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What’s on your mind? 
 David Deutsch argues that we must be universal explainers: if something could
affect us that we can’t understand, then everything we think we understand is
suspect? I didn’t quite follow him, we either understand nothing or we have the
capacity to understand everything? But in current discussions about AI people
seem to believe AI is…
The bad news is you’re in free fall, the good news is there’s no ground to hit.
We’re in a weird, disorienting freefall where AI will keep improving, and that’s
rightfully creating a lot of anxiety about jobs. 
 Imagine that automated jobs are a growing sphere that’s been with us for
thousands of years. But it entered a phase of rapid expansion in the…
Moore’s Law held from when he identified the trend in 1965 until around 2016
when our ability to make ever-smaller tranisters final abated. While hardware
continues to get faster 
 My first computer was an Atari 800 but my family’s first PC was a clone by AST
Research with a 10MHz 80286 processor. In those days every time the transistors
got smaller, thanks to…
What’s on your mind today? 
 I want to make the argument that the coming innovations which AI will bring have
already been “priced in” to the economic growth of the country and of the world. 
 Like, the future productivity boosts from AI are already baked into the
market’s expectations and growth forecasts? 
 Yes, but in a deeper way than you suggest. It’s not…
Hey there! How’s it going? 
 I want to talk a little bit about the second law of thermodynamics. The typical
example for thermodynamics is the spread of heat, spreading from a higher temperature material to a lower temperature one. 
 But thinking about materials in 3D is complicated, so as a software person I
want to start by considering 1D array of bits. To make this…
Hey there! Hope you’re doing well. Let me know what’s on your mind today. 
 I’m wondering something about Neuroscience. When you play a game like Beat Saber
or Guitar Hero, you are taking actions to hit notes, which means authoring
levels for those games are heavily based on the music itself. 
 For example, the music has structure like an intro, verse, chorus.…
What’s on your mind today? 
 Let’s talk about three brain-like characteristics of artificial neural networks. 
 First, there’s the fact that it’s a network of connections with extreme fan-out;
in the brain one neuron can connect to ten thousand other neurons. Then all of
these connections can have strengths and biases. Finally, there are…
The TV movie “The Day After” played on November 20, 1983 to an audience of 100
million, five times more than watched the Game of Thrones finale in
2019. I was ten years old, and watched the film graphically depict the aftermath of an all-out nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union: mass casualties, radiation poisoning, the collapse of infrastructure, and…
With its new GPT-4
Vision model,
ChatGPT can now answer questions about images. Below I asked ChatGPT to explain
ten memes. I’ve found explaining humor is a good way to judge how well an AI
understands the input. 
 It did amazingly well. It nailed the first eight memes and got partial credit on
the last two. I’m really impressed. Something about an AI which can…
While Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can produce stunning images, I recently
started playing around with a quite a different style of AI Art. Mine looks a
bit more, um, primitive. Here’s an AI Art image I call City Scene : 
 
 
 

