From the desk of Jonathan Y. Chan
Casey Newton, whose fiancé works at Anthropic, writes in response to Mark Zuckerberg: On Sunday night, HBO aired the third-season finale of House of the Dragon, the stuffy and unrelentingly bleak prequel to Game of Thrones. The show takes place in a world where one great house holds a near-monopoly on a superweapon — dragons — and thus rules the world. … In Westeros, no one is confused about what…
I finally found a soul-crushing short story that had been stuck in my head since 2016: Prodigal by Gord Sellar. The issue of Analog it first appeared in is no longer in print but it’s available through the Wayback Machine here . I don’t want to spoil it. I’ll add a review when I add some support for spoiler tags to this blog! It’s a 15-page story about a dog owned by a couple that receives him a…
Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I’m continually surprised to see the so-called “accelerationists” so excited about open-weight models. … Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism , which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a “public good”…
The first page of Henry Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis : In the life of every person there comes a point when he realizes that out of all the seemingly limitless possibilities of his youth he has in fact become one actuality. No longer is life a broad plain with forests and mountains beckoning all-around, but it becomes apparent that one’s journey across the meadows has indeed followed a regular…
SonOfLilit and jerkajerk’s fix on Reddit for EPUB files rendering with giant black boxes over the text on the reMarkable worked great for me. Here are the Reddit post and the Bash script that worked for me.
The aesthetic of fen qiang dai wa, or “white walls and black tiles,” defines the traditional residential architecture of the Jiangnan region, located in China’s lower Yangtze Delta. Fen and dai, or black and white, are references to the colours of the region’s vernacular architecture, which generally presents a rather humble and austere appearance that contrasts with the bright colours of Chinese…
It is a stain on my fellow well-off non-Donald Trump voters that support for Prop 13 is actually more correlated with class than it is with political affiliation. Prop 13 is the CA law that means that a rich person living in a $10 million house that they inherited from their parents can pay far less in property taxes than someone who was born poor, worked hard, and saved up to buy a $1 million…
These notes are incomplete and are not a review. Life in the Bay Area, an economic dynamo in America’s richest state, can feel awfully dysfunctional. San Francisco has been unable to serve its homeless population, and even many wealthy people have to keep a generator for their extraordinarily expensive houses because the state can’t keep the lights on. I would like to give Mr. Wang the benefit of…
Lectio difficilior potior (Latin for “the more difficult reading is the stronger”) is a main principle of textual criticism. Where different manuscripts conflict on a particular reading, the principle suggests that the more unusual one is more likely the original. The presupposition is that scribes would more often replace odd words and hard sayings with more familiar and less controversial ones,…
First download the existing tokenizer to ./my_tokenizer/tokenizer.json . You only need tokenizer.json ; for example, GPT-2’s can be obtained here . Then open up a Python REPL and run some commands. I’m adding task & sentinel tokens for UL2R: from transformers import AutoTokenizer tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("./my_tokenizer/") tokenizer.add_tokens(["<|r|>",…
Lawrence Jones: … it’s not our job; we shouldn’t have to live in fear while they figure out what’s going on. Put him in a mental institution or a jail and let the system figure it out. People are having to duck and die on the trains and the buses, walk through the street—this is just one case, but it’s happening all across the country. And it’s not a money issue. Billions of dollars have been…
From Towards a Liberatory Technology by Murray Bookchin , writing under the pseudonym Lewis Herber (emphasis mine): Thus far every social revolution has foundered because the peal of the tocsin could not be heard over the din of the work-shop. Dreams of freedom and plenty were polluted by the mundane, workaday responsibility of producing the means of survival. Looking back at the brute facts of…
From How Americans Used Time in 1965 by John P. Robinson, published in 1977: Numbers are minutes spent per day (out of 1440 total). Employed Men Activity Minutes Radio 4.62 Television 97.93 Conversation 12.18 Outdoors 4.14 Total Mass Media 145.52 Total Leisure 100.95 Employed Women Activity Minutes Radio 4.28 Television 62.78 Conversation 17.04 Outdoors 0.97 Total Mass Media 96.46 Total Leisure…
🎶 Ihni binni dimi diniwiny anytime Ihni binni dimi dini one more time Or ihni binni diniwiny anytime Oh, Ihni binni dini one more time 🎵
Because of you – because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met, Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny. That’s part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right. There can be no fuller expression of America’s support for self-determination than our leaving Iraq…
…there is credible evidence from the same scholarly sources that articulate the unwillingness or inability of francophone sub-Saharan African nations to embrace these new forms of governance apparently because the status quo serves the interests of the political leaders of these countries and their external mentor-France. The various economic, cultural and security arrangements that France…
… when reelected, McCarthy gained the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, a position he used, according to biographer David Oshinksy, “to undermine government morale, damage numerous reputations, and make America look sinister in the eyes of the world.” From The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers .
