flâneur

Sophia Pung

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on the atlas — 22

highlights — 68

  • will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions!
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • And I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that immediately after my death punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • But you see that I have none, and can only ask you to proportion the fine to my means. However, I think that I could afford a minae, and therefore I propose that penalty; Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, my friends here, bid me say thirty minae, and they will be the sureties. Well then, say thirty minae, let that be the penalty; for that they will be ample security to you.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living - that you are still less likely to believe.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you?
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • I speak rather because I am convinced that I never intentionally wronged anyone, although I cannot convince you of that - for we have had a short conversation onl
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • But, setting aside the question of dishonor, there seems to be something wrong in petitioning a judge, and thus procuring an acquittal instead of informing and convincing him
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • I can give you as proofs of this, not words only, but deeds, which you value more than words. Let me tell you a passage of my own life, which will prove to you that I should never have yielded to injustice from any fear of death, and that if I had not yielded I should have died at once. I will tell you a story - tasteless, perhaps, and commonplace, but nevertheless true. The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator; the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the b…
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • for it is not in the nature of things that a bad man should injure a better than himself
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • there he ought to remain in the hour of danger; he should not think of death or of anything, but of disgrace. And this, O men of Athens, is a true saying
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the part of a good man or of a bad.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • But this is just the ingenious riddle of which I was speaking: the demigods or spirits are gods, and you say first that I don't believe in gods, and then again that I do believe in gods; that is, if I believe in demigods. For if the demigods are the illegitimate sons of gods, whether by the Nymphs or by any other mothers, as is thought, that, as all men will allow, necessarily implies the existence of their parents. You might as well affirm the existence of mules, and deny that of horses and asses. Such nonsense, Meletus, could only have been intended by you as a trial of me. You have put this…
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • But you have just admitted that the good do their neighbors good, and the evil do them evil
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected - which is the truth
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • and then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me:
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • So I departed, conceiving myself to be superior to them for the same reason that I was superior to the politicians.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think t…
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • Well, Chaerephon, as you know, was very impetuous in all his doings, and he went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether - as I was saying, I must beg you not to interrupt - he asked the oracle to tell him whether there was anyone wiser than I was, and the Pythian prophetess answered that there was no man wiser. Chaerephon is dead himself, but his brother, who is in court, will confirm the truth of this story.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • I hope that you will see the propriety of my answering the latter first, for these accusations you heard long before the others, and much oftener.
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • which occur to me at the moment
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • They ought to have been ashamed of saying this, because they were sure to be detected as soon as I opened my lips and displayed my deficiency; they certainly did appear to be most shameless in saying this, unless by the force of eloquence they mean the force of truth; for then I do indeed admit that I am eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs! Well, as I was saying, they have hardly uttered a word, or not more than a word, of truth; but you shall hear from me the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner, in a set oration duly ornamented with words and phrases. No indee…
    The Internet Classics Archive | Apology by Plato
  • ‘AI exists on computer’ to ‘AI killing human beings in physical reality’ by using something other than ridiculous, unforgivable cheating.
    No Physical Substrate, No Problem | Slate Star Codex
  • a weighted average over all the input vectors
    Transformers from scratch | peterbloem.nl
  • The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built.
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • This surprising amount of detail is is not limited to “human” or “complicated” domains, it is a near universal property of everything from space travel to sewing, to your internal experience of your own mind.
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • It seems hard to scan a trained neural network and locate the AI’s learned “tree” abstraction. For very similar reasons, it seems intractable for the genome to scan a human brain and back out the “death” abstraction, which probably will not form at a predictable neural address
    The shard theory of human values - LessWrong
  • pick_a_random_thing()
    ChatGPT
  • Ideally such a method should provide a means of forward programming the general form of behavioral tasks to be achieved, while allowing the neuronal circuits to optimize their performance through learning and adaptation.
    Synthesizing cognition in neuromorphic electronic systems | PNAS
  • The hallmark of cognitive behavior is the ability of an agent to select an action based not only on specific external stimuli, but also on their context
    Synthesizing cognition in neuromorphic electronic systems | PNAS
  • nohup npm start & [5:25 PM] tail -f nohup.out
    • Discord | #general | ampdot office hours
  • But how is the program deciding which modification to execute?
    Four Background Claims - Machine Intelligence Research Institute
  • Sufficiently intelligent artificial reasoners would be able to figure out our intentions and preferences
    Four Background Claims - Machine Intelligence Research Institute
  • In order to build AI systems that have a beneficial impact, we have to solve a number of technical challenges over and above building more powerful and general AI systems.
    Four Background Claims - Machine Intelligence Research Institute
  • This is particularly true if its intellectual advantage allows it to socially manipulate humans, acquire new hardware (legally or otherwise), produce better hardware, create copies of itself, or improve its own software.
    Four Background Claims - Machine Intelligence Research Institute
  • I see this as the most uncertain claim out of the ones I’ve listed here.
    Four Background Claims - Machine Intelligence Research Institute
  • and fill them with refrigerators, and cars, and cities)
    Four Background Claims - Machine Intelligence Research Institute
  • It would be surprising if humans were perfectly designed reasoners, for the same reason it would be surprising if airplanes couldn’t fly faster than birds.
    Four Background Claims - Machine Intelligence Research Institute
  • e Church-Turing thesis
    Four Background Claims - Machine Intelligence Research Institute
  • unexpected failure modes
    On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
  • In self-supervised learning on the other hand, the pretraining task is derived automatically from unannotated data
    On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
  • Scale required three ingredients: (i) improvements in computer hardware — e.g., GPU throughput and memory have increased 10 × over the last four years (§4.5: systems ); (ii) the development of the Transformer model architecture [Vaswani et al . 2017] that leverages the parallelism of the hardware to train much more expressive models than before (§4.1: modeling ); and (iii) the availability of much more training data
    On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
  • The idea of transfer learning is to take the “knowledge” learned from one task (e.g., object recognition in images) and apply it to another task (e.g., activity recognition in videos).
    On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
  • On a technical level, foundation models are enabled by transfer learning [Thrun 1998] and scale .
    On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
  • the same deep neural network architecture could be used for many applications
    On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
  • road data (generally using self-supervision at scale)
    On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models