RandomCanuck

Hi all. I've had an account here for awhile, and I thought it was about time I wrote an introduction.

I'm a Canadian, born in the west, grew up in the east. Politically I lean left, some days more so than others. I'm a strong believer in social justice. I believe in Canada having a strong social safety net, including universal basic income. I'm happy to pay my taxes.

You can find me on Mastodon @RandomCanuck@[email protected]. Also on Friendica. I'm a redditor too, but I mostly just graze and rarely post.

I run a small consulting business with my wife, and we've been doing that since 2000. I cut my teeth designing automated test equipment, and then control systems for automated assembly systems.

I've been a computer user since 1980, including Apple II+, IIe, III, Wang 2200, TRS-80, Commodore PET, a hand built 6502 micro, along with various Wintel PCs, a Mac SE30, Performa, Mac II, various iMacs MacBook Pros, and a MacBook Air, and Raspberry Pi.

I'm a long time staffer to a pack of toy poodles, starting in 1994. I love motorcycles, fast cars, hiking, camping and canoeing. Sci-Fi fan, most recently of the Murderbot series and Cory Doctorow’s books. I also read a lot of mysteries, history, and philosophy. Agnostic religiously, scienctific philosophically. Systems thinker. Writer.

Technical standards developer for CSA, IEC, IEEE, and ISO.

#Canadian #Introduction #nerd #engineering #writing #reading #science #dogs #computing

A parliamentary petition has been started to try to encourage the Canadian Government to join the Fediverse. If you want to support this petition, follow the link to Chris Alameny’s post where you’ll find links to both French and English versions of the petition. You have to be a Canadian citizen to sign the petition. We only need a few more signatures to get over the 500 needed. We’d love to see every Province and Territory represented.

Great essay by Scrimshaw on the state of play in the OLP. It’s likely they won’t survive another election if they continue with their internal delusions.

I always enjoy Brittlestar’s stuff, but this week’s essay seem particularly apropos.

In this paper, we show that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) suffer from catastrophic forgetting even when they are trained to approximate a single target distribution. We show that GAN training is a continual learning problem in which the sequence of changing model distributions is the sequence of tasks to the discriminator. The level of mismatch between tasks in the sequence determines the level of forgetting. Catastrophic forgetting is interrelated to mode collapse and can make the training of GANs non-convergent. We investigate the landscape of the discriminator's output in different variants of GANs and find that when a GAN converges to a good equilibrium, real training datapoints are wide local maxima of the discriminator. We empirically show the relationship between the sharpness of local maxima and mode collapse and generalization in GANs. We show how catastrophic forgetting prevents the discriminator from making real datapoints local maxima, and thus causes non-convergence. Finally, we study methods for preventing catastrophic forgetting in GANs.

Here’s the state of the art in AI, according to Stanford.

Generally, it seems like AI experts are divided about how close we are to developing an AGI, and how close any of this might take us to an extinction level event. On the whole, they seem less likely to think that AI will kill us all. Maybe.

Hi all, new to Lemmy but a KW resident for more than 30 years. Looking forward to seeing some stuff going on here.