what keeps you up at night?

I think it’s cool to think about this; what are the big questions or concepts that you struggle to wrap your head around? I think this question and “when’s the last time you cried?” are my favorite icebreakers, mainly because I hate meeting people and they scare off a lot of people but the people who answer tend to be ok

Why can’t neural networks do multiplication?

Absolutely boggling. Don’t hit me with that logspace/kernel shit, or say you’re only explaining things locally. Multiplication is both simple and essential and you can throw math at me explaining why they actually can kind of do it, but that’s beside the point; the fundamental structure of a neural network prevents this and this one question probably more than anything else has kept me occupied for much longer than it should and made me pretty sad about what I’ve been studying

Are all hard problems the same?

I think that it’s interesting that in a lot of fields, the hardest problems are collected around similar higher level issues that we don’t have great theories for yet: acting on unseen behavior, self-organization, self-reproduction, recursion, verification/generation.

Am I basic as hell? Is that fine?

Okay so I have this theory; basic means you don’t put any effort into finding something different, and on the opposite end of the spectrum is putting extreme amounts of effort into finding something obscure. I have made up this concept called “first-order basic” (yeah baby in this blog we zero-index our orders), which is the thing in a category when you put the minimal effort possible into not being basic, so they’re still popular and generally liked but not like basic basic. Think like Two Door Cinema club in the early 2010’s, or Billie Eilish like two years, or liking the Golden State Warriors the first year with Steve Kerr. However, things in first-order basic tend to become basic after some time, and thus everything eventually becomes basic! Mainstream culture consumes all of us and we go in weird cycles!

In the film Your Name, why doesn’t headass Taki-kun write his god damn name on Mitsuha’s hand?

fucking IDIOT

Are Google and Facebook ethically okay?

Like the whole privacy/”if the product’s FREE, YOU’RE THE PRODUCT!!!”/”would you PAY for a AD FREE facebOOK?” debate. Also the whole how much power should a CEO/Board have, cause like the alternative is Wall Street dictating company policies to an even greater extent? Oof.

How does a fridge work?

At this point I still don’t know and I’m too scared to google it

If I were in Ancient Greece, could I have done all that? Pythagorean theorem? ASA for parallel lines?

Vain question I guess but it’s fun to think about it

What do we do with the work of monstrous men?

I’ve thought about this for a while and I don’t think I have a good answer. The article linked also doesn’t have a good answer and dances around it, but it’s written beautifully.