Blue Alchemist Technology Powers our Lunar Future: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has successfully made solar cells and transmission wire out of lunar regolith simulants - a critical capability. Iron, silicon and aluminium were extracted via molten regolith electrolysis at 1600°C, with oxygen as a byproduct. https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blue-alchemist-powers-our-lunar-future/
“For decades, the Sleeping Beauty Problem has divided people between two answers.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeSu9fBJ2sI
Opera enters the generative AI space with new features in browsers and content apps https://blogs.opera.com/news/2023/02/opera-aigc-integration/
HiP-CT is a new technique that can hierarchically image whole human organs, beginning with the resolution of a human hair (25μm/voxel) down to a resolution where we can see single cells (1.5μm/voxel) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yL6D7TtN9w
Several universities to experiment with micro nuclear power https://apnews.com/article/sxsw-education-business-climate-and-environment-86f6e0aadd29090b347ac2272c595d55
German Archaeologists Discover World’s Oldest Wooden Wells https://www.sci.news/archaeology/article00788.html
Apparently, there is a 5th millennium BC cultural connection between the people of Lake Turkana (NW Kenya) and Neolithic Khartoum - 1400 km apart. https://brill.com/view/journals/jaa/15/1/article-p42_42.xml
“The Supreme Court: Why the common view about this institution is misguided” https://heterodoxthinking.substack.com/p/the-supreme-court
Evolutionary Psychologist's Advice on Relationships https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-h7V_91c-o
What Millennials Should Know About the Soviet Union https://www.humanprogress.org/what-millennials-should-know-about-the-soviet-union/
GPU.js is a JavaScript library that transpiles and compiles simple JavaScript functions to run on a GPU. https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js
Tetris can be used to implement a general purpose digital computer that, among other things, is capable of running Tetris. https://meatfighter.com/tetromino-computer/
A new drug quashes all coronavirus variants. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/02/pegylated-interferon-lambda.html
Ted Chiang: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web
To grasp the proposed relationship between compression and understanding, imagine that you have a text file containing a million examples of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Although any compression algorithm could reduce the size of this file, the way to achieve the greatest compression ratio would probably be to derive the principles of arithmetic and then write the code for a calculator program. Using a calculator, you could perfectly reconstruct not just the million examples in the file but any other example of arithmetic that you might encounter in the future.
Some reactions and references to Ted Chiang's article:
Compression is Equivalent to General Intelligence: http://mattmahoney.net/dc/rationale.html
In 2000, Hutter [21,22] proved that finding the optimal behavior of a rational agent is equivalent to compressing its observations. Essentially he proved Occam's Razor [23], the simplest answer is usually the correct answer. The proof applies to any goal-seeking agent in any unknown environment which can be simulated by a computer. For example, an agent could be a person or computer whose goal is to accumulate money or some other reward signal in an unknown world.
Formally, the agent and environment are a pair of interacting Turing machines that pass messages back and forth at each time step. In addition, the environment outputs a reward signal (a number) to the agent, and the agent's goal is to maximize the accumulated reward. What Hutter proved is that the optimal behavior of an agent is to guess that the environment is controlled by the shortest program that is consistent with all of the interaction observed so far.
Notes on a New Philosophy of Empirical Science: https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.5466
…a theory is scientific if it can be used to build a data compression program, and it is valuable if it can compress a standard benchmark database to a small size, taking into account the length of the compressor itself.
Thank you for the information theory links. An interesting and deep rabbit-hole that will be important for understanding AI.