Polimath

my daughter happily chirped last week that Christmas was only 2 weeks away and my wife burst into tears. It's been a rough month.

Gonna donate 100 copies of Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage to New Jersey libraries

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day — a day to celebrate one of humankind's greatest achievements

laneless.substack.com/p/500-millio...

So... this guy is going to get away with it, right?

Man, it's almost like the vaccine mandate was a bad idea

Cormac McCarthy (RIP) and Werner Herzog Talk Science and Culture To kick off this wonderful episode of Science Friday (listen below), physicist Lawrence M. Krauss suggests that science and art ask the same fundamental question: Who are we, and what is our place in ...

I started reading that Vanity Fair piece about Cormac McCarthy's young muse and that caused me to search out this interview with McCarthy, Werner Herzog, and Lawrence Krauss

www.openculture.com/2011/04/wern...

Still kind of waiting out the recent flood to see what this platform becomes after everyone has gotten their "wow, it's so cool to be on bsky" out of their systems

Obviously ChatGPT is going to stone-cold murder SO, but Discord has already stolen the crown. And Discord is going to make it much harder for ChatGPT to learn about emerging technologies.

Stack Overflow has been a declining resource for years. For whatever reason, the social benefit of answering questions on SO has declined substantially in the last 10 years. Newer tech has moved help forums to Discord & left SO out in the cold.

Moving over to bsky and changing your profile picture is like going to a party with a fake nose and mustache and seeing how long it takes people to figure out who you are

finally getting some traction on my job search

Very cool map of topics from hacker news lmcinnes.github.io/datamapplot_...

GitHub - rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch: Implement a ChatGPT-like LLM in PyTorch from scratch, step by step Implement a ChatGPT-like LLM in PyTorch from scratch, step by step - rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch

Bonus material from the book "Building an LLM from Scratch", looks like it is geared toward people who are just starting to dip their toes into this water

"from scratch" is not something I really want to do but it seems good to know how to do it

github.com/rasbt/LLMs-f...

Project Silica Project Silica is developing the first-ever storage technology designed and built from the ground up for the cloud, using femtosecond lasers to store data.

Just discovered Project Silica, Microsoft's research project for ultra-long-term data storage

My current personal data storage solution is extremely fragile (most of my data will be functionally lost when I die) so I'm very interested in this project

www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

We're doin all the data things over here, I think

If you're just here to be grumpy at a stranger on the internet, then that's fine too.

I know being grumpy at a stranger can help when we need to externalize our frustrations about a world beyond our control.

Is your point that I should reflect on something I said 6 years ago?

And, if I have, then that's good?

I guess I'm missing the point of why you're here telling me to reflect on something I've already reflected on. Are you interested in that reflection?

be honest: would you listen to a single word I said if I told you about my reflections?

YouTube video by GRAILE AI ChatGP-why: When, if ever, is synthetic text safe, appropriate, and desirable?

Why are LLMs bad for search? Because LLMs are nothing more than statistical models of the distribution of word forms in text, set up to output plausible-sounding sequences of words.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpE4...

>>

A starter pack for #NLP #NLProc researchers! 🎉

go.bsky.app/SngwGeS

How do you do sample data generation?

I not only admitted I was wrong about that, I wrote a long thread about how despicable Kavanaugh was for breaking his promise to protect Roe

Anthony Goldbloom makes the case for using GenAI to clean and process unstructured data

I've used it for sample data generation and have had reasonable success with that
blog.sumble.com/the-overlook...

I think back to my grad school days. It was pre-iPhone but web tech was well established.

I thought there were a world of possibilities for making stuff to make things better for people & I was excited to get out there & do it.

Thinking hard about what John Carmack said about optimism for the future, trying to compare it to my life experiences

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1653437161658544129?t=iZEAW07mcuWzHrC-hspdaA&s=19