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Understanding Society, Intelligence, and the Meaning of Life Through the Lens of Complex Systems

  Introduction: I have always been very interested in the complexity of the world e.g. how different elements depend on each other, any simple principle behind these complexity etc. In the last half year, I finally got some leisure time digging into a couple of popular books written by scholars from Santa Fa institute which is a theoretical research institute dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems and founded by Nobel laureates in Physics. In the last half year, since I work as an engineer and am also very interested in philosophy of science, I read a couple books covering origin of life, history of intelligence and philosophy of intelligence which I collected from various AI talks in 2025. All the books are listed in the reference sections I gained many fascinating insights from these books. I also came to see complexity science and intelligence as deeply interconnected. Together, they inspired me to reflect not only ...

Book Highlights: Complexity A Guided Tour

  What is complexity? property: Complex collective behavior: each typically following relatively simple rules with no central control or leader. It is the collective actions of vast numbers of components that give rise to the complex, hard-to-predict, and changing patterns of behavior Signaling and information processing: Adaptation: All these systems adapt—that is, change their behavior to improve their chances of survival or success—through learning or evolutionary processes an alternative definition of a complex system: a system that exhibits nontrivial emergent and self-organizing behaviors. How to measure complexity effective complexity Gell-Mann proposed that any given entity is composed of a combination of regularity and randomness. To calculate the effective complexity, first one figures out the best description of the regularities of the entity; the effective complexity is defined as the amount of information contained in that description, or equivalent...

逛了 70 +湾区图书馆后,聊聊那些值得一提的馆子

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  引子 最近这两年逛了70+ 湾区图书馆,覆盖了san mateo 和 San Leandro 以南到 san jose 所有图书馆,以及部分三番及以北的图书馆,每一个都拍了很多照片,做了笔记记录,以下是其中的值得一提的图书馆~~ 东湾 Fremont Main Library ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 热闹游乐园一角的宁静而又不失乐趣的灵魂港湾 位于Lake Elizabeth 一角,湖的周围满是各种来烧烤或者野餐开party的人,还有各种游乐设施,比如水上乐园,pickleball场地,船坞等等,非常热闹 图书馆占地面积很大,所以整体非常宽敞。 里面有很多有意思的小装饰和布置, 比如窗边的小绿植,以及植物角 还有各种历史文化的小展柜, 二楼围着中间的“光柱” 放了一圈公用电脑,感觉大家围着这光柱用电脑的场景让人不禁往科幻片的方向遐想。 一楼还有二手书甩卖角,小说类50美分一本,非小说类1美刀一本,教科书2刀一本,选完书自己把钱投入旁边的信箱 还有一楼中间的仔细去,巨型的圆弧落地窗外是广阔的草地和蓝天白云,在这里自习一定很惬意 但是只有2-3人 study room,没有大型study room Hayward Public Library ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 光影之间的摩登书屋 hayward public library 地处hayward downtown, hayward 给人的传统印象是湾区比较差的区 确实能看到很多破落的地方,比如流浪汉和奇怪的人很多,图书馆门口就有,养老院门口还有一个帐篷。这是暗的一面。 但让我吃惊的是光的一面。 首先是距离不远的养老院,竟然还配备了一个专属的日本花园 Japanese Gardens。 这个日本花园十分精美,虽然面积偏小,但是内容丰富而精致,有山,池,树,花,石,瀑布,鲤鱼,岛,桥,庭,石灯笼,悬崖,河,曲径,沙 而且都精心布置和修剪,十分雅致,在其中散步是一种享受。感觉精致程度不逊色于sf 的japanese tea garden,和 南湾的 hakone garden 而且一旁还有个小的影院,最近在放映日本经典电影。 然后是Hayward downtown,意外充满艺术气息,各种大型壁画,还有随处可见的utility box 上面的精美画作。还有各种漂亮的公园,大树,古典风...

