Quotes

Over the last twenty years, publishing systems for content on [BBC] News pages have come and gone, having been replaced or made obsolete. Although newer content is published through dynamic web applications that can be readily modified, what lies beneath this sometimes resembles layers of sedimentary rock.

Bats in a birdless country, Sosuke put his hoe on his shoulder, Kosuke took his net in hand, Sosuke to the mountain, Kosuke to the sea Cucumber flowers that bloom in the twilight, cicadas singing in the leaves of a distant mulberry, mountain paths cool with dew? Kosuke by the sea dreamed of them with envy Tasty beach grasses on dunes near and far, boats drying by the distant summer tide, the voice of the sea resounding in the eelgrass? Sosuke on the mountain dreamed of them with envy And the world changed, as change it will? Kosuke put the hoe on his shoulder, Sosuke took the net in hand, now Kosuke to the mountain, Sosuke to the sea Beginning in mist, ending in frost, springs and autumns passed swiftly by, and hope was like the bloom on the grass, a thing buried in sand and lost from sight What becomes of the blue clouds of ambition that for a moment swell up in the breast? Not a trace left to be seen of Sosuke’s dreams, Kosuke’s dreams Once again the lilies flower, once again the plums are green, and in the deep blue shade of the trees, Sosuke and Kosuke come home perplexed.

Glitch is built in an entirely new and different way for a game. The back end (java at the lowest level, with game logic scripted in Javascript) is designed for maximum flexibility and ease of deployment. That means we'll be able to push new content — new items, new places, new characters — on a daily basis. It also means that we'll have lots of APIs with which the game can be expanded and extended.

I followed this curiosity, to see if a tool that can generate something mostly not wrong most of the time could be a net benefit in my daily work. The answer appears to be yes, generative models are useful for me when I program. It has not been easy to get to this point. My underlying fascination with the new technology is the only way I have managed to figure it out, so I am sympathetic when other engineers claim LLMs are “useless.” But as I have been asked more than once how I can possibly use them effectively, this post is my attempt to describe what I have found so far.

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend an entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for 3 minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil. Granted that work (and especially paper work) is thus elastic in its demands on time, it is manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned.

The ending of the final volume [of a multi-volume novel series] should leave the reader with the feeling that he has gone through the defining circumstances of Main Character's life. The leading character in a series can wander off into another book and a new adventure better even than this one. Main Character cannot, at the end of your multivolume work. (Or at least, it should seem so.) His life may continue, and in most cases it will. He may or may not live happily ever after. But the problems he will face in the future will not be as important to him or to us, nor the summers as golden.

Radiology has embraced AI enthusiastically, and the labor force is growing nevertheless. The augmentation-not-automation effect of AI is despite the fact that AFAICT there is no identified "task" at which human radiologists beat AI. So maybe the "jobs are bundles of tasks" model in labor economics is incomplete. [...] Can you break up your own job into a set of well-defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I suspect most people will say no. But when we think about other people's jobs that we don't understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don't appreciate all the nuances.

A Trumpeter, bravely leading on the soldiers, was captured by the enemy. He cried out to his captors, "Pray spare me, and do not take my life without cause or without inquiry. I have not slain a single man of your troop. I have no arms, and carry nothing but this one brass trumpet." "That is the very reason for which you should be put to death", they said; "for, while you do not fight yourself, your trumpet stirs all the others to battle."

I have recently compiled an anthology of fantastic literature [The Book of Fantasy]. While I admit that such a work is among the few a second Noah should rescue from a second deluge, I must confess my guilty omission of the unsuspected major masters of the genre: Parmenides, Plato, John Scotus Erigena, Albertus Magnus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Francis Bradley. What, in fact, are the wonders of Wells or Edgar Allan Poe—a flower that visits us from the future, a dead man under hypnosis—in comparison to the invention of God, the labored theory of a being who in some way is three and who endures alone outside of time? What is the bezoar stone to pre-established harmony, what is the unicorn to the Trinity, who is Lucius Apuleius to the multipliers of Buddhas of the Greater Vehicle, what are all the nights of Scheherazade next to an argument by Berkeley? I have worshiped the gradual invention of God; Heaven and Hell (an immortal punishment, an immortal reward) are also admirable and curious designs of man’s imagination.

