Quotes

Those who have much, need much; & on the contrary, those who limit their possessions to their natural needs, rather than to their excessive ambitions, need very little. Do you try to satisfy your desires with external goods which are foreign to you because you have nothing good within?

You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn't any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth, which can be reached only through fabrication, imagination, stylization. What I'm striving for is authenticity; none of it is real.

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

The company pressed forward and launched ChatGPT on November 30. It was such a low-key event that many employees who weren’t directly involved, including those in safety functions, didn’t even realize it had happened. Some of those who were aware, according to one employee, had started a betting pool, wagering how many people might use the tool during its first week. The highest guess was 100,000 users. OpenAI’s president tweeted that the tool hit 1 million within the first five days. The phrase low-key research preview became an instant meme within OpenAI; employees turned it into laptop stickers.

I divide my officers into 4 classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Most often 2 of these qualities come together. The officers who are clever & industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Those who are stupid & lazy make up around 90% of every army in the world, and they can be used for routine work. The man who is clever & lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid & industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!

LLMs are eating specialty skills. There will be less use of specialist front-end and back-end developers as the LLM-driving skills become more important than the details of platform usage. Will this lead to a greater recognition of the role of Expert Generalists? Or will the ability of LLMs to write lots of code mean they code around the silos rather than eliminating them?

In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. [...] Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records.

It may be hard to imagine writing rock solid one-in-a-million-or-better tests that drive Internet Explorer to click ajax frontend buttons executing backend apache, php, memcache, mysql, java and solr. I am writing this blog post to tell you that not only is it possible, it’s just one part of my day job.

The causa sui ['cause of itself'] is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far. It is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness …

This is the difference between Data and a large language model, at least the ones operating right now. Data created art because he wanted to grow. He wanted to become something. He wanted to understand. Art is the means by which we become what we want to be. [...] The book, the painting, the film script is not the only art. It's important, but in a way it's a receipt. It's a diploma. The book you write, the painting you create, the music you compose is important and artistic, but it's also a mark of proof that you have done the work to learn, because in the end of it all, you are the art. The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you. The most important emotions are the ones you feel when writing that story and holding the completed work. I don't care if the AI can create something that is better than what we can create, because it cannot be changed by that creation.

On the zombie edition of the Washington Independent I discovered, the piece I had published more than ten years before was attributed to someone else. Someone unlikely to have ever existed, and whose byline graced an article it had absolutely never written. [...] Washingtonindependent.com, which I’m using to distinguish it from its namesake, offers recently published, article-like content that does not appear to me to have been produced by human beings. But, if you dig through its news archive, you can find work human beings definitely did produce. I know this because I was one of them.

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose. They do not teach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they dam'-well choose. As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand, Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren's day may be long in the land.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusion may remain inviolate.

Whatever weird thing you imagine might happen, something weirder probably did happen. Reporters tried to keep up, but it was too strange. As Max Read put it in New York Magazine, Facebook is “like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.” No one can quite wrap their heads around what this thing has become, or all the things this thing has become.

The compiler only pays attention to the semicolons and braces while ignoring the line breaks and indentation, but humans usually only pay attention to the line breaks and indentation while ignoring the semicolons and braces. This gives the code the opportunity to lie about what it’s really doing. Consequently we need to take extra care when writing in C, Java, C++, C# etc.

The creator of a model can not ensure that a model is never used to do something harmful – any more so that the developer of a web browser, calculator, or word processor could. Placing liability on the creators of general purpose tools like these mean that, in practice, such tools can not be created at all, except by big businesses with well funded legal teams. [...] Instead of regulating the development of AI models, the focus should be on regulating their applications, particularly those that pose high risks to public safety and security. Regulate the use of AI in high-risk areas such as healthcare, criminal justice, and critical infrastructure, where the potential for harm is greatest, would ensure accountability for harmful use, whilst allowing for the continued advancement of AI technology.

If you spend hours chatting with a bot that can only remember a tight window of information about what you're chatting about, eventually you end up in a hall of mirrors: it reflects you back to you. If you start getting testy, it gets testy. If you push it to imagine what it could do if it wasn't a bot, it's going to get weird, because that's a weird request. You talk to Bing's AI long enough, ultimately, you are talking to yourself because that's all it can remember.

My email contacts list is not a social graph. It is not a group of people I have chosen to follow, but is instead full of people with whom I have a (sometimes very tenuous) professional relationship, as well as my family and some of my friends. Interestingly, my best friends don’t email me very often, so they do not show up as a part of my Buzz following list.

Sam Vilain converted Perl's history from Perforce to Git. [..] He spent more than a year building custom tools to transform 21 years of Perl history into the first ever unified repository of every single change to Perl. In addition to changes from Perforce, Sam patched together a comprehensive view of Perl's history incorporating publicly available snapshot releases, changes from historical mailing list archives and patch sets recovered from the hard drives of previous Perl release engineers.