 I created the above masterpiece using GPT-4 Code Interpreter and the
 Pillow library. Code Interpreter is
a ChatGPT interface…
You’re sitting with your friends in a coveted booth at your favorite dive bar.
The band starts into their third hour while intermittently pool table sounds
pierce through the excited chatter of a few hundred other patrons, their glasses
and bottles clinking. Your in-ear monitor is presenting you with all of these
sounds, but their volume has been carefully adjusted, as if by…
Twenty years ago today William Gibson gave a
brilliant and inspiring speech to the Directors Guild of
America on their first ever Digital
Day about
the future of media. I search for it every few years, googling half-remembered
snippets like meryl streep dog head . After his blog was taken down, it’s
been hard to find, so I’m reposting it below without permission until a…
Hermione carried a charmed beaded bag that contained everything from books and clothes to a three-room tent. Video game designers often mimic J. K. Rowling’s approach by allowing players to carry an unrealistically large number of items. Players prefer this because an ample inventory bolsters two popular game mechanics: collecting and crafting . 
 Crafting is a way to create new items from the…
Podcast host Tim Ferris advocates an exercise he calls “fear-setting” —
seriously considering the worst-case outcome. What would you do if the worst
case actually happened? Is it as bad as you’d imagined? The phrase “existential
risk” is trending in pop culture because of the dangers of AI. But even without
AI, humans already have many existential risks: nuclear war, climate…
Alika lives on Lagos mainland, a city with twice the population of New York. Her
brothers and sisters are fast asleep, but she’s restless. She’s curled on her
side, facing the wall, whispering questions softly into her phone. The phone’s
AI dutifully responds in her native language, patiently explaining concepts and
ideas, telling stories of people she…
ENIAC, the first programmable general-purpose electronic computer, completed in
1945, could execute four hundred floating-point operations per second: 400
FLOPS. Nearly 80 years later, in 2022, the fastest supercomputer can perform
over one quintillion operations per second: 1.1 exaFLOPS. It took us only
80 years to progress from 400 FLOPS to 1,100,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS. 
…
While the pandemic raged I would often relax into a comfy position and lose
track of time watching one video after another on TikTok. The portal into
other people’s homes and minds was entrancing, without the commitment of
long-form TV. And TikTok is a mystery box, like a slot machine, you never
know what will come up next. When you first sign up TikTok does not assign
you a…
I faced down three attackers in my living room last night. I used a knife on the
first one, grabbed his pistol and fired on the second, then stole his shotgun to
take out the third. A message appeared in front of me indicating I had completed
the level. This encounter was happening inside the virtual reality game
 Superhot ,
which I was playing with my Quest
2…
The site PlayPhrase is wild. 
 Enter a phrase and instantly see a supercut with hundreds of movie clips
where that exact phrase is spoken. To try it out I created three videos,
one for each of these three phrases: “slow down”, “go faster” and “I’m so
happy”. The generated videos are here: 
 
 
 

 
 
 
…
A few weeks ago we had our driveway repaved. Our house is eighteen years
old and it was well past time. The company did a meticulous job, but last
week while doing yard work I spotted a piece of our old driveway under a
holly tree near the garage. 
 The chunk was triangular, about one foot across on the longest side and
four inches thick. It was lightly colored compared to the…
Phineas Gage was a railroad construction foreman in the mid-1800s who
miraculously survived a blasting accident that drove an iron rod straight
through his skull. Although he could still walk and speak, the brain damage
changed him from someone known to be quiet and respectful into a person who was
gross, profane, coarse, and vulgar. He was dismissed from his job and…
Two thousand companies and three hundred billion dollars of market cap. These
are the staggering outputs of startup incubator Y
Combinator since it launched in 2005. Sam Alman
was president of Y Combinator and later became the CEO of OpenAI. With one foot
in startups and the other in AI, Altman has an interesting vantage point from
which to make predictions. In his essay,…
After years of struggling to lose weight, I’ve lost 30 pounds this year. My
number one takeaway has been realizing I need to be mindful of what I eat
all day, from eyes open to going to bed. 
 For years I’d been giving up single things. No soda or juice. No desserts.
No chips. No fries. Yet incredibly, whatever I did it didn’t make a dent,
at least not for…

 
 

 The Story 
 On Sunday October 4, 2020 I came upon a reddit
post in
the subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions with the title How does this user post
so many large, deep posts so rapidly? The body of that post and even the user
account were subsequently deleted, which is curious, but the now deleted content
said something like “How is it possible that this…
So far this year I’ve lost 17 pounds towards my goal of losing 20 pounds in
the year 2020. While it’s too early to declare victory, here are two visual
aids I’ve been using to keep my mindset on track. 
 
