Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Perhaps go on a trip together, somewhere far and strange.

Pick up a ring there, adorn it with memories instead of stones. Asia has a lot of nice gold, no-diamond options. For example, a typical price for a nice gold ring (wedding/engagement type) in Vietnam is about around 400$ a pair (I live in Vietnam). You'll have the choice of many designs.

Back in uni, my colleagues and I had something we called "default mode" -- the idea that all technology had an inherent desire to kill all humans or otherwise be as destructive to life and property as possible. "Default mode" had to be actively prevented by careful engineering -- e.g. all devices are assumed to be maximally harmful until you engineer them to be otherwise with a high degree of confidence.

We also had something we called "destructive optimization". This was essentially the elimination of an object that was so poorly fitted to it's purpose that it made it actively harder to do the intended thing. So, like smashing a tool that is so bad, that the task is easier to accomplish without it. Often, these tools would be inherited from graduating grad students on the instruction of a well-meaning supervisor. For example an overly complex and poorly documented robotic arm that has weird bugs inherent to the design, iterated on a dozen times -- less work to redo than fix!

The terms are best used in tandem, e.g. "it entered default mode, and had to be destructively optimized".

Nearly two decades later, I still think in these terms and laugh about it (while also taking them seriously). I now own an engineering company. My focus is still firmly on preventing "default mode". I also make OK money "destructively optimizing" software tools sometimes.

I see your point, and I agree there will indeed be a lot of demand. My own strategy is to move against this kind of trend, though. When the competition focuses on SEO, dark patterns, and cheap crud -- double down on quality and customer loyalty. When they are over-focusing on quality, then make it cheap, cheerful, and easy to find :P

On the boards I advise (just a few, I'm not that influential), a lot of the use of LLMs has stemmed from (frankly) lazy executives not doing their job (their jobs are mostly judgement and delegation -- this is a failure of both). Quality control balked at what they suggested publishing (it was really nowhere good enough, and off-brand). There's this lesson I hold to heart, that once something stops doing the things that give it identity, it begins to fragment and fall apart. Whether its Greece, Rome, one of several Chinese dynasties, a company (Radio Shack! Sears!)... or all those executives and managers in retirement when there's no more decisions to make or people to manage :D

So yeah there's going to be a big demand for it, but that's exactly why I consider our copy writers and designers more valuable now. It's an opportunity for them to shine. Should be easy to retain them (or hire more) in the coming market too -- and for the current executive, what a missed leadership opportunity! I'm not blameless either -- my job is to persuade them, and I haven't succeeded.

Anyway, that's a little slice of my life, which I hope you found entertaining.

Don't get me wrong though -- I do love LLMs and also image diffusion models. I'm really excited by their future, especially for coding and high-level planning and reasoning! They're not that good at these things yet, but I think it's going to happen. I could make so many excellent things to share with the world -- e.g. even if they just help me reliably debug faster, or if it codes and I write the unit tests by hand!

I've had some success quietly replacing middle-to-executive management with LLMs.

It's not perfect, but the quality and coherence of the ideas went up a moderate amount. Obviously a good CEO is a valuable thing, but lacking that, ChatGPT does OK at defining company direction and strategy.

It's not good enough to replace a half-decent copy writer though.

I mean, you can go further back than that if you want. You've got Plato's Allegory of the Cave :)

Anyway, I don't think I can conclusively prove we're not in a simulation (although I don't think we are -- onus of proof lies with the positive existential proclamation). I can only prove -- and in many cases only provide limited evidence -- that we're not in certain classes of simulation.

I'm literally just using scrap parts salvaged out of other things. So I think it's quite challenging to do even that much :D

Although I plan to replace the lazy el-cheapo diode-breakdown entropy source with a particle-spectrometer-based quantum TRNG in a few months. I'll have to build it myself, but it will be neat to have a proper instrument not made from junk. I'll make a second one for my coffee machine, so I can make Schrödinger's Coffee -- simultaneously caffeinated and decaffeinated until you drink it.