There is a line of Verlaine I shall not recall again, There is a nearby street forbidden to my step, There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time, There is a door I have shut until the end of the world. Among the books in my library (I have them before me) There are some I shall never reopen. This summer I complete my 50th year: Death reduces me incessantly.

—And the Ultimates? They’re willing to die? To be replaced by your voracious UI?[They think as you thought or had your sophist Sea God think]And Ummon recites poetry which I had abandoned in frustration, not because it did not work as poetry, but because I did not totally believe the message it contained.That message is given to the doomed Titans by Oceanus, the soon-to-be-dethroned God of the Sea. It is a paean to evolution written when Charles Darwin was nine years old. I hear the words I remember writing on an October evening nine centuries earlier, worlds and universes earlier, but it is also as if I am hearing them for the first time:[O ye/ whom wrath consumes! who/ passion-stung/ Writhe at defeat/ and nurse your agonies! Shut up your senses/ stifle up your ears/ My voice is not a bellows unto ire. Yet listen/ ye who will/ whilst I bring proof How ye/ perforce/ must be content to stoop. And in the proof much comfort will I give/ If ye will take that comfort in its truth. We fall by course of Nature’s law/ not force Of thunder/ or of Jove. Great Saturn/ thou Hast sifted well the atom universe/ But for this reason/ that thou art the King/ And only blind from sheer supremacy/ One avenue was shaded from thine eyes/ Through which I wandered to eternal truth. And first/ as thou wast not the first of powers/ So art thou not the last/ it cannot be. Thou art not the beginning nor the end/ From Chaos and parental Darkness came Light/ the first fruits of that intestine broil/ That sullen ferment/ which for wondrous ends Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came/ And with it Light/ and Light/ engendering Upon its own producer/ forthwith touched The whole enormous matter into Life. Upon that very hour/ our parentage/ The Heavens/ and the Earth/ were manifest. Then thou first born/ and we the giant race/ Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms. Now comes the pain of truth/ to whom tis pain. O folly! for to bear all naked truths/ And to envisage circumstance/ all calm/ That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well! As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness/ though once chiefs/ And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful/ In will/ in action free/ companionship/ And thousand other signs of purer life. So on our heels a fresh perfection treads/ A power more strong in beauty/ born of us And fated to excel us/ as we pass In glory that old Darkness. nor are we Thereby more conquered/ than by us the rule Of shapeless Chaos. Say/ doth the dull soil Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed/ And feedeth still/ more comely than itself> Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves> Or shall the tree be envious of the dove Because it cooeth/ and hath snowy wings To wander wherewithal and find its joys> We are such forest trees/ and our fair boughs Have bred forth/ not pale solitary doves/ But eagles golden-feathered/ who do tower Above us in their beauty/ and must reign In right thereof. For tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might. Receive the truth/ and let it be your balm]—Very pretty, I thought to Ummon, but do you believe it?[Not for a moment]

I think it is well established that HTTP Authentication needs a major kick in the ass and OpenID and OAuth may get us most of the way there. However, until I see RFC#s attached to both I'm hardly going to consider them to be complete. I propose the creation of an IETF WG on Identity and Authentication. The WG would be chartered to produce two RFCs covering each of the two areas. OpenID and OAuth could be used to seed the WG effort.

I think now of all the kids coming up who are learning to write alongside ChatGPT, just as I learned to write with spell-check. ChatGPT isn’t writing for them; it’s producing copy. For plenty of people, having a robot help them produce serviceable copy will be exactly enough to allow them to get by in the world. But for some, it will lower a barrier. It will be the beginning of their writing career, because they will learn that even though plenty of writing begins with shitty, soulless copy, the rest of writing happens in edits, in reworking the draft, in all the stuff beyond the initial slog of just getting words down onto a page.

Confession: we've been hiding parts of v0's responses from users since September. Since the launch of DeepSeek's web experience and its positive reception, we realize now that was a mistake. From now on, we're also showing v0's full output in every response. This is a much better UX because it feels faster and it teaches end users how to prompt more effectively.

What win I if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy. Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week? Or sells eternity to get a toy? For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy? Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown, Would with the sceptre straight be stricken down?

