Astral Codex Ten

lsusr

3 min read

lsusr

Article

lsusr is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 14, 2021 and November 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “a great recent Less Wrong post by lsusr”; “I got the rationalist techno-Buddhists’ answer from lsusr a few months ago”. It most often appears alongside Alaska, artificial intelligence, Backpropagation.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 14, 2021
  • Last seen: November 07, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

[LINK] Unifying Predictive Coding With Backpropagation
April 14, 2021 · Original source
This is a link to / ad for a great recent Less Wrong post by lsusr, Predictive Coding Has Been Unified With Backpropagation, itself about a recent paper Predictive Coding Approximates Backprop Along Arbitrary Computation Graphs.
Inline links: Predictive Coding Has Been Unified With Backpropagation, Predictive Coding Approximates Backprop Along Arbitrary Computation Graphs
A series of recent papers helps flesh this out. Predictive coding can approximate backpropagation without needing backwards information transfer. The most recent paper shows that you can do this for arbitrary computational graphs. lsusr writes:
Inline links: recent, papers, most recent paper, writes
I’m not sure I am as excited as they are; AI and neuroscience have always been a single field in some spiritual sense, and they continue to be very different fields in practice. And I’m not sure what good more neuromorphic computers would be - lsusr suggests “a computer that doesn’t break when you cut it in half”, but it sounds easier to just avoid letting your computer end up in a situation where that might matter.
In What Sense Is Life Suffering?
November 07, 2025 · Original source
I don’t know the orthodox Buddhist answer to this question. But I got the rationalist techno-Buddhists’ answer from lsusr a few months ago, and found it, uh, enlightening. He said: mental valence works like temperature.
Inline links: lsusr