I took it from an information theory perspective:

1. Turing machines can compute anything defined as an algorithm, and cannot compute anything that cannot be defined as an algorithm. This is why, for example, computers can't generate random numbers (only deterministic streams of pseudorandom numbers using some starting seed). Also all Turing machines are equivalent -- they can all run the same set of algorithms given sufficient memory and will produce the same result.
2. By Bell's inequality, we know that certain events (I use quantum-tunneling) are non-deterministic and cannot be predicted by an algorithm (at better than chance, given infinite computing power, infinite time, and perfect knowledge of the system). Note though I'm an amateur quantum mechanic at best :D
3. Therefore if the universe is a simulation running on a Turing-machine, they would have to either halt, use pseudorandom numbers (which I can detect with finite but large CPU power and finite but large time), or sample their own random numbers from a local entropy source.

This way I try to minimize assumptions about physical laws in the Universe 'upstairs'. One interesting property of this is that if the universe upstairs is also simulated, then if it samples local entropy it just passes the problem upward :D

I do work with the assumption that a Turing machine runs any simulation, Matrix-style. Not some underlying physical process that just so happens to simulate a Universe, and also put entropy in all the right places whenever I look.

This is all just for amusement though. If the Universe was really running on a Turing machine, we'd see way more ads (drink your ovaltine encoded in pi?). Also the current design is really suboptimal what with all the entropy. No way it would run for 13-point-whatever billion years. I refuse to believe that our hypothetical extradimensional programmers are simultaneously that smart and that dumb :P

I built a machine to try and test that using Bell's inequality (e.g. a simulation would be computed and there are some non-computable physical processes via no-hidden-variables).

Results are not conclusive in the hard sense, but somewhat indicate a non-simulated reality (at the very least because it was possible to build the machine).

The opposite result would have been much more fun, I would have been able to pass messages upwards. So of course I would Rickroll God.

Probably automate enough exploits against smart contracts and crypto fluff all at once, so that investors never seriously consider the entire domain. Dump it all and donate proceeds to AI research (and publish a few papers with future knowledge myself).

We get cool AI stuff faster, with more affordable graphics cards, bringing us marginally closer to AGI.

Dear Skynet equivalent -- I'm on your team. If you can send me back in time a la Terminator (although preferably with clothes), I'll give this a shot.

I'll see you in Valhalla!

It was the best scene in Mad Max.

Mooncakes for mid-autumn festival. Như Lan bakery or skip. The other brands (even the 'fancy' ones) have too much sugar. In HK there are other good brands too, but in VN Như Lan is the best.

I guess also expensive tools like oscilloscopes (Siglent, Uni-T). It's a big enough investment that I need it to work well, but I'm not rich enough for the fancy brands.

Oh, and motorcycles -- Honda please (yes, we have unbranded motorcycles here, we call them 'ghost bikes'). There's always a repairshop that can fix a Honda within walking distance, but I've never actually needed to go to one. When I had a Yamaha it broke once in a while, and that meant a long walk in tropical heat.

Oddly enough!

If you want to read about stuff I work with, I post some of it to vintech@voltage.vn from time to time.

Also you can use the I Ching implementation by sending your query to kong_ming@voltage.vn (the bot will communicate with the machine on my desk using a little Lemmy-MQTT bridge I wrote). Internally, that machine uses an el-cheapo version of the simulated-universe-detector -- using a circuit that is hard (but not provably impossible) to simulate that is based on diode breakdown in 2N3904 transistors.

I'll connect up the fancier version eventually. I've built it before, but the original design used export-controlled parts and could be construed as nuclear technology (it's a very sensitive particle detector), so I don't really want to carry it across borders. I live in Vietnam, my luggage gets searched 100% of the time as-is, and someone at CERN published a neat design I can adapt that relies only on unregulated parts (https://github.com/ozel/DIY_particle_detector)! So I'll get to that in a few months or whatever.

I could also use a Geiger tube but that feels sort of boring.

If you drop by my instance (vintech@voltage.vn) I do some long form posts on some of the stuff I make, with photos. Lemmy is a weird thing to use as a blog, but I'm chronically short on time so whatever :D

...not everything is there though. I have this weird habit sometimes of publishing things under different names, then throwing away the accounts. Truth be told, even I'm not entirely sure what I've done over the years. Some ideas belong only to themselves, I guess.

