Categories

Our members report about more interesting findings and events.

• Simple Decimal Calendar (, +) [en]

  The concept of a decimal calendar has been attempted throughout history but never adopted widely. Yet. (introducing:) Unix days! TL;DR: Normalizing Unix seconds by the number of seconds in a day, results in Unix day, which has convenient properties, such as 5th digit after decimal point corresponding to decimal second (0.864 length of traditional second). So, dividing UNIX SECOND by 86400, we get a decimal Unix day, for example, if UNIX SECOND = 1688897360, then UNIX DAY = 19547.42315, and displaying this number with time formatting, makes it extremely easy for our time-trained eyes to interpret: 19,547 4:23:15, meaning: 19th Unix decimal year (19 thousand days) 547th day of the year (5-dmonth, 4-dweek, 7-dweekday) 4:23:15 decimal time (4-dhour, 23-dminute, 15-dsecond) Try in terminal function edate {     secs=$(date +%s); days=$(($secs/86400))     hour=$(printf "%05d" "$((($secs-($days*86400))*1000/864))")     printf "%'.0f %s:%s:%s\n" "$days" "${hour:0:1}" "${hour:1:2}" "${hour:3:2}" } Julian Days Some scientists use it. In fact, there are good reasons why astronomers use days (namely, Julian Days, JDs) for date calendar computations: simplicity, uniformity, continuity. However, incidentally, decimal fractions of days define decimal time, where hours define the …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2023-07-09 @09:23Z
• Observation about NNs (, +) [en]

  Neural Networks (NNs) are just a class of mathematical functions, that are very flexible, think of them like N-dimensional NURBS, or like N-dimensional "clay" that you can shape into anything, what make of it depends on your parametrization: do you use it like molding material to "photo-copy" existing behaviors or do you use it as engineering material to make high precision components: depends on the fidelity of behavior and pattern copy-ability -- for example, you can't expect to directly 3D-print a washing machine with a low-fidelity 3D printer, similarly, you can't expect a low-fidelity neural net to capture the behavior of stock market... that needs separate modeling of each constituent mind, that observes and makes input into collective behavior of the market. Looking at NNs as simply a class of mathematical functions. It makese sense to get intuition, when these functions can be useful: for example, one may use NURBS when we want to represent both standard geometric objects like lines, circles, ellipses, spheres, tori, and free‑form geometry like car bodies and human bodies. Similarly, we may use NNs, when we need: Function approximation, regression analysis, time series prediction, fitness approximation and modeling. Classification, pattern and sequence recognition, novelty …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2022-02-23 @14:04Z
• Happy 19-th Unix dYear! (, +) [en]

  A dYear (decimal year) is a 1000 days by our new calendar, and it's time to celebrate, and remember what happened during this 1000 days (between 18000th Unix day, which was 2019-04-14, and now, the 19000th day, which is 2022-01-08). Here's some of the 18-th dYear highlights, according to Wikipedia: 18014 – The deepest dive of any human in history is achieved by Victor Vescovo, as he reaches Challenger Deep within the Mariana Trench, at a depth of 10,928 m. (link) 18024 – The first patient ever to receive a genetically modified phage therapy to treat a drug-resistant infection is reported: a British teenager, Isabelle Holdaway, 17, successfully recovers from a near-deadly bacterial infection. (link) 18036 - The redefinition of the SI system of measurement adopted by the majority of countries in the world takes effect. (link) 18150 - Astronomers announce the detection of water in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b, the first such discovery for an exoplanet in the habitable zone around a star. (link) 18192 - Google announces that its 53-qubit "Sycamore" processor has achieved quantum supremacy. (link) 18205 - 11,000 scientists from around the world publish …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2022-01-08 @00:00Z
• Trade is care (, +) [en]

  Look at pretty much any human operations, you'll see many humans wearing or using things produced by other humans: clothes, watches, earphones, tables, computers, pans, beds, etc. etc. You start realizing the significance of this collaboration on the moments of high risk missions -- when people have to depend on mission-critical equipment devised and made by others -- you see a person doing or talking something important, and you realize that those headphones, or that camera, or that network, etc., is enabling the very existence of this or that important mission, and that through trade, while indirectly, all those other people in the economy have come together to advance those positive outcomes that we see. Trade relationships are not so dissimilar from caring and even love relationships, especially, when products in the supply chain are made with care for the others in it.  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2021-12-26 @04:09Z
• Working on multiple projects! (, +) [en]

  When I think about it, it's a good timing! Multiple projects and ideas are at the point, where my focus on data retrieval and analysis rather than engineering is needed for all of them: 0 > oo is at the stage, when it requires marketing HiveCell is at the stage, that it needs a discussion My tasks for a Project X just became lead generation Treenity is at the stage that it needs MetaDrive, and wants to fund it. However, development of MetaDrive it is a perfect way to help all these projects through scaling our communication, outreach and marketing.  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2021-12-06 @05:58Z
• Community Meeting #3: Running projects on Infinity (, +) [en]

