I spent last week with my daughter at Camp Ross , part of the Goshen Scout Reservation . About three hours southwest of DC, Goshen is a large patch of Virginia centered on Lake Merriweather, which is named for Marjorie Merriweather Post, of the Post Foods dynasty, who bequeathed the property to …
The Pope's encyclical has elicited fascinating reactions from some AI experts. Most eye-catching has been a reflexive opposition to Leo's suggestion that these models are not truly conscious: So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through …
Andrej Karpathy notes that "people who aren’t keeping up even over the last 30 days already have a deprecated world view" about using LLMs to write code and that devs must "rapidly progress through their grief cycle" to find their new place in the profession. I think he's right …
My Spotify Wrapped was less embarrassing than it could have been--I am frozen in time in the late aughts, but that's fine with me. But it reminded me to take on one more "if only I had the time" project. My beloved dishwasher is internet-connected (of course). Mostly, this affords …
In the spirit of losing less writing output to Twitter , here's something I posted last week that got a surprising amount of attention. It seems very likely to me that we're in the early days of a new temperance movement for online gambling . The ferocious pace at which the industry …
The blog update is not the only project that AI coding has allowed me to pursue with wild abandon. Three years ago I bought a small rangefinding module from Adafruit, attached it to a wifi-capable microcontroller, and pointed it at the water in my Christmas tree stand. Since then, adding …
I have been writing a personal blog since 2006, apparently! I fell in love with technology because I feared scarcity, and because, in this world, digital technology is the only real cure for it. Never having to throw anything away is a close corrolary. So it's unsurprising that each time …
Josh Tauberer has written a great and generous post reflecting on the civic tech era and why its successes deserve to be celebrated, even if it has been some time since its heyday. I agree with him. I'm proud of my time at the Sunlight Foundation and the part that …
I just got this email from Scouting America. What a week for Pete Hegseth's Department of Defense. Yesterday, attacking a war hero astronaut senator for insisting on the rule of law . Today, repudiating a youth organization with whom it's partnered for a century. It's genuinely disgraceful. I'm an Eagle scout …
Surprisingly few papers use this title! I'm writing this post primarily to stake a claim before any more arrive. But also because I want to register some hunches, which I had assumed were kind of obvious but which I increasingly suspect might not be. Scott Alexander is much smarter than …
I found myself chatting with some smart friends over the weekend. Like any good party, the conversation eventually turned to cryptocurrency. By the end, I was convinced I should write this post. I am not and don't want to be a crypto guy. But I am convinced there is an …
The wordcel versus shape rotator debate was a brief but amusing moment of online faux antagonism. There is a natural human tendency to collapse all experience into a unidimensional continuum (or, if you're attempting to show an unusual amount of intellectual rigor, a four-quadrant chart), and this was a good …
For many years I led the technical arm of the Sunlight Foundation, which was, at the time, one of D.C.'s most prominent advocates for government transparency. On the tech side of the house, the transparency mission mostly meant bringing already-open records into the digital age: getting public data …
I think, or maybe just hope, that this account is true: that LLMs will keep getting better, but that we know enough to understand what an LLM is , and make guesses about what an ideal one looks like, and that it doesn't imply serious threats to the primacy of human …
Read Benedict Evans , who scorns how it amasses stats on an area in which he's an expert. Read this thread to see how it does with SEC filings. I haven't validated every number it cites, but it appears quite impressive. The value of analysis is set to plummet. The value …
Of course it was reasonable to focus on Mangione's interactions with the health care system as we searched for his motive. But now, with his manifesto in hand and some of his personal history known, those interactions seem bizarrely scant. He suffered from chronic back pain, but could still go …
One of the reasons I've been slow to leave Twitter is my default skepticism about new services. I enjoy my ruts: I didn't want to leave ICQ, or AIM, or blogs, or the Instagram photo feed. I linger around these digital ghost towns even as my friends move on to …
Luis Villa notes , with some sadness, the closing of yet another door to the open web--occasioned, this time, by creators' reluctance to make their work available for training AI: [The open web] was inarguably the greatest repository of knowledge the world had ever seen. Among other reasons, this was in …
We have just returned home. Physically, we were in Vermont, working by remote for two weeks and vacationing for a third. Psychologically, we were in numerous locales. Caloric IPA City. A day trip to Diminished Parental Vigilance Island. Touring the Drug-Addicts-Are-Merely-Annoying,-Not-Dangerous District. But also: relaxing in the Land of …
Tom MacWright has written an interesting post on LLMs and their effect on the discipline of programming , noting that they represent a grimly ironic answer to his desire to democratize programming, since his enthusiasm for the project was about its potential to provide both intellectual and financial returns. LLMs allow …