This site explores the intersections of three subjects: decision making, learning and creation of value.
Large Language Models are at a pivotal point. On one hand, we still don’t understand how they work or why they work so well - could human thought be nothing more than a pattern that these models have somehow uncovered? On the other hand, there’s growing concern that LLMs are hitting a wall[1], that current approaches (i.e. throwing ever more money and computation on training) won’t fix its biggest…
Have you ever tried playing chess against yourself? Unless you are a chess purist or have a split personality, it is not much fun. The pleasure of engaging in a game like chess comes from challenging another mind (human or otherwise). From not knowing what the other is planning and the uncertainty that comes with it. When two opponents share the same brain, there are no secrets or surprises.…
What do we value most in life? Health is an obvious choice, next to love and meaningful friendships. Money is certainly on the list too, but controversial, at least when pursued narrowly at the cost of everything else (though few would dispute that a good life depends on owning a sufficient amount of it). Uncontroversial is the value of another item: knowledge. Our post-industrial society…
Programming is a marvellous activity. By typing on a keyboard and feeding code to a computer, a programmer can create entirely new (virtual) worlds out of nothing. There are few constraints on what a program could be - the only limitations are memory and a CPU’s processing power. Whatever you can think of, you could, in theory, bring into existence on a computer. But since virtual worlds are…
We make sense of the world through models we create in our minds. How well we understand reality depends on the accuracy of those models. However, we are often not aware that our internal representation can be inaccurate or, worse, we may not even realise that we use mental models at all. By bringing our thought processes into the open, we can shed light on the gaps in our understanding and learn…
Software engineering is a rapidly evolving industry, putting developers in a perpetual state of having to learn new things while doing their actual job. This is a daunting task, not only because a full-time job leaves little room for training and catching up on the latest changes in tech, but also for the reason that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to decide what and how to learn. For…
In her book “The biggest bluff” the author Maria Konnikova describes betting as a “corrective for many of the follies of human reason”. This seems contradictory at first as betting is rarely considered a prudent activity. It is, however, important to distinguish betting (in poker) from gambling. A game like roulette, for example, is based purely on luck. Poker, on the other hand, is a complex game…
The half-life of a tech-stack
One apparent difference between human and artificial intelligence is that an algorithm needs to be fed with adequate data to be able to do something useful. In contrast, the human brain can be quite happy without external input. Giving the mind nothing to work on or confronting it with nonsensical material can stimulate fresh thinking.