  Meeting time: 0051-09-26 06:66 (2021-11-14 16:00Z). Meeting link: https://t.me/io0ooli?voicechat=47b3b7c94877932263. Meeting topic: Want to start your project or company? Meeting Agenda: starting basic projects on Infinity linking with Telegram channel or group declaring work results and getting feedback on progress registering capital inputs and generating shares Details: This meeting will be about starting the simplest possible project on Infinity, and then, elaborating on the capabilities based on the feedback. We'll do this, if there will be at least 1 other participant with a specific project they want to run. You may find this meeting interesting, if you want to start a project or run a virtual company, and seek for new ways of doing it.  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2021-11-14 @16:00Z
• Next-Gen OpenAI Codex Model (, +) [en]

  Inspired by the rudimentary GPT-3 ability to generate code, the OpenAI researchers decided to focus on specifically training a system, called Codex, to generate code from text. The following video came out as a live demo of the new Next-Gen OpenAI Codex system: "Proficient in more than a dozen programming languages, Codex can now interpret simple commands in natural language and execute them on the user’s behalf—making it possible to build a natural language interface to existing applications." The system is claimed to have a 37% accuracy by the metric that OpenAI group has defined, a 10% improvement compared to the previous model. Details in the research paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf.  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2021-08-10 @22:20Z
• How Touchscreens May Have Delayed Humanity's Progress: A Multi-Trillion Dollar Mistake? (, +) [en, cn]

  Looking back to our history, we may discover, that the premature introduction of touchscreens have been among the worst innovations ever, that had delayed humanity's progress in numerous fields from software and hardware engineering to remote control domains. With the focus on "what can be done with a flat touchscreen", we may have wasted countless hours of front-end developers to soft-innovate ways of touching, instead of pushing hardware engineers to hard-innovate better input hardware form factor, that prevented the creation of "precision remote control" input capabilities for the masses, degrading the masses to the behaviors of scrolling with a thumb. 1. Touchscreens delayed software and hardware engineering Back in the days of Nokia 9000 Communicator, and IRC chat, we had a trend of developing mini hand-held PCs (see: modern variant). Imagine that a touchscreen and PDA were not invented, and instead, people would have evolved those hand-held PCs, to the point where keyboard went behind (like explained in: Hankeyboard idea), allowing for blind touch-typing with 10 fingers, while viewing the screen (a bit like with modern "PlayStation Portable" (PSP), but with full keyboard at the back of it). This kind of device …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2021-03-17 @03:49Z
• Introducing the 0oo Sites (, +) [en]

  We may soon be infamous for having many names (remember infty.xyz, infinity.family,.. and now 0oo.li?). While there are many things happening here at the HomeBase, we continue to explore new ways of presenting ourselves to different people. For example, even the domain as culturally-neutral as 0oo.li has difficulties to pronounce to some people, for example, Japanese language has no letter "l", and a name like 無限.もえ (i.e., "Infinite Sprouting") may be much easier to tell and memorize. On the other hand, we explore new ways to introduce the pattern of economy that we are trying to create. Recently, realizing that makers who prototype and bring products to markets may be one of the most suitable audiences here, we came to think how to advertise the HomeBase as a virtual maker-space, and came up with an English name HalfMakery, that would communicate the idea of projects prototyping products. While without major changes to the content and how the system works, we want to style it differently to appeal to the makers that work on new products. Applying the convenience of Django Sites Framework thus, from now on, we are introducing "The 0oo Sites" (i.e., "Infinity …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2021-02-03 @20:54Z
• The Strategy Ahead (, +) [en]

  Our direction remains unchanged from what it was described to be in the invitation letter. It includes: Creating Civilization DNA, the Super-Intelligence That We Are. The invitation letter in fact describes what we pursue quite clearly, and the 0oo project is feature-complete enough so that it can be the time to start inviting people to join it, and that is what I plan to do next: Make our self-introduction explicit. It is not good for inviting people to have a project, that has no good self-introduction of its creators. (=Credibility!) Make membership cards, so that we can sell memberships: (Titanium 10$/year, and Tantalum 5K$/year for organizations.). Use the invitation letter, invite people.  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2021-01-25 @14:03Z
• Modern Jungle (, +) [en]

