Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) Playground
Spent a few hours this weekend learning about Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC), inspired by a fun chat with @mwilcox & friends. Built a IPython notebook with toy examples—like an HDC Autoencoder for ImageNet—to learn by tinkering: https://github.com/samim23/hyperdimensional_computing_playground
Octonions - eight-dimensional hypercomplex numbers used in theoretical physics with a number of counterintuitive properties.
Octonions can be understood as self-referential biquaternions that naturally model phenomena like vision - imagine a sphere (like an eye) that maintains its geometric properties while having both transparent and opaque regions. Just as your eye uses its lens to transform 3D space onto a 2D retinal surface and then encodes this into 1D neural signals, octonions provide a mathematical framework for this kind of dimensional reduction through self-reference. The self-dual property of octonions (being their own mirror image mathematically) enables them to simultaneously represent both the spatial domain (like the physical structure of the eye) and the frequency domain (like the neural encoding of visual information), making them uniquely suited for modeling systems that need to transform between different dimensional representations while preserving essential geometric properties.
The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature
New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.”
The Octonion Math That Could Underpin Physics
“The real numbers are the dependable breadwinner of the family, the complete ordered field we all rely on. The complex numbers are a slightly flashier but still respectable younger brother: not ordered, but algebraically complete. The quaternions, being noncommutative, are the eccentric cousin who is shunned at important family gatherings. But the octonions are the crazy old uncle nobody lets out of the attic: they are nonassociative.” – John Baez
Fun Fact: Octonions are the last number system in the Cayley-Dickson construction that still forms a division algebra (meaning you can divide by non-zero elements). If you go beyond octonions (to sedenions), you lose even more properties!
Hypercomplex Math and the Standard Model
What is the nature of change (e.g., learning) in the Eternalist perspective of reality? As you contemplate, enjoy this timeless recording of Enrico Caruso from 1917:
Dies irae: Centre panel from Memling's triptych Last Judgment (c. 1467–1471)
‘We look at the present through a rear-view mirror, so that we march backwards into the future' - Marshall McLuhan
"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
In the world of Retrocausal Security Services, Gnomes are the apex predators of the timeline
GPUses Christ
"Our age has found a substitute for God: the impersonal calculation. This new god has turned into an idol to whom all men may be sacrificed. A new concept of the sacred & unquestionable is arising: calculability, probability, factuality." ~ Erich Fromm (in "The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology", 1968)
We're entering an era where LLM agents can quickly clone any SaaS application, eroding traditional defenses and economic moats. This will accelerate the 'open-source everything' movement and have a significant impact on society.
You can achieve true greatness if you focus fully on one thing... ohh..
What Marshall McLuhan told the Bilderberg group when invited to address them in 1969
Marshall McLuhan, Director
May 14, 1969
His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard,
Soestdijk Palace,
The Hague,
Holland.
Your Royal Highness:
It was good to be there. It is good to be back.
As you know, I was a rather bad boy at Bilderberg. Frankly, I was staggered at the very low level of awareness of the contemporary world exhibited by all the guests present. As my friend Wyndham Lewis, the painter, put it: "The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person who lives in the present." Ordinary people live thirty years back in a state of motivated somnambulism. Such was the state of the delegates at Bilderberg. Association with poets and painters of many lands have accustomed me to dealing with people of trained perceptions and contemporary awareness. Without a knowledge of all the poets and painters and artists from Baudelaire to Joyce, it is futile to attempt any appraisal of the formal or efficient causes initiated by the evolutionary extensions of our bodies which we call technology.
The paper readers as well as the bankers and statesmen and educators present at Bilderberg had undergone no perceptual training. They were men of a few simple old-fashioned concepts. As a colonial, I had nourished the illusion that Europeans, at least, were aware of the contemporary arts as necessary guides to change. My disillusion was total. The delegates at Bilderberg were embalmers (embombers) of a dead past. They live in a rear-view mirror, blowing both horns of their dilemmas!
The great advantage in participating in Bilderberg is that it did give me a means of testing the level of awareness which the incompetence of the participants has enabled them to attain. Every man has a right to protect his own ignorance. However, these men are responsible for coping with a changing world which has set them scurrying for cover in the opposite direction of the changes that we have released. I asked them to instance a single example in human history...