We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn’t we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective “marker” for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste? In other words, it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion…
I was working on an Android app when the virtual device in the Android Emulator on macOS suddenly stopped being able to connect to the network. Using the in-device menus to restart network adapters didn’t help. Restarting the device also didn’t help. I fixed it by using these commands to “cold boot” the emulator: emulator -list-avds # INFO | Storing crashdata in:…
This is very simple, but it doesn’t seem to come up when I search. If you a have a component rendered with React.memo and are trying to figure out which prop is causing it to re-render: export const Foo = React. memo (( props : FooProps ) => { // ... }); … you can (ab)use React.memo ’s second parameter, propsAreEqual . /** * Lets you skip re-rendering a component when its props are…
Gould had a pronounced aversion to what he termed “hedonistic” approaches to piano repertoire, performance, and music generally. For him, “hedonism” in this sense denoted a superficial theatricality, something to which he felt Mozart, for example, became increasingly susceptible later in his career. He associated this drift toward hedonism with the emergence of a cult of showmanship and gratuitous…
I find that reading a document aloud is a great way to catch grammatical errors or awkward wordings. You can have macOS do this for you with a one-liner: pbpaste | say --rate=250 This will read aloud whatever’s on your clipboard at 250 WPM.
Harmony is set in a world where technology makes it possible for everyone to be in perfect physical health. In such a world, Project Itoh (the pen name of author ITO Satoshi) thinks the only remaining source of suffering would be free will. I enjoyed the book: the world is interesting and I was hooked on the plot. But I can’t recommend it. First, a petty complaint that I need to get it out of the…
From the Wikipedia article on the Mosuo ethnic group in China: In Mosuo culture, a myth describes that long ago, dogs had life spans of 60 years while humans had life spans of thirteen years. Humans felt their life span was too short, so they traded it with the dogs in exchange for paying homage to them.
From “British logistics in the Falklands War” on Wikipedia: The Argentine government did not wish to “repatriate” its dead, as it considered that they were already in Argentina. Many were not identified, and were buried with the inscription “Argentine soldier known unto God.”
LLMs can sometimes recognize number patterns, but can they explain their reasoning? See for yourself! The interactive demo below generates a random program and uses that to compute three number sequences. The LLM is given two of those as examples and asked to pick the third out of a lineup. Click expand to see the actual messages sent to/from the LLM. You can run things yourself if you click…
You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. — Exodus 22:21, ESV You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt. I, the LORD, am your God. — Leviticus 19:34, NAB Photographs by Joe Raedle, Alex Wong, and Scott Olson…
There’s nothing particularly complex about this, but a few things surprised me along the way so I figured I’d write up some notes. To generate a random $n$-dimensional unit vector, first generate a vector where each entry is a random sample from a normal distribution then normalize it to a unit vector. Why does this work? I’ll paraphrase a very helpful comment by mindoftea on StackOverflow: The…
The ```math fenced math code block syntax is an alternative to the traditional $$ or \[ syntax for \begin{display} supported by GitHub . I learned about it today while working on a small (~200 line) shell script to serve Markdown files as live-reloading webpages w/ KaTeX support: markd . To use the LaTeX syntax highlighter for triple-backtick ```math fenced code blocks in Neovim , place this…
A golden oldie from Rich Lowry at the National Review in 2008: I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” 👀
Photos were not syncing from my Mac to my other devices. On my Mac, the number of photos it was aware of (displayed at the bottom of the main screen) was different from the number of photos displayed in Photos on my iPhone. Both said “Last synced X minutes ago”, where X was some small number, so it seemed like it wasn’t even aware that the two were out of sync! Bizarrely, new photos from my iPhone…
Countries in dark blue grant jus soli without restrictions; all other countries require at least one parent to have citizenship or residency. Jus soli is the predominant rule in the Americas… Almost all states in Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania grant nationality at birth based upon the principle of jus sanguinis (“right of blood”), in which nationality is inherited through parents rather than…
I run Phoenix ( Rails -like web framework for Elixir ) like so: elixir --name foo@127.0.0.1 --cookie bar --erl \" -elixir ansi_enabled true\" -S mix phx.server … then connect IEx (the Elixir REPL) using: random = $( head /dev/urandom | LC_ALL = C tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 | head -c 8 ) iex --name "iex- $random " --remsh foo@127.0.0.1 --cookie bar … and connect Livebook ( Jupyter for Elixir)…
Go to http://plex.tv/claim/ to create a “claim code”. In Package Center, search for and install “Plex Media Server.” Make sure to select the “Claim” option when installing, not the default option! Enter the claim code you generated in step 1. Otherwise you’ll have to reinstall; I was able to sign in to my Plex account but then kept getting the error “Not authorized: you do not…
1960s-era encryption systems often included a punched card reader for loading keys. The mechanism would automatically cut the card in half when the card was removed, preventing its reuse. From “Securing Record Communications: The TSEC/KW-26” via “Stream cipher attacks” on Wikipedia.