  I find it quite fascinating, that certain very simple ideas work across all the levels, from solving personal problems to general world's problems. One of such ideas is the idea of average. Every school kid knows what mean means, and yet, we call the same thing by the word expected value at college, and then, we call its special case by the word risk. Then, we realize that this concept is essential to so many things, from defining trust (set of expected values) to carrying out rational decision making, and we generalize its computation by inventing the most general sums on well defined systems of sets. Reportedly, when Kolmogorov was asked in his later age, what does he think to be his greatest achievement in his life, he didn't say that it is axiomatic definition of probability. He responded, that it is the introduction of conditional expectations. I don't know why, but my guess is that it is because, in order to find the best action to take, we condition the risk landscape %%F(\cdot|X)%% on our possible actions %%X%%. We define %%Y%%, which is our goal, a set of conditions to meet, and try to …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2015-05-22 @23:37Z
• Hash Pill (, +) [en]

  Fact is, you are a unique information pattern in the world, defined by your mind, rather than just your private key.How do you prove that you are you? In mathematics, there is often a large number of ways to prove a fact if that fact is a universal truth. For example, there is a large number of ways to prove Pythagoras theorem. If something is true, you can look at it from many angles and arrive at the same conclusion. However, in cryptography, this hardly true. If you had lost your private key, you cannot access your assets, or decrypt messages, even if there is other strong evidence that they are yours. The ability to prove things is critical to creating a world of fair credit and access to information. If you had ever lost a password, or wallet of bitcoin or other digital currency, or simply your data locked under your encryption key, you know how unforgiving is the fact that you only have one way to prove facts. For example, you may have proofs such as transaction records in other databases, governmental records and legal bank transactions, even people's memories, but that all doesn't count to recover …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2018-04-27 @00:00Z
• Why Inverse Insurance Matters? (, +) [en]

  "If something's important enough you should try. Even if the probable outcome is failure." In other words, -- if value is large, the expected value is still large, even if the probability is small. Unfortunately, today, insurance industry is only considering the bad things of low probability that are important enough, not the good things. We insure against catastrophes, ill health, and car accidents. We don't insure ourselves from the extremely good things that could happen -- namely, from what would happen if we didn't miss an important invention or technological breakthrough. What happens if coming up with a viable cryoprotectant is 5 years earlier than it would be otherwhise without the inverse insurance incentive? What happens if emergency vascular pump is brought a year earlier than it would be without an incentivize? These questions can be answered based on general statistics. 150K people die every day, and approx. 20K from ischaemic heart disease. So, these are the people we could save every day. We could compute very specific losses if technological breakthrough does happen earlier rather than later. Prize foundations is a good start for such inverse insurance. However, this perhaps is not enough, and probably not the right …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2017-01-03 @00:00Z
• Escaping Entropic Black Hole Together (, +) [en, cn]

  People die, civilizations and cultures are taken over or forget their past, our genomes decompose or are disrupted by radiation, pollution in our environments, diseases; our neural networks forget, or eventually suffer from degradation. The common enemy of humankind and all life is entropy. Contrarily, our common goal is attaining information. The below is an information-theoretic and physical interpretation of these circumstances, and a number of ideas to help us achieve our common goal. The Black Hole When famously Newton saw an apple fall, he didn't notice one thing -- it fell not just towards the ground. It fell from past to the future. What force pulled it into the future? According to an interpretation of the existing evidence we are indeed falling into a "black hole", - not gravitational, but entropic (if not black hole, then at least an entropic well). Information as we know it, is the substance that reduces the uncertainty about an information source. When a coin (information source) is spinning in the air, and you don't know if it will land heads or tails, it is said to have "entropy" (randomness) about the outcome, and when it lands (and you observe the outcome), you …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2017-01-03 @00:00Z
• Open Knowledge, and its Risks (, +) [en]

  Today, we have many organizations that are striving to organize knowledge and make it universally accessible: Wikipedia, Google, Open Knowledge Foundations to name but a few. While this knowledge is good for empowering people to solve problems, there is risk that making procedural knowledge easily available to people will have undesired consequences. For example, enable machines to self-replicate, or enable the creation of dangerous warfare. I'll talk more about the former, since the latter is quite well known. The event of such autonomous self-replication could occur earlier than superintelligence, if some types of procedural knowledge are made available in computer-readable form. Procedural Knowledge First off, what I mean by procuedral knowlege? Definition: Procedural knowledge is a representation of the outer world in an intelligent agent, such that the intelligent agent is confident that performing a certain sequence of known actions (programs) yiels a known result. This sequence of actions is to be called a procedure, the known result - a product. Here, representation is the influence that the outer world had for the intelligent agent through the physical interactions ("education"); the intelligent agent is an entity capable of volition, cognition, action; confident means aware of high probability of success …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2017-01-03 @00:00Z
• Universally Accessible Scholarships (, +) [en]

