Disqus - Latest Comments for hminsky

Re: Exxact | Deep Learning, HPC, AV, Distribution & More

hminsky — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:15:54 -0000

Fabulous essay, has aged like fine wine!

Re: New MIT Research Proves AGI Was Achieved

hminsky — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 14:50:14 -0000

WTF, this must have been written by chatGPT, it literally is hallucinating results which are not true. Nobody has a program yet that performs particularly well on ARC, the reference to an MIT paper is incorrect and likely nonexistent. Seriously, does the 'author' even exist.

note, I was a grad student at the AI Lab, and have been working actively in AI for last 20 years.

Re: The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models

hminsky — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 17:29:51 -0000

These systems have no underlying robust models of reality, cause and effect, of even the most basic physical processes such as object persistence. They dredge up paraphrases of previously written sentences, but their reasoning is fundamentally suspect at all times, because they are trying to use language to do reasoning, instead of generating language from reasoning.

ChatGPT4: Q: if you drop two pennies in your front pocket, and then put them both in your back pocket, then put one back in you front pocket, how many are in your back pocket?

A:
If you drop two pennies in your front pocket, and then put them both in your back pocket, you would have 2 pennies in your back pocket.

Then, if you put one penny back in your front pocket, you would still have 2 pennies in your back pocket and 1 penny in your front pocket. So, the answer is 2 pennies in your back pocket.

Re: Fully-vaccinated Fla. man dies from COVID-19 despite no preexisting health conditions

hminsky — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 00:24:06 -0000

"The CDC has estimated one out of every 25,000 full vaccinated Americans have died from COVID-19. The majority of breakthrough cases were reportedly in patients 65 or older."
Of course the sociopaths who wrote this article made no mention of the odds of death from COVID in unvaccinated people. It is around one in 400.

Re: How Bell’s Theorem Proved ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ Is Real

hminsky — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 16:22:07 -0000

There is a hole a light-year wide in the experiment as described, namely the assumption that the experimenters 'deciding' which way to set their detectors is not correlated with each other. They had to be in the same light cone to set up the experiment, so the states of the entangled particles are within the light cones of both experimenters from before the time the entangled particle is generated. You can't just magically step outside the universe and set up an experiment without affecting and being affected by the world state.

Re: The COVID Hypochondriacs Think They’re Saving the World, But They're Actually Destroying It

hminsky — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 17:46:37 -0000

Smallpox, Polio and Measles will always be with us so why bother vaccinating people?
Oh yeah, because you can actually eradicate some viruses that have primarily human reservoirs, and save immense suffering. Smallpox is eradicated. Polio would be except for terrorists and anti-vax epsilon-minuses. Measles could be eradicated as well.

Re: What's RTSP IP Camera & Best RTSP IP Cameras Buying Guide

hminsky — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 20:08:19 -0000

Do these cameras have any AI features?

Re: PureThermal 2 - FLIR Lepton Smart I/O Module by GetLab

hminsky — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 09:03:20 -0000

Has anyone found a fix for the board locking up when connected to a Linux as a USB camera? It runs for a several minutes when connected to
my NVIDIA Jetson TX2 board but then freezes and has to be power cycled.

Is there a firmware update or anything?

Re: PureThermal 2 - FLIR Lepton Smart I/O Module by GetLab

hminsky — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 09:01:48 -0000

I have similar problem connecting to Ubuntu Linux (18.04) on the NVIDIA TX2 board.
I don't know where the error lies... in the PureThermal firmware or the Linux usb camera driver.

Re: Don't Break Your Bank To Purchase Ruger's New Scout Rifle

hminsky — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 22:05:03 -0000

I had not one but two of these, and there is something just wrong with the bolt; when you cycle it, its 'floppy' in its track, and if you don't shove it forward into battery completely straight, it locks up. Totally not acceptable. A bolt action should be smooth and precise, not loose and wobbly. I thought it was just a problem with the first one, but the second had the same issue.

Re: Palo Alto’s China Delight shutting down after 22 years

hminsky — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 13:22:50 -0000

I am going to miss the Szechuan Crispy Prawn!! I went there almost every time I was in Palo Alto, for decades.

Re: Marquita Turner, 5 months pregnant, uses pink handgun to shoot home intruder

hminsky — Sat, 13 Aug 2016 10:35:57 -0000

A woman is much more likely to be killed or injured by a gun in their home at the hands of their boyfriend or husband than to use it to defend her life from a stranger. Scary, get those guns out of the house!

But wait, that same woman is much more likely to be killed with a knife by her boyfriend or husband in her own home than to use it to defend against a stranger. And in fact her husband or boyfriend's fist or foot or hammer two-by-four is much more likely to kill her than to defend against a stranger in the house. In fact her own child is far far more likely to kill or injure her with a kitchen knife than to use that knife to defend against a stranger in the house. The obvious conclusion? Get the boyfriends and husband and children out of that woman's house!

Or maybe this is a case of some kind of terribly misleading use of statistics?

Re: POTD: Tricked out ARES SCR Rifle

hminsky — Sat, 06 Aug 2016 09:02:12 -0000

They already have come after these, in Massachusetts. Our Attorney General decided that all semi-auto rifles are mass murder weapons, and is trying to enforce the "AWB" to say that any rifle that has "similar operation" to an AR15 is banned. That general term includes any semi auto.

I think she's trying this as a ploy to score political points so Hillary appoints her to her cabinet after the election. But anyway, take a look at MA, it's where the Democrats are trying out their gun banning / confiscation ideas today.