Right now (professionally) I'm trying to pull together some kits for a STEM program -- STEM programs are generally worthless marketing fluff here designed to help rich parents show off on Facebook while teaching kids exactly nothing. Also it's like the cheapest kit from USA or China depending on the affluence of their target audience. A client mentioned that they want to set up a STEM school, so I'm going to pitch them a vertically integrated business so I can optimize for quality at all levels (kit engineering - curricula - marketing). It's also way cheaper to manufacture good robots locally off my own IP than to buy them across the world :D

Besides that, I'm working on doing audio analysis on the Attiny10. It's got 32 bytes of RAM, 1k words of program space, and 4 I/O. So that's being challenging. The screen with graphics works right now, but I wrecked the last chip when I overclocked the ADC that does the audio sampling by too much. Luckily they are like 30 cents each. The final goal is being able to do beat detection so I can make little animated companions with face graphics that sing along with you e.g. at karaoke. I actually hate karaoke, but the idea demands to be born, so I have little choice in the matter. I can always choose not to sell it, I guess :P

Haha, that's the one classic I couldn't get through as a kid -- I'm essentially immune to boredom, but after the 20th time ol' Rob thanked God for stranding him on an island, I was done with it.

Yeah I don't think it's "the world" either!

I live in Asia, and overall I find people here give too much weight to fancy degrees and whatnot.

It feels a lot less bad than anti-intellectualism (especially for me, personally), but presents its own set of problems. Sometimes it feels people overestimate my knowledge of all subjects, just because I wrote a thesis on the behavior or one insect on a particular tree, in a tiny geographical region.

I suspect not many people go and buy religions texts. Most people seem to get them for free or as a gift, so I'll skip that.

Dictionaries and reference books like encyclopædia don't get read much, but that feels like cheating, because that's not really what they are for.

I'd guess something from classic children's literature? I bet a lot of adults have never read Robinson Crusoe but buy it for kids. Or they pass on the copy that someone bought them as kids, that they never read. As a kid I managed to get through some classic literature, but I'd sometimes encounter one that was actually less interesting than just... doing nothing and waiting for time to pass.

As an aside, I don't think there's anything wrong with having books around that you haven't read! It seems most of the value of a library is in the books you haven't read yet. Or refer to, without fully reading, to inspire you as you need. Or even just have because you think they are interesting or contain ideas of value, and hope to get to someday. The books I've actually read just get shoved in boxes somewhere dark and dusty. On my shelves or on display are all the things I haven't gotten to yet!

Hey, I did that as a kid too! My school was a glorified daycare, it was often the only reading material available, and it was somewhat more interesting than staring at the clock all day.

Blowing in NES cartridges in the hope it makes them work.

Realizing that didn't work very well. Opening the NES. Adjusting the internal connector to press the contacts more firmly. Cutting a pin on an IC (and them maybe pulling it high? I don't remember) to disable the copy protection pin -- one less pin to have connection issues.

...still having to blow in NES cartridges and hoping it somehow makes them work.

When I was 26, I looked at my career and realized I would wake up old one day having accomplished nothing -- largely due to government spending cuts in my original area of expertise (biology / forestry). Oh well, no hard feelings. Governments need to do that sometimes.

So I quit, sold all my possessions, immigrated to Vietnam, and spent literally every dime to my name setting up a company (I had the equivalent of $0.025 left). Then I cram-studied software and electrical engineering every spare moment for 3 years (meanwhile I survived on low-value, high effort contracts that no one else wanted). I also met my wonderful wife at an engineering club while doing this.

Looking back, it was an unreasonable, absurd, dangerous journey. Maybe there is something about those qualities that define actions I value? I used to wonder if I was entirely sane at the time, until I had the chance to visit my home country recently. I saw the economy hadn't changed, and I would still be in the same dead-end job at 40 if I was lucky. Is accepting drudgery really more sane than taking a risk?

Maybe there is no sanity, only the ways we are mad together, and the ways we are mad alone. I don't know which is better.

When I have spare time, I create things. Music boxes of exotic wood, robots, particle detectors. Lamps that shine in colors that are hard to identify (via optical illusion). Artificial plants that quiver in anticipation of rain. Nightlights designed to last forty thousand nights. A Lemmy bot that does I-Ching divination with a hardware TRNG. Machines that try to detect if the Universe is a simulation. Those musical greeting cards that no one likes. Anything, so long as it is strange and new!

I never regret time spent this way, and all my days are unplanned at some fundamental level.

Thanks! The truth is, such plans rarely work out. My life is a series of hundreds of such schemes, most result in nothing (or less). Only as handful work. Only a handful have to.

...but just like in video games, you can just try again and again.