  Why it matters? A possible scenario: 5 years later: we encounter unknown risk x. (e.g., a disease) UBI Scenario: the talent pool is not large enough, and we die. UAS Scenario: educated people quickly find a cure. Problem Artificial intelligence and robotization is projectedL to replace human labor in nearly every job. At the same time, we have a number world's challenges that need talent to be addressed - health, engineering, science, climate change, modelling the universe, and even arts to help express ideas and align political philosophies. UBI: Universal Basic Income The unconditional basic income (UBI) has been proposedL as a remedy for the technological unemployment. However, I am convinced that the UBI is unlikelyL to have significant impact on solving the world's pressing issues, including the problem of unemployment itself. The majority of people seem to think locally and short-term, thus without any guided incentives, UBI is unlikely to support the activities directed towards addressing the fundamental problems of society. UAS: Universally Accessible Schlarships MOOCs Could be Studied A hope has been placed on the massive open online courses (MOOCs) to provide free or nearly-free education to …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2017-01-03 @00:00Z
• Staying in Control of AI (, +) [en]

  Decision Transparency An important part of being rational is knowing one's goal, why one has it, taking actions maximizing the probability of achieving it, and being able to tell why one takes certain actions over the other. Our success in staying in control of AI clearly depends on how well we as a whole, and well as each individual is able to control why one does what one does, and decide what one wants to do. If you don't know why the search results are ranked the way they are, you should worry, because this ranking is part of your daily decisions. If you can't know why a specific trading bot made a decision to sell stocks, resulting in thousands changing their jobs, you should be concerned, too. If you can't know why a task management system at your work is recommending you to do task X that you do, you are out of control. The AIs are already largely in control of corporate world, both at micro and macro levels, replacing middle managers, so probably: AIs used for non-trivial human decisions should all be transparent and make sense: rankings, recommendations, trading, etc. Tomorrow's Society Tomorrow most people might live …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2016-06-25 @00:00Z
• The $10bn Mouse Cryonics Prize (, +) [en]

  The central problem of cryonics is a bit like Fermat's Last Theorem -- easy to understand for a child, but hard to solve: how to freeze water without making it expand and break cells. So, let’s be bold — what about a $10bn cryonics prize to a team that freezes a mouse brain, keeps it under a cryogenic temperature (below −180°C) for 24 hours, and then brings back the mouse to life? Why? We're getting there In 2016, Kenneth Hayworth’s Brain Preservation Foundation awarded its one-time Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize to an organization called 21CM for successfully freezing a rabbit brain in “near-perfect” condition, with the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures intact. According to Hayworth, this is the first time a cryopreservation was provably able to protect everything associated with learning and memory. [1] The idea was to “use glutaraldehyde-based fixative, then slowly perfuse increasing concentrations of ethylene glycol over several hours in a manner similar to techniques used for whole organ cryopreservation. Once 65% w/v ethylene glycol was reached, vitrify brains at −135 °C for indefinite long-term storage.” (link). And this actually worked, so there’s a reason to believe that by thinking in analogies, we …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2016-04-01 @00:00Z
• Will Deep Learning Be Monopolized? (, +) [en]

  Artificial neural networks are a kind of cognitive memory. They are memory, because they save information in terms of weight distributions, but they also work as processors, exchanging information between units, and updating weights - recognizing patterns and learning. Considering that there are companies today working on new kind of processors emulating neural networks (e.g., RPUs), I would expect, that soon computers may start having something we could call cognitive memory units (CMUs), a new kind of hybrid between RAM and GPU, implementing powerful artificial neural networks. Will GPU computing power be monopolized? Today, GPU computing power can be easily turned into money by mining coins, solving Kaggle or stock market prediction problems without much mental effort of your own. Given their power in automating very tangible, real tasks, like coming up with strategically superior moves in global political game, there are all incentives to compete in monopolizing the deep learning by amassing the GPU computing by every superpower in the world, to execute their political agendas. Who is going to be in control? Today, we have hand-helds owned by individuals, but supercomputers owned by governments and large organizations, used to do all kind of tasks, including track …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2016-03-10 @00:00Z
• A Future Without Buildings, Schools and Jobs (, +) [en]

  A world without buildings You probably don’t imagine a life without buildings. However, buildings for living may become as obsolete as horses for transportation. They have many shortcomings: Buildings are not good enough in protecting people from communicable diseases (second? highest risk to mankind!) Buildings are inconvenient to transport from in cases of emergencies (think about the ease of migrations after global warming!) Buildings prevent people from free exploration of planet surface (think of sleeping every night of your life without seeing stars, because of your ceiling!) So, imagine a capsule hotel on the wheels. Not an ordinary one, but of a shape of honeycomb cell, so that one or more of them can connect into a larger structure. Moreover, imagine the chassis which allows the capsule move horizontally like a car, or vertically like on a segway. Wouldn’t that be cool to be able to explore cities like that, and then to sleep in a bed with a transparent ceiling and see the real stars above before at nights, then see whatever beautiful landscapes in your office during the days in vertical position, and connect into larger spaces with your friends during the day for play and socialization? For …  ››

  [Mindey] @ 2016-03-10 @00:00Z

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