on the merits of denying intelligence

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, haha. Without getting too much into the weeds, I think : Each of our perspectives on what AGI / or "I" in general means is shaped by unique personal experience, a bound set for each of us. These sets may or may not be commensurable - we don't currently know if the categories or your experience, and the categories of mine are even comparable. This has political consequences, mainly related to how seriously we take each other's speech.

Some of the technological steps you mentioned however, I must say are "operational improvements" which improve cache hierarchy and introduce compression in some cases -without really changing the overall "architectural" approach employed by the currently trendy transformer gang. 

I think it remains useful to query both, other humans, and the results of what we can make machines do ... in improving not just "what we think intelligence is", but also how we can communicate what we think it is.

the ambiguity of knowledge

A parent asked, if others had asked their children, what their children wanted from education - and how to judge if the child's preferences or the parents' preferences were better.

I elected to share a canonical rant : before I went to Year 1 of elementary school, my parents asked if I wanted to study in a school with two, or three languages. I said two, because I wanted to be lazy. They sent me to the school with three. So for the rest of my life, I have been wary of fools asking meaningless questions.

Aside from that, of course life has provided many disparate experiences. Many have involved speaking with people who tell me, nicely or otherwise, that they believe I am not well-informed or well-opinionated. The problem with me, I find, is that while I am quite willing to accept these views, and submit to compromise, more often than not, I find that I should have paid less attention to them, because the speaker was foolish. I can only speak from my own experience, which is quite limited.

I do not believe this makes me intelligent, but sometimes intelligence is something you have whether you want to have it or not. And others lack it, whether you wish they had it or not.

And sometimes you are just stupid. :)

maths has an ISO notation

Day 1 back at elementary number theory ( day 1155 of sabbatical2, day ~15,547 on earth ). I am revising this slide on the notation for exponentiation and logarithms which I made year ago.

• after a bunch of catch up on software engineering, I am finally turning to focus on remediating my poor foundations in number theory
• a quick look around the internet will show you that this "has always been, and continues to be" an issue for many students of maths; folks also decry other notations like dx/dy, and the visual non-symmetry of notation for differentiation and integration
• I think, a pet idea of mine henceforth will be  : someone should make an ISO standard for canonical mathematical notation, and then republish all past mathematical texts ( or have a way of translating them automatically ) to the canonical mathematical notation; all mathematicians would be of course free to use non-ISO notation anywhere they liked. ( oh wait, they've been doing it since 1992, and the latest is here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_80000 )

TIL :(or am reminded, because I probably forgot) : 

• (1) there's an ISO for maths notation, so speculation about notation optimisation should just target that, 
• (2) the notion of "antilogs" we studied in highschool are already deprecated in scientific writing, 
• (3) the etymology of "logbooks" is the same as that of "knots"