A bullet travels at about 280 meters per second, which is roughly 1000 kilometers per hour, about the speed of a jet. If we fired a bullet from Earth toward the Sun, it would take 17 years to reach the Sun. If we imagine the Sun as a basketball and place that basketball in London, then under the same scale, the nearest star to the Sun, a slightly smaller star called Proxima Centauri, would have to be placed in Mumbai or Miami. Voyager travels at about 60,000 kilometers per hour, sixty times faster than a bullet. Even for Voyager, it…

In his brilliant book Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, Nick Lane argues that the single most revolutionary event in the history of life on Earth was not the origin of life itself, but something that happened roughly two billion years later: the moment one bacterium engulfed another and, instead of digesting it, struck up an intimate partnership. That engulfed bacterium became the mitochondrion, the power plant of every complex cell. || When the first cancer cell appeared, it thought it had found the secret to immortality. At first, it just wanted to live forever.

Intelligence is a nonlinear, emergent phenomenon arising from the processing and transformation of information within a dynamic system. It is not an attribute of any specific entity, but rather a system-level property that may manifest under certain structural and informational conditions. The unpredictability of intelligent behavior (if intelligence is truly an emergent phenomenon) may share more with meteorology than with quantum mechanics. That is, intelligence may be deterministic at the micro-level, yet fundamentally unpredictable at the macro-level due to its nonlinear, dynamic complexity. Personally, I find this idea compelling when thinking about the question of free will. If our sense…

complexity itself can sometimes lead to the emergence of simple, fundamental patterns. For example, in topological materials, we observe remarkably robust and simple phenomena. In the quantum Hall effect, the system's conductivity remains quantized and independent of its shape. Similarly, in topological insulators, surface electrons behave as if they are massless, with quantized conductivity unaffected by the material’s physical form. This behavior mirrors that of a topological object, whose properties are determined not by its shape but by its topological structure. For instance, a torus retains its topological properties regardless of how it is reshaped, as long as its defining…

Consider a hypothetical chimpanzee A capable of arithmetic up to multiplication versus one (B) limited to simple addition: though we might label the former (A) "exceptional", perhaps "scientist in chimpanzee", this incremental advancement doesn't represent a qualitative leap in intelligence. Similarly, while scientists may specialize in pushing knowledge boundaries through rigorous training, their cognitive architecture remains bounded by the same genetic constraints as all humans. I would say my critique here ties to a broader perspective articulated in Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: human intelligence occupies a narrow band on the spectrum of possible cognitive capacities. If artificial intelligence reaches human-level general…

Cantor said,“ In Mathematics, the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems”. This sentiment reflects the essence of human thought and science, which is driven by an insatiable curiosity, a desire for knowledge, and the courage to challenge authority and upend existing scientific paradigms. Indeed, the freedom of thought has two dimensions, the first being freedom from the constraints of others, and the second being freedom from purpose. In the realm of mathematics, which demands logical rigor, asking insightful and valuable questions necessitates a high level of mathematical literacy on the part of the questioner. Over time,…

In 1934, Karl Popper proposed that every scientific theory must be falsifiable. Since then, falsifiability has become a central criterion in modern scientific thought. However, from a Bayesian point of view, falsification is itself a probabilistic event. This implies that truth is not a fixed, absolute entity, but rather a distribution of beliefs that are continuously updated as new evidence is introduced.

The reason fuel is stored inside the wings can largely be divided into two main points. The first reason is simply convenience. The fuel tanks are located near the engines, and when the engines draw fuel, it can be delivered in a very short pipeline. For example, if the fuel tanks were placed far away, the fuel would have to be sent through long pipes, and if the pipes broke or connections loosened, all of the fuel could leak out instantly. If that happened, operating the aircraft would become extremely difficult.

I was thinking, specifically in language/or the symbol systems, if we want to achieve superhuman intelligence, we actually only need two stages. 1) let the machine understand the language to communicate (and this is already achieved). 2) let it self-play with one of itself or multiple of itself against the ground truth. and that’s it. and to make the convergence faster, it would be good to make sure that it’s also capable do the following in the middle of the process (in a very abstract way): the system could abstractly transfer its current knowledge to the subsequent generation, metaphorically "dying"…

What if we could hear gravitational fields? Would Earth's pull translate into a hum, a low murmur, or chaotic static? What if randomness itself was heard as music? If time could be smelled, what would tomorrow taste like? What would the past feel like, beyond memory? The very fact that we struggle to conceptualize these experiences is proof of the constraints imposed by our physiology.

If we start thinking about how to design superintelligence, we can start to think about designing something dynamic, generative, and beyond human cognitive limits. It should be able to form complex systems from simple beginnings and produce emergent properties and behaviors. Such a design must follow a kind of razor's cut principle: it has to be simple enough to allow the degrees of freedom for the rules to play out. Simplicity is not a limitation here but the foundation for complexity to emerge. From this perspective, I asked myself whether the reward for a superintelligent can truly be designed by…

I hope you run and walk as if you might lose your legs tomorrow. Cherish the sun as if you might never see it again. Live every moment as if it were your last, and fully engage with life, nature, people, and yourself. I hope you have a powerful heart. I hope you are at ease, relaxed, and happy. I hope that when you are climbing a peak, your heart has the drive to push forward. I hope that when you fall into a valley, your heart has the strength to endure. I hope that when you lie still, your…

Turns out this kind of debate is unnecessary, instead, the representation method (individual neurons versus neuron patterns) likely depends on how frequently a feature is encountered. This realization gave me an "aha" moment. I had an aha moment back then. Interesting, at least we can tell that the brain operates as a non-linear model, as this phenomenon did not occur when the toy experiment omitted the ReLU activation function.

But perhaps it is also worth acknowledging that, whether we like it or not, we are all complicit in this cycle of life and death. We kill insects in our daily lives, we shed and destroy countless cells within our own bodies every second, and we consume other living things to sustain ourselves. Life is, in some ways, an ongoing paradox—both miraculous and cruel.