Beautiful old art

https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/computer-art-50s-and-60s

"Before the wheel was invented... no one could talk about the probability of the invention of the wheel, and afterwards there was no uncertainty to discuss.... To identify a probability of inventing the wheel is to invent the wheel."

- Kay & King, Radical Uncertainty (2020)

Quoted here:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X22001157

@mpesce I prefer to think in terms of corporations as being very slow AIs, executing procedures to copy themselves into the future by any available means. "Capitalism" in that context is simply the vector sum of their interacting goal-seeking behaviours. No mind, just blind iteration as it expands to absorb all available resources.

And "human attention" is a very low-level but useful resource.

I'm trying to understand the Sohl-Dickstein 2015 paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03585.pdf) on generative diffusion probabilistic models, and for the longest time was hung up on how the reverse process could work. Clearly, a reverse random walk is very unlikely to go back to the original spot. Then I realized that we just need to "fine-tune" the mean and stdev to make it go backwards. Here is a simple example that brute forces that: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/151u9xjBIF-bxbASym9tbvlcWWT83rMjq?usp=sharing

#generative #ml #diffusion