iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

Started my NLP lectures today exploring the fascinating levels of natural language. This slide features an interesting example: Turkish, using Greek letters (orthography) on a historic tombstone from Istanbul. A poetic and meaningful common lesson transcending barriers...

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

The universe, in a baffling sense, creates local pockets of complexity (decreasing entropy through biological/physical self-organized structures) while relentlessly advancing toward a state of maximum global entropy. www.quantamagazine.org/why-everythi...

quantamagazine.org

Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex | Quanta Magazine

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution.

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Reposted by Bahaeddin ERAVCI

Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

Don's main distinction for a CS mentality: - ability to jump very quickly between levels of abstraction, between a low level and a high level, almost unconsciously - deal with non-uniform (he means mathematically dis-continuous, discrete IMO) structures

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

Came across a book (actually a transcript of lectures at @mitofficial.bsky.social) from a CS legend Donald Knuth, the author of The Art of Computer Programming. Not nearly as popular as TAOCP. Love the line "Computer God talks about God" in the foreword, we'll see where it leads...

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

The origins of aesthetics is really fascinating. Why deem this scene utterly spectacular and even tie it to the "long-tailed mountain lady"? What mechanisms shaped this "taste" and how?

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

#Severance isn’t a typical tv show. It’s a sharp dive into philosophy of mind, probing identity, memory, and mind-body duality with surprising depth. Highly recommend...

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

There appears to be a striking correlation between ignorance on a topic and the confidence with which people make bold statements about it. Can easily use this principle as a de-noising filter...

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

Self (and its counterpart the other) is a very handy abstraction to make the most of our limited processing power. Illusion of free will is a beneficial yet erroneous causal explanation we created after we observed the self interacting with the other(s) for some time. m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ig9...

m.youtube.com

The illusion of self and the illusion of free will, explained | Annaka Harris

YouTube video by Big Think

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

People with absolute no theoretic or practical knowledge/experience (not a single call to nvidia-smi) about deep learning seems to easily predict the future of AI. Their self-proclaimed prophetic confidence -still- amazes me.

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Some reflections and insights after 1993 NIPS by Leo Breiman known for developing CART, bagging, and random forests. Always find less formal writings of the pioneers more insightful.

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Intersection of info theory and complexity theory has always been very interesting. While entropy quantifies global uncertainty (potential information), observer-dependent entropy brings observer’s view (its world model) to define subjective uncertainty. www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-entr...

quantamagazine.org

What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know. | Quanta Magazine

Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world th...

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

AGI isn't around the corner and scaling auto-regressive LLMs won't get us AGI. I argue, while AR-LLMs are great improvements, we need some very important paradigm shifts with lessons from the past. open.substack.com/pub/beravci/...

open.substack.com

Bridging Generative AI and Truth: Ancient Lessons for Modern Tech

When a seasoned lawyer last year filed a brief citing six precedent-setting cases, he trusted the AI chatbot that assisted him.

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

The infamous event of "cultural generalization made by a keynote speaker" shows how bias and miss-generalization are hard problems even for humans (even if a MIT professor). So, we maybe more compassionate with LLMs trained on our data.

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

#NeurIPS and other major conferences should consider making presentations, at least important keynotes/highlights, publicly available. I could easily make an argument with public fundings for research presented. Funding agencies can also support this for more open science.

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Feels like the beginning of 1900s with huge discoveries each year but this time huge strides in tech. Exciting to be a witness of the tech revolution ranging from AI to quantum compute... blog.google/technology/r...

blog.google

Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip

Our new quantum chip demonstrates error correction and performance that paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

GPU poor man's home setup ready for a long night...

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

This saga reminds me of the access modifiers I teach in my Java OOP course. Maybe we need something similar in the generative AI age: - Public: Content accessible to both AI and humans - Protected: Human-only consumable public content Easier said than done with a lot of technicalities though...

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Test-of-time awards are the **real impact** metrics akin to revolutionary science in Kuhnian sense. Congrats to @ian-goodfellow.bsky.social and Ilya with GANs and Seq2Seq. blog.neurips.cc/2024/11/27/a...

blog.neurips.cc

Announcing the NeurIPS 2024 Test of Time Paper Awards – NeurIPS Blog

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

When we're talking about learning (machine/biological) we should not forget about the giant feedback loop which we are trying to model and infer. Folks who think AGI can be achieved from internet text with scale alone are either: - Hyping for their personal gains - Don't have a clue whatsoever

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Swiss church installs AI-powered Jesus: Two-thirds of the users found it to be a “spiritual experience” "I think there is a thirst to talk with Jesus." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

theguardian.com

Deus in machina: Swiss church installs AI-powered Jesus

Peter’s chapel in Lucerne swaps out its priest to set up a computer and cables in confessional booth

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

A lot of contemporary discussions in AI/ML have a corresponding philosophical discourse. For example, use of copyrighted material in LLM is linked with the Ship of Theseus paradox. We frankly don't have answers for these problems and maybe will never have an objective answer.

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Intelligence is hard to define but is related to in-domain vs out-domain generalization. Trivial case being k-NN in-domain retrieval. AR-LLMs have better interpolation performance but usually fail catastrophically out-domain. Defining "in-out domain" for any task isn't easy as it looks though.

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Starter packs were very instrumental in getting the conversation going. But is there any way we can save a starter pack as a list @support.bsky.team? If not would really appreciate if we could.

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

When the ancients, whether rationalists or mystics, urged 'Know thyself,' they were pointing to our faculty of reason and cognition. Just started and it feels like it is going to be a classic. Grateful for the dopamine hits with intellectual pleasure...

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Bahaeddin ERAVCI @beravci.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Spinning up #Bluesky to increase signal to noise ratio. I do hope their recommendation system doesn't mess up @bsky.app. Frankly **anything** is probably better than X right now.

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