The stampede of the affluent into grim-faced, highly competitive sports has been a tragicomedy of perverse incentives and social evolution in unequal times: a Darwinian parable of the mayhem that can ensue following the discovery of even a minor advantage. Like a peacock rendered nearly flightless by gaudy tail feathers, the overserved athlete is the product of a process that has become maladaptive, and is now harming the very blue-chip demographic it was supposed to help.

The very fact of perceiving, of paying attention, is selective; all attention, all focusing of our consciousness involves a deliberate omission of what is not interesting. We see and hear through memories, fears, expectations, In bodily terms, unconsciousness is a necessary condition of physical acts. Our body knows how to articulate this difficult paragraph, how to contend with stairways, knots, overpasses, cities, fast-running rivers, how to cross the street without being run down by traffic, how to procreate, how to breathe, how to sleep, and perhaps how to kill: our body, not our intellect. For us, living is a series of adaptations, which is to say, an education in oblivion. It is admirable that the first news of Utopia that Thomas More gives us is his puzzled ignorance of the 'true' length of one of its bridges.

Of all the parameters in SD, the seed parameter is the most important anchor for keeping the image generation the same. In SD-space, there are only 4.3 billion possible seeds. You could consider each seed a different universe, numbered as the Marvel universe does (where the main timeline is #616, and #616 Dr Strange visits #838 and a dozen other universes). Universe #42 is the best explored, because someone decided to make it the default for text2img.py (probably a Hitchhiker’s Guide reference). But you could change the seed, and get a totally different result from what is effectively a different universe.

For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.

In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it's really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.

John Of Gaunt: O, but they say the tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony: Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. He that no more must say is listen’d more Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose; More are men’s ends mark’d than their lives before: The setting sun, and music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, Writ in remembrance more than things long past...

My purpose is no less than to effectuate in each of you a noticeable, irreversible change. I want you to see and absorb calculational arguments so effective that you will never be able to forget that exposure. I want you to gain, for the rest of your lives, the insight that beautiful proofs are not “found” by trial and error but are the result of a consciously applied design discipline. I want to inspire you to raise your quality standards. I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself “Dijkstra would not have liked this.”, well, that would be enough immortality for me.

Our historians, the most perspicacious on the planet, have invented a method for correcting chance; it is well known that the outcomes of this method are (in general) trustworthy—although, of course, they are never divulged without a measure of deception. Besides, there is nothing so tainted with fiction as the history of the Company… A paleographed document, unearthed at a certain temple, may come from yesterday's drawing or from a drawing that took place centuries ago. No book is published without some discrepancy between each of the edition's copies. Scribes take a secret oath to omit, interpolate, alter. Indirect falsehood is also practiced.

On the one hand, information wants to be expensive because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is lower and lower all the time. So you have these 2 things fighting against each other.

I’ve often joked with other internet culture reporters about what I call the “normie tipping point.” In every emerging internet trend, there is a point at which “normies” — people who don’t spend all day online, and whose brains aren’t rotted by internet garbage — start calling, texting and emailing us to ask what’s going on. Why are kids eating Tide Pods? What is the Momo Challenge? Who is Logan Paul, and why did he film himself with a dead body? The normie tipping point is a joke, but it speaks to one of the thorniest questions in modern journalism, specifically on this beat: When does the benefit of informing people about an emerging piece of misinformation outweigh the possible harms?

...we think so much reversal is based on "We think something should work, and so we’re going to adopt it before we know that it actually does work", and one of the reasons for this is because that’s how medical education is structured. We learn the biochemistry, the physiology, the pathophysiology as the very first things in medical school. And over the first two years we kind of get convinced that everything works mechanistically the way we think it does.

Why have our two consuls and praetors turned up today, resplendent in their red brocaded togas; why are they wearing bracelets encrusted with amethysts, and rings studded with brilliant, glittering emeralds; why are they sporting those priceless canes, the ones of finely-worked gold and silver? "Because the barbarians are supposed to show up today; And such things really dazzle the barbarians." Why is everyone so suddenly ill at ease and confused (just look how solemn their faces are)? Why are the streets and the squares all at once empty, as everyone heads for home, lost in their thoughts? "Because it’s night now, and the barbarians haven’t shown up. And there are others, just back from the borderlands, who claim that the barbarians no longer exist." What in the world will we do without barbarians? Those people would have been a solution, of sorts.