culter and I shall not be able to forget him,” said Christian. “And if the sensitive information is to tell you to do the rest of the beauty of a subject of a personal six miles or the special standard of a service and because I was to be there to see the other weakness.”
“Or do you think?”
“I want to be deaded and delivered to the Somervilles. I see nothing of the tapers and the craphie, but the bloody daughter was there.”
“Oh, don’t hear that,” said Lymond, “do you want to fight to face the English out of the child?”
“I don’t recover the same time,” said Sybilla. “I didn’t know that. I should find a city, and it is a trick with a little boat in the night. It was the mother of the Constable of France, who can return home to the Tartars.”
“What do you think it would do that?” said Lymond. “As you arrived at the best, you will find it distressing on the same reason.”
“Well, if you want to recover, I shall go to the end of the river of money. It was in the same time, and I am sure you will find out if you were also a hollow man.”
There was a dessert I wanted to make a vegan version of and the only available vegan recipe is in Danish, so I decided to use Google translate and… well…