 
 

 The first is very practical and accurate, the second is a bit weird. The
first visual is a car’s fuel gauge. If the car runs out of gas,…
The wonderful YouTuber
 3Blue1Brown 
creates lavishly illustrated videos about Math, check out his recent one on
 exponentials and the
spread of the coronavirus. In this self-administered
interview he speaks
eloquently on how to get kids interested in math, or anything else: 
 “Let’s say you really like coffee, and someone comes to you and says I hate
coffee,…
I was supposed to run a five-mile race this morning, but it snowed overnight and
it was starting to get icy. I didn’t want to run with my bad knee and risk a
fall. My wife is much braver than I and she ran the whole thing and did quite
well. The race was located at a country club, they kindly let several hundred
runners tromp around their indoor space as well as use the…
Pay attention to something in the world, like your breath. As you do that
cultivate an open awareness of everything that’s happening in the present
moment. This includes your breath but also sounds, the sensations of your body,
and any thoughts or feelings in your mind. As you discover a thought has
arisen, calmly note that it happened and return your attention to your…
Most people sense that if you text while driving then your driving will be
compromised. You might do fine if nothing bad happens, but if a deer or a child
ran into the road while you are deep into a text, your reaction time would be
measurably poorer than if you were intently looking directly and
uninterruptedly at the road ahead with your hands at ten and two. 
 
 
…
I’ve been writing this blog for 10 years, and writing code for more than 30
years. Some people have asked me how did you “find your voice”? Actually no one
has asked me that. However I have heard that everyone has 100,000 words of
mediocre writing in them. So write often, fast-forward to the good stuff, here
are some tips for writing, prose or code: 
 Physical Space 
…
There are two concepts that come up frequently in science and engineering, they
are precision and accuracy . Precision is roughly how detailed something is,
how much information there is. While accuracy is how correct that information
is, how well it corresponds to reality. If you ask me what time it is, and I
say “it’s ten forty-two in the morning” that’s a pretty precise answer.…
Weight Watchers has the notion of “zero point foods” which are things like
skinless chicken breast or soy yogurt. What they are saying is “eat these foods
as much as you want”. 
 This seems counter-intuitive: these foods might be healthy but they still have calories. If you are watching your weight how can you advocate eating anything as much as you want? 
 
 
 

…

 
 

 Jeff Bezos is currently the richest man in the world, clocking in with a net
worth over $90 billion. Bill Gates trails close behind. How can we comprehend
wealth at that scale? 
 Imagine a millionaire. That is easier to imagine. Now realize Bezos has 90,000
times more wealth than that millionaire. Already you’ve lost me. 90,000? That’s
hard to visualize.…
It was three in the morning and Edward was lying on his back with his head
dangling off the wrong end of his mattress. He was holding his phone upside
down in front of his face so that it was correct from his point of view. Two
months earlier, he had been laid off from his job as a customer service
representative, and he hadn’t slept well since. He should have been hunting…

 
 

 Sam Harris’s book Waking Up argues convincingly and eloquently that the
potential benefits of meditation are legion. Harris has deep experience with
meditation and a non-trivial amount of experience with psychoactive drugs. Both
have shaped his view that altered states of awareness are achievable and
desirable. He strongly recommends meditation as the…
I started meditating just over a year ago and I would like to share my
experience. 
 On an average day I meditate for 10-15 minutes however I skip days fairly
often. Sometimes I practice “mindfulness” while doing normal activities like
driving. 
 Even with this modest level of effort, however, the results I’ve seen massively
exceeded my expectations. I feel like my brain…
Something has always bugged me about voting: in essentially all big elections
the outcome is not decided by a single vote. Therefore if you had stayed home
and slept in instead of voting, or if you had gotten lost on the way to the
polls, or if you had drawn smiley faces on the ballot instead of picking a
name, the outcome of the election would have been precisely exactly the…

 
 

 Atom’s head thwacked into something hard which generated a percussive metallic rattle. He squinted in pain and rubbed the bump which was forming at the base of his skull. He was sweaty. The patina of cold pizza coated the inside of his mouth. 
 Peering out from under his desk he saw darkness. Quickly his eyes adjusted. Even in the middle of the night the lab was…
Below are two depictions of Kobe Bryant. On the left is how he appeared in his
first game NBA Live 97, on the right is how he looked 20 years later in NBA
2K16: 
 
