The Nobel Prize in physics goes to Geoffrey Hinton for his work in computer science. What? : techtakes

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 38 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Sneers from r/physics! First up, this comment by napqe:

I'm sorry, but this is like awarding the nobel prize for literature to Xerox/HP/Brother for "improvements to printing".

And in the same thread, from GustapheOfficial:

Last year's prize was too relevant, they had to stagger the physics by a year.

We also have this by M1st_:

What's next? Someone gets a Nobel prize for another algorithm that numerically solves differential equations??

Finally, we've the title of this thread, by TheSkells:

Yeah, "physics"

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 36 points 2 months ago (2 children)

nobel committee went full on ai-brained this year, nobel prize in chemistry is for alphafold. they had three good years in a row, had to do something stupid ig

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

lol that's gonna age like milk

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 2 months ago

still better than peace prize for kissinger

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

i mean they still can give nobel prize in literature to chatgpt for extruding most text in unit of time

this is not my field, but allegedly alphafold kinda works, but it's also not ai and more pattern matching, something that google does expertly. i still don't think that it's gonna be very useful even that it does solve a hard problem

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

half goes to david baker, you might remember him from rosetta@home thing. the other two people are from google deepmind

i guess it's one of these years when chemistry nobel goes to biologists, but now with layer of ai hype on top for some weird fucking reason

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 35 points 2 months ago (2 children)

So Geoffrey Hinton is a total dork.

Hopefully, [this Nobel Prize] will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they're saying. [There] is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks it's nonsense to say these things understand language. That school is wrong. Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 32 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.

Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance? No? Just talking about shit you apparently have no idea about?

I didn't even know you could be a crank about linguistics, that's pretty amazing. What other otherwise really boring fields are you going to tackle, geodesy?

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 26 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

there's plenty of linguistics cranks, but most of them have nationalistic tint, like people thinking that all languages come from turkish or something like that

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 22 points 2 months ago

Everybody knows that all languages derive from ULTRAFRENCH.

[–] acausal_masochist@awful.systems 17 points 2 months ago (3 children)

You give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Greek.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 16 points 2 months ago

𒍪𒌝𒁍

[–] thesporkeffect@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I hope that was a typo for Proto-Indo-European

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 20 points 2 months ago

PIE was just people wanting to eventually speak Greek but they had yet to figure out how, so they were just working backwards little by little trying to make their language more like Greek.

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

like people thinking that all languages come from turkish

This is amazing, I fucking love this. People striving to create the lowest stakes possible conspiracy. I struggle to think of something that would have less impact on the world no matter it were true or false.

A shadowy cabal of powerful people guarding the secret of "actually, it was [rolls die] Turkish people who invented [rolls another die] language!"

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 2 months ago (3 children)

then think again, because it was a part of continuing series: turkish nationalism

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago

Funny you say that, as it was the Dutch who invented dice.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 21 points 2 months ago

Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance?

Early onset Nobel disease.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm just waiting for him to chime in about music theory.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

A popular meme on social media makes a series of allegations about the musical tune pitch A=432Hz and A=440Hz, including that the latter was a standard imposed by the Nazis to manipulate their enemies.

spittake

Multiple experts told Reuters these allegations are unfounded.

NO WAY

Thanks Reuters.

[–] self@awful.systems 16 points 2 months ago (3 children)

since 1953 all music has been tuned to 440Hz. This frequency has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.

fuck yes, this is the random all-caps crankery I get out of bed for! I love the idea that 440hz agitates the brain, but not in a scientific way (at least not for our universe?)

[–] self@awful.systems 23 points 2 months ago (2 children)

since 1969 all computers have been running Unix. This operating system has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago

This operating system has NO SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP with our universe and actually causes the brain to become agitated.

This but about Windows and unironically.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I like my music the way I like my CPUs, 432 Hz.

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[–] misterbngo@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This reminds me of when I was planning out a tubular bells project. there is an amount of crankery around various notes and I came across a series of videos about the various Cs and their use in healing or chakra alignment.

When i went to buy some tuning forks I noted some more weird mysticism, but hey at least they produced a nice set of C notes.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 2 months ago

seconds after 440hz tone is sounded:

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

it's an old one, with roots in 80s era right wing cult/crank organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiller_Institute

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 27 points 2 months ago

efficient move, getting the Nobel disease in before the Nobel itself

[–] fubarx@lemmy.ml 28 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Given how much money is being ~~wasted~~ invested in AI, they should have given them the Economics prize.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 25 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Repeating a comment I made in another forum here...

The Nobel organization is basically all about PR, and while as the nominating body they’re nominally independent, the Royal Academy of Science knows on which side their bread is buttered. Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 17 points 2 months ago

Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.

This works on multiple levels

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 22 points 2 months ago

ah yes, the dynamite guy award show, a fine institution of the ages

[–] rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The "everything is physics" crowd is awfully silent right now 🤔

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 17 points 2 months ago

Hinton could be the first guy to win a Nobel and an Ignobel in the same year.

[–] mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org 17 points 2 months ago

AI is poisoning science development. It is not necessary that everything uses AI ffs!!

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Using tools from physics to create something that is popular but unrelated to physics is enough for the nobel prize in physics?

So, if say a physicist creates a new recipe for the world's greatest potato casserole, and it becomes popular everywhere, and they used some physics for creating the recipe to calculate the best heat distribution or whatever, then that's enough?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

if there's a massive potato casserole bubble

[–] pikesley@mastodon.me.uk 9 points 2 months ago

@dgerard @nightsky Massive Potato Casserole Bubble is a Squarepusher EP you can't fool me

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago (2 children)

it's happening omg. check back in five years

https://awful.systems/comment/3766257

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

From your linked post:

also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was “the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.”

Not an expert by any means, but this sounds like pagerank, but for language.

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

there's a similarity in the sense that they're both 'content free.' pagerank didn't care about what was on your site, only what your page linked to and what pages linked to you

(past tense bc it's unclear to me whether Google even uses pagerank at this point)

they diverge pretty significantly in one way: pagerank is an algorithm motivated by pragmatic simplifications. discarding the information of content when ranking sites is only something you would do because using content is really hard. you can take the statistical approach to semantics in the same spirit, but you don't have to... ai true believers are necessarily treating the maxim I referred to as a philosophical claim, something that addresses the ground truth of what words are

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago

Also discussed in the Stubsack.

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