This blog is about my life and things I find interesting.
I avidly use LLMs at work and at home. One thing that's been a concern for me is security: I consider my laptop a safe space, and it's where I put my private files--those I don't entrust to cloud storage. I wouldn't want an LLM to read them, whether accidentally or maliciously. Enter permission prompts. Every time an agent harness wants to invoke some tool (which includes reading and writing…
This week I finished my income tax return. Gemma, my new personal assistant, helped. She mostly sat around and waited for my instructions, but I had her spring into action several times. Gemma went through the year's transaction histories from my credit card and bank accounts to identify my charitable contributions. Gemma listened to my description of an imbalance on my joint return between my…
As a child, my parents would take me on trips to neighboring towns on an elektrichka , a commuter suburban electric train. We didn't have much of a purpose in these trips; my parents were just showing me a good time. I loved everything about those train rides. Going to the train station, smelling the railroad, buying tickets, boarding, looking out at the landscape, arriving at some random town.…
Today my COVID risk score is 1.7 . It's better than my all-time high of 2.1 on Aug 1st, but worse than my all-time low of 1.3 in mid-July. It is intoxicating to tame the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic with a nice number. This number---unlike numbers for the world, country, state, county, and even city---is something I feel I have a lot of control over. It updates daily, based on my activity.…