ICLR 2025 World Model Workshop Notes

  https://iclr.cc/virtual/2025/workshop/24000 highlights world model is a model given states and actions, predict next states world model can be used for simulation and training RL agent short horizon task: combine local reward and global value function diffusion model can be combined with/replace transformer or VAE to speed up inference post training Robotics one model for high level instruction generation and one for low level motion generation use vision language model simulate with world model and pick best trajectory before execute in real environment World model can be pure video frame prediction encode video into latent space and apply diffusion model or transformer model for generation one component of model to infer latent action from video frames could also concatenate video token with action token and make next frame prediction Quality diversity algorithms find a diverse set of high performing agent(policies) and combine them exploration and goal s...

中西哲学差异与现代自由民主的历史根源

一、哲学起点:自然本原 vs. 天地和谐 希腊前苏格拉底哲学 :通过对世界本源的追问(如“万物皆水”“万物流变”),逐渐培养出逻辑推理、理性辩证的传统。这种思维方式为后来科学与民主政治奠定了“理性论证”的文化土壤。 中国道家 :老子提出“道法自然”,强调顺应天地、追求和谐。这种思路发展为政治上的“无为而治”,在个人层面追求超脱,但缺少对公共制度和公民权利的持续探讨。 影响 :希腊思维走向了“通过理性设计社会”的传统,而中国道家思想则更强调“个人与自然的和谐”,对自由民主制度的直接推动有限。 二、社会与政治秩序:理念正义 vs. 道德秩序 希腊的苏格拉底与柏拉图 :强调“美德即知识”,追求普遍适用的“正义”与理念,提出哲学王的政治理想。尽管理想国有理想化色彩,但为后世关于公民义务与政府合法性的讨论奠定了哲学框架。 中国的孔子与儒家 :强调“仁”与“礼”,政治基础是“君子修身齐家治国平天下”。儒家政治是等级化的德治体系,强调和谐秩序,而非平等权利。 影响 : 西方:理性与正义的普遍性,逐渐发展为“普世价值”观念的哲学源头。 中国:伦理与等级秩序的稳固性,更适合维持长期统一的帝国,但不利于民主制度中“人人平等”的理念。 三、制度与权力:法治平衡 vs. 权威控制 亚里士多德 :系统比较不同政体,提出混合政体与“中产阶级是民主基石”的观点,奠定了现代宪政与民主制度的雏形。他的“法律至上”思想深刻影响了后来的西方法治传统。 中国法家(韩非子) :主张“以法治国”,强调绝对的君主权威与惩罚机制,核心在于维护中央集权与国家权力,而不是保障个体权利。 影响 : 西方:法治逐渐发展为公民与政府之间的契约,法律的意义是限制权力、保护自由。 中国:法治更多是君主治理的工具,法的根本目的是“强国控民”,而不是“限制权力”。 四、人生与自由:个人幸福 vs. 精神超脱 希腊的伊壁鸠鲁学派与斯多亚学派 :强调个人幸福与理性自律,讨论公民在社会中的自由与责任。这种哲学关注个体权利与社会秩序之间的平衡。 中国的庄子与佛教 :追求心灵自由与超脱,主张摆脱世俗政治与社会责任,更多是一种精神避世哲学。 影响 : 西方:哲学始终与社会、政治紧密相连,个人幸福被放置在公共生活的框架中考...

Thoughts And Lessons Learned from Building An LLM App

Recently I built an LLM app which summarize news in a period for a user. This app contains following features. RSS Subscription:  Users can subscribe to RSS channels. Daily News Crawl:  Automatically crawls news entries from RSS channels daily. Preference Survey:  LLM surveys users to understand their news preferences. News Summaries: Generates daily or weekly summaries based on user preferences. Users can expand summary entries to fetch and summarize content from reference URLs. Updates user preferences based on click history. Question Answering:  LLM answers user questions based on crawled news (e.g., "What are the latest AI trends?"). My tech stack is Frontend:  NextJs + custom ExpressJs server + Tailwind CSS Avoid server components to simplify client-side state interaction logic. Use server components only when components are mostly independent (e.g., signin/signup page vs news summary app page). Custom ExpressJs server for flexible middle...