Re: A New Computational Universe - Fredkin's SALT CA

hminsky — Sun, 24 Jul 2016 12:18:48 -0000

I did a kind of simple existence proof of a cellular automata rule based on the SALT model, which has a particle which can move (asymptotically) in any direction at any velocity.

https://www.youtube.com/wat...

This is clearly a rather fragile configuration, as a single cell out of place causes it to destruct, but it at least shows in theory that you can make a simple (almost) reversible planar wave glider that moves in any rotational direction, on a cartesian grid.

Interestingly, it also exhibits a Lorentz-like relativistic contraction in the direction of motion. In fact it is hard to imagine a translational wave/particle in motion in the SALT world which does NOT exhibit Lorentz contraction.

Re: Panama Papers & National Security Agency Surveillance Value

hminsky — Sun, 08 May 2016 22:52:44 -0000

well said @skyoss . Someone once said "the government can't abuse data they don't have". The only realistic way to prevent government abuse of our private data is to forbid the government from collecting it in the first place. In fact we did have laws forbidding it, which the NSA simply broke. And then told us "what are you worried about, we promise we won't actually look at it", which they then proceeded to do illegally on thousands of citizens, thousands of times with no consequences.

Re: Technology & the Future: Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”

hminsky — Sun, 27 Mar 2016 01:19:03 -0000

Michelson the physicist lamented in 1894 "… it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established … An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." This was right before quantum physics and relativity were discovered.

The idea that all the really great society changing technical inventions have been completed is so short sighted and ignorant that it defies belief that someone would be taken seriously for publishing it.

Artificial Intelligence will change everything; it will bring back the economic benefits of slavery, without having to use human slaves. If computers can drive our cars, clean our houses, pick our crops, take out our garbage, repair our infrastructure, operate our mines, factories, perform medical procedures, etc, it will profoundly change life at least as drastically as the industrial revolution.

Re: Facebook's Zuckerberg meets China's propaganda chief

hminsky — Sun, 20 Mar 2016 10:33:36 -0000

communists hate and fear free speech like Frankenstein fears villagers with torches...

Re: Marvin Minsky on Singularity 1 on 1: The Turing Test is a Joke!

hminsky — Mon, 25 Jan 2016 12:22:29 -0000

Marvin's opinion was something like this: Turing proposed the "Turing Test" as a kind of reductio-ad-absurdum agrument, to people who at the time thought it was completely impossible that a machine could ever think with the competence of a human being. His argument was that if you were talking to such a machine intelligence, and it could chat with you in such an intelligent fashion that it was not easily distinguishable from a human, and you still were of the opinion that it was not "thinking", then your opinion was not reasonable. It was in other words sufficient but not neccessary that a system perform so well, and yet some people would still insist that it was not "thinking" because it was a machine. Turing believed that computation was universal and that therefore what the brain could compute, another system could also compute.

Re: [Lincoln Chafee Metric System Proposal -- Adopting New System Wouldn’t Be Easy] | National Review Online

hminsky — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 20:04:24 -0000

Aside from the posturing and insults, there are actually serious problems with supporting both metric and English units in industry. It causes redundancy and confusion. There is a concept called "technical debt", where you do the easy thing today, and build up a larger and larger debt of effort that must be performed in the future. Our manufacturing efficiency and productivity does suffer for having to support both systems, and anyone who claims otherwise is a liar.

Re: Bright Object Streaks Through Night Sky

hminsky — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 20:24:27 -0000

We saw it in Watertown, MA ar 18:37 EST Headed South it looked like.

Re: America's gun stores are overstocked

hminsky — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 10:22:29 -0000

You still cannot order a case of .22LR for less than extortion pricing though. When will the cheap .22 come back??

Re: 7 Ways to Improve Your Japanese Skills

hminsky — Fri, 22 Aug 2014 17:07:51 -0000

This is a great resource for brushing up on my grammar! I studied three semesters of Japanese back in 1993, and have kind of stagnated since then, without getting any better. But with online resources like this web site, and another I discovered recently japanesepod101, I'm at least not forgetting as fast anymore!

Thanks again for taking the time to explainy clearly these basic grammar issues.

Re: Engage with the livestream

hminsky — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 15:44:43 -0000

I have read the Lessig's analysis of the unintended consequences of the super PAC laws, and what worries me is whether some similar unintended consequence will come from the reforms proposed. I'm particularly worried about messing with constitutional amendments; it's completely possible that we could make things worse. It's obviously must easier to look at things in hindsight, but I want to know if there's any way to try to analyze the unintended consequences of these proposed reforms in the same was that Lessig analyzed the superPAC outcomes.

Re: Unarmed Man Goes On Shooting Rampage

hminsky — Fri, 16 May 2014 11:34:57 -0000

On elephant in the room is the mandated extremely heavy trigger pull on NYPD pistols. They do not have safeties on the pistols (because police cannot be trusted to operate such a complex device under duress), so instead they put a minimum 10 lb (often 12 or even 14 lbs in practice) trigger pull. Have you ever tried to fire a pistol with that much weight on the trigger? It's almost impossible to hit a man sized target at 20 feet for anyone who hasn't practiced a lot. Under the real world tension of using a gun, I imagine it is just luck when a NYPD policeman hits anywhere near where he aims.

Re: Nest Bets That You Secretly Hate Your Smoke Detector

hminsky — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 08:58:11 -0000

So you're on the Internet telling people what they should buy for home safety, as well as how they should cook. Do you have any other words of wisdom as to how others should live their lives? Don't bother answering, as I am sure that you do.