Here’s what I use to reinstall the main branch of the neovim Homebrew package: brew unlink neovim && brew install neovim --HEAD --fetch-HEAD My searches weren’t turning up good results.
Ran across the Toasty Tech GUI Gallery today. I assumed it was abandoned because of the pristine “IE is EVIL!!!” banner until I noticed the Windows 11 review: Don’t miss the “screen shots” of the “ Realworld Desk ” GUI. Awesome website.
From the Wikipedia article on Hattori Hanzo : He died at the age of 54 or 55 in 1597. There are three theories about his death. One asserts that he was assassinated by a rival Samurai, the pirate Fūma Kotarō. After Hanzo tracked him down to the Inland Sea, Kotarō lured him and his men into a small channel and used oil to set the channel on fire. The second theory is that Hanzo became a monk in Edo…
Here’s the copy-icloud-photos script I use to backup my photos stored on iCloud to my Synology NAS: #!/bin/bash set -euo pipefail args = ( --delete --human-readable --no-perms --partial --progress --times -v ) src = "/Users/jyc/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/" cd " $src " find ./ -cmin +1440 -print0 | rsync --files-from=- --from0 \ "${…
I am Culgi, who has been chosen by Inana for his attractiveness. … Because I am a powerful man who enjoys using his thighs, I, Culgi, the mighty king, superior to all, strengthened the roads, put in order the highways of the Land. … So that my name should be established for distant days and never fall into oblivion, so that my praise should be uttered throughout the Land, and my glory should be…
Previously: One-Paragraph Reviews, Vol. I I didn’t manage to stick to the one-paragraph format this time. I’m trying to write down: everything that was novel and notable to me when reading the paper as concisely as possible … but (1) can be a lot of stuff because the things I’m reading about are generally things on which I’m not an expert! I’ll try moving stuff that isn’t related to the main point…
The iteration order for Elixir maps is not just “undefined” in the sense that there is some order at runtime which you don’t know. Different functions that take maps can also iterate over the map in different orders! Lists have the iteration order you’d expect: range = 1 .. 32 Enum . map (range, fn a -> a end ) Enum . zip_with (range, range, fn a, b -> {a, b} end ) # [1, 2, 3, ...] # [{1, 1}, {2,…
I’d assumed that emoji were all organized into a contiguous Unicode codepoint range, but this is very much not the case! There are more than a thousand different ranges containing emoji. The Unicode consortium makes the complete list available as a file, emoji-data.txt . Here are a few lines: 25FB..25FE ; Emoji # E0.6 [4] (◻️..◾) white medium square..black medium-small square 2600..2601 ; Emoji #…
Going to try and see if this format helps me get through the backlog of reviews I’ve been meaning to write. The schema I’ll try is: (1) why it’s interesting (2) the most interesting insight. 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering by Kerbl, Kopanas, Leimkühler, and Drettakis (2023) . The authors reconstruct 3D scenes from 2D images and render much faster than before (≥ 100fps)…
You are ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI, based on the GPT-4 architecture. — OpenAI’s system prompt for ChatGPT Imagine you are an experienced Ethereum developer tasked with creating a smart contract for a blockchain messenger. — a ChatGPT prompt found on the web Peter Watts predicted LLM prompts in Blindsight (2006) and Echopraxia (2014): Imagine you are Siri Keeton: You wake in…
Received this official-looking document in the mail by virtue of having my address associated with my failed startup. If you look at the fine print you’ll notice it’s not actually from the government. It’s from a scam company called “Corporate Processing Service” that is generously offering to file a form for you for \$243. The state only charges you \$25 and has an online form . See “Misleading…
Just tried to print out a PDF and it’s been an adventure! Preview and Chrome don’t print any math notation, including in figures Zotero prints it all out, but blurry Firefox prints out nothing but blurry complete figures (!) All of them render it properly on my computer though. The PDF is “Compiler and Runtime Support for Continuation Marks” (Flatt & Dybvig, 2020).
If a function is only called from a single place, consider inlining it. – John Carmack From John Carmack on Inlined Code on Jonathan Blow’s blog.
I was excited to learn that S3 has natively supported redirects since 2012 . That meant that I could use the power of the ✨ cloud ✨ to get my own link shortener for “free”–thanks to AWS’s Free Tier–without having to muck around with databases, web servers, or serverless-cloud-lambda-edge functions. Each link is just a zero-byte file in an bucket, which S3 itself magically turns into a redirect. I…
Given their disdain for the social sciences, certain Silicon Valley venture capitalists have an ironic affinity to unwittingly describing things in structuralist terms. And they do a poor job at it: the overloaded “bottom-up” vs. “top-down” metaphor for everything from growth to ideation to what kind of salad they ate today is just word salad in comparison to Lévi-Strauss’s Culinary Triangle or…