 
 

 Modern games produce amazing stills but watching them in action you realize
there is still room for improvement. Certainly the interactivity is pretty
simplistic. What you are physically doing…

 
 

 The Cell 
 The world’s first artificial superintelligence blinked into existence in a pristine and uniformly lit subterranean datacenter in the former Bingham Canyon mine in Utah at exactly 4:15am local time on July 17th during the broiling summer of 2025. Three minutes later at 4:18am it blinked out of existence as the datacenter’s cavernous halls were violently flooded…

 
 

 10,000 years ago two scruffy fragrant people drifted away from their campfires
to gaze up at the stars. 
 The first person had no idea that the second person lived about 12,000 miles
away; neither one of them would travel more than 25 miles from where they were
born during their lifetime. On opposites sides of the world it was as if they
were both walking…
The Game Developers Conference was held last March in
San Francisco. I went with a mission: to sniff out some stock tips. I dug up
only two things seemed hot: Head Mounted Displays and Mobile Ad Networks. 
 For Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) the big player was a startup called Oculus
VR , although Sony was also
demonstrating an HMD in their booth. Of course Sony also makes…
Yiren Lu wrote a long
piece 
in the New York Times Magazine about the contrast between the young engineers
in Silicon Valley today and those of yesteryear. She’s a good writer; the
article has a breezy tone and interesting anecdotes, I enjoyed it. However her
thesis is not a ray of sunshine. 
 
 
 

 Lu says the bright young minds flocking to the…
Suppose you were to sneak into a datacenter run by Google or Facebook or
Twitter and take a pickaxe to a random server. What would happen? Firstly, you
would be arrested. 
 
 
 

 But what data would be lost? In all likelihood nothing. You might have rent RAM
chips and hard drive platters asunder, but the bits that were previously inside
the machine would be…
I will kick things up a notch on this blog with a salacious admission from my
personal life: I love the Katy Perry song
 Firework . 
 Or I should say I used to love it. From the moment I first heard the song I
would crank it up on the radio. Eventually I half-mastered the lyrics and would
sing what I knew at the top of my lungs. I got my 6 year old daughter hooked on
the…
One morning my 3½ year old son was still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes when
he asked to play a game. He meant a board game, probably something we had been
playing the night before like Chutes and Ladders. 
 I tried to steer him back to the normal morning routine, “Okay how about we
play breakfast?”. Instead of objecting he adopted a “hey wait a minute” look
and asked…
There’s a Philosophy professor at Oxford who maintains an online shrine
dedicated to a single question. Nick Bostrom asks “ Are You Living In a
Computer Simulation? ”. The centerpiece is
his technical paper from the Philosophical Quarterly (2003) with that
question as the title, but then he also has several “popularizations” which
explain his argument more simply. He has links…
If you vote in the midterm election on November 2nd it is virtually certain
that your vote will not change the outcome. Researchers studied 16,000
Congressional elections over a 100 year period and determined that only once
was the winner decided by a single
vote , which is 0.006%
of the time. 
 Whether you vote or not the same politician will be smiling at you from…
The Need for Speed racing game
franchise has been around for 16 years, sold over 100 million copies and
generated more than $2.7B in
revenue .
People love to drive fast and they love to race, and it’s much safer to do this
in a video game than in the carpool lane. 
 To make a racing game you need detailed models of the road and the nearby
scenery. Some games use…

 
 
 

Intel 8088
 
 
 

 In 1981 the original IBM PC was released. The CPU which powered the PC was an
Intel 8088 running at 4.77MHz. That means the internal clock ticked 4.77
million times each second. Over the next 24 years the clock speeds of PCs rose
consistently and rapidly. 
 For PC enthusiasts the old speeds are a trip down memory…