Saturday, August 2, 2025

The Good, The Bad, and Anthropic

This new article by Anthropic is basically saying "good" and "bad" personality traits are just vectors, as everything truly is for the state of AI today.



Larger Insects

I came across this tweet by Yishan Wong about his kid's ramblings.

Thus, I began to ponder that lobsters are technically insects, and if we could do this to lobsters, why not terrestrial insects?

After our planet's inception, this was actually possible. During the Carboniferous period (~300 million years ago), oxygen levels were much higher (~35% compared to 21% today), and giant insects like dragonflies with 70 cm wingspans could survive.

Currently, large insects the size of a car or even a dog are not feasible on Earth today due to a combination of factors. Let's review these one by one and determine what changes we would need in each respective element to make large insects a reality.

1. No Lungs = Impossible ...?

Insects do not have lungs. They rely on a tracheal system; it is basically a network of tubes that diffuses oxygen directly to their tissues. However, this works efficiently only at small sizes because diffusion is slow and becomes less effective over longer distances.

However, giant insects existed during the Carboniferous period, most likely because of the high oxygen content in the atmosphere. Thus, if we want to bring back those times, I propose that we should start converting the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to increase the oxygen content through an artificially managed large-scale photosynthesis program.

2. Exoskeletal Issues

Insects have exoskeletons, not internal bones. As body size increases, (1) volume and weight grow faster than surface area (square-cube law), (2) the exoskeleton would become too heavy and brittle to support a large body, and (3) it would also crush under its own weight or break when trying to move, jump, fly, or perform other mechanical actions.

Suppose we tried to maintain their shape and structure (or at least maintain their insect-like qualities). In that case, the material that composes their exoskeleton must have a stronger microstructure.

3. Heat Regulation

Much like the lobsters Yishan's son mentioned, larger bodies expend more energy, and thus, generate more heat and lose it more slowly. Insects don’t sweat or have internal thermoregulation like mammals. Giant insects right now would likely overheat quickly in direct sunlight or during exertion, especially during these times that we are experiencing a rapid increase in atmospheric temperature brought by global warming.

If we could bring down the global temperature by some degree, larger insects would be one more step closer to being feasible.

These solutions are definitely difficult to achieve and require systematic cooperation among countries. However, if we so desire that larger insects roam our Earth again, we must do this together. I am no entomologist, but I empathize with some of them in their desire for larger insects as domesticable creatures.

Sunday, July 27, 2025

GRPO and Fixed RL Algorithm on Sequence Models

New paper released by the Alibaba AI team working on Qwen:
Group Sequence Policy Optimization

It appears that they have fixed GRPO and Reinforcement Learning for sequence models.
Could not understand more than half of this, and I had to rely on what others are saying, but this is really good for LMs trained using RL. Try your hand at understanding their paper and let me know what you found!




Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Reviewing IT Proficiency Learning Materials

Happy 23rd of July! It is 6 PM, and I am writing to you all about my recent progress with reviewing for TOPCIT. Currently, I have only saved the PDF document and done some light reading on Book 3: Overview of System Architecture.

Each of the books is less than 300 pages, but there are 6 of them. Do you think I'll be able to finish all of them by the end of the week (July 26)? I don't think so, but I can certainly try!

Honestly, it's been a while since I've done some reading... About a month ago already. Might take a while to speed things through and I'm still at page 24... sighh...

Wish me luck.