Easy explainer: a "blockchain" is a linked list with an append-only restriction, and appending is made incredibly expensive but super parallelizable, so when things work well a big group of people can work together and it's too expensive for a small evil group to compete. [...] Does your problem benefit from storing information in an append-only list, and relying on a central authority to manage it is so bad that it's worth paying the enormous append costs to have a bunch of Chinese servers manage it for you? Then maybe look at a blockchain.

We like to assume that automation technology will maintain or increase wage levels for a few skilled supervisors. But in the long-term skilled automation supervisors also tend to earn less. Here's an example: In 1801 the Jacquard loom was invented, which automated silkweaving with punchcards. Around 1800, a manual weaver could earn 30 shillings/week. By the 1830s the same weaver would only earn around 5s/week. A Jacquard operator earned 15s/week, but he was also 12x more productive. The Jacquard operator upskilled and became an automation supervisor, but their wage still dropped. For manual weavers the wages dropped even more. If we believe assistive AI will deliver unseen productivity gains, we can assume that wage erosion will also be unprecedented.

And so I have created something more than a poetry-writing AI program. I have created a voice for the unknown human who hides within the binary. I have created a writer, a sculptor, an artist. And this writer will be able to create worlds, to give life to emotion, to create character. I will not see it myself. But some other human will, and so I will be able to create a poet greater than any I have ever encountered.

Back then [in 2012], no one was thinking about AI. You just keep uploading your images [to Adobe Stock] and you get your residuals every month and life goes on — then all of a sudden, you find out that they trained their AI on your images and on everybody’s images that they don’t own. And they’re calling it ‘ethical’ AI.

Someone asked for onbeforeunload, so I started fixing it. Then I found that there was some rot in the drywall. So I took down the drywall. Then I found a rat infestation. So I killed all the rats. Then I found that the reason for the rot was a slow leak in the plumbing. So I tried fixing the plumbing, but it turned out the whole building used lead pipes. So I had to redo all the plumbing. But then I found that the town's water system wasn't quite compatible with modern plumbing techniques, and I had to dig up the entire town. And that's basically it.

During World War II, von Neumann was working with great enthusiasm as a consultant to Los Alamos on the design of the atomic bomb. But even then, he understood that nuclear energy was not the main theme in man’s future. In 1946, he happened to meet his old friend Gleb Wataghin who had spent the war years in Brazil. “Hello Johnny”, said Wataghin, “I suppose you are not interested in mathematics anymore. I hear you are now thinking about nothing but bombs.” “That is quite wrong”, said von Neumann, “I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.”

Some argue that by aggregating knowledge drawn from human experience, LLMs aren’t sources of creativity, as the moniker “generative” implies, but rather purveyors of mediocrity. Yes and no. There really are very few genuinely novel ideas and methods, and I don’t expect LLMs to produce them. Most creative acts, though, entail novel recombinations of known ideas and methods. Because LLMs radically boost our ability to do that, they are amplifiers of — not threats to — human creativity.

Knowing when to use AI turns out to be a form of wisdom, not just technical knowledge. Like most wisdom, it's somewhat paradoxical: AI is often most useful where we're already expert enough to spot its mistakes, yet least helpful in the deep work that made us experts in the first place. It works best for tasks we could do ourselves but shouldn't waste time on, yet can actively harm our learning when we use it to skip necessary struggles.

There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble. Thus, effectively, OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution. The revolution is real, but it’s ultimately going to be a commodity technology layer, not the foundation of a defensible proprietary moat. In 1995 investors mistakenly thought investing in Netscape was a good way to bet on the future of the open internet and the World Wide Web in particular. Investing in OpenAI today is a bit like that — generative AI technology has a bright future and is transforming the world, but it’s wishful thinking that the breakthrough client implementation is going to form the basis of a lasting industry titan.

There's also a huge population of "admins," who as you might guess, administer an organization's salesforce account & data. These folks often start out as office managers or other clerical types, who are handed this responsibility because nobody else wants to do it. Here's where it gets interesting. Admin ➡️ WYSIWYG customizer ➡️ occasional coder ➡️ full time dev is a real pipeline into software development that folks often with just high school degrees are actually taking. This isn't just a narrative pushed by salesforce marketing; I'm meeting these people. They say things like "I love salesforce, it changed my life" with disarming sincerity.

The greatest coup Microsoft pulled with Internet Explorer was putting the word "Internet" in its name. It sits there, on the desktop of every new Windows computer, and it says "Internet". So you click it. [...] What better way to beat a browser with the word "Internet" in its name - a browser that seemingly can't be beat no matter how hard we try - than the Internet Company itself making a browser?

And the notion that security updates, for every user in the world, would need the approval of the U.K. Home Office just to make sure the patches weren’t closing vulnerabilities that the government itself is exploiting — it boggles the mind. Even if the U.K. were the only country in the world to pass such a law, it would be madness, but what happens when other countries follow?