Quotes

And I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre, That I do not demand enough from myself, As I could have learned from Karl Jaspers, That my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack. I roll on a wave and look at white clouds. ...Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne. So many words, so much paper, who can stand it. I told you the truth about my distancing myself. I’ve stopped worrying about my misshapen life. It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies. ...You are right, Jeanne, I don’t know how to care about the salvation of my soul. Some are called, others manage as well as they can. I accept it, what has befallen me is just. I don’t pretend to the dignity of a wise old age. Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now, In things of this world, which exist and, for that reason, delight us: Nakedness of women on the beach, coppery cones of their breasts, Hibiscus, alamanda, a red lily, devouring With my eyes, lips, tongue, the guava juice, the juice of la prune de Cythère, Rum with ice and syrup, lianas-orchids In a rain forest, where trees stand on the stilts of their roots.

Reading anything less than 50 years old is like drinking new wine: permissible once or twice a year and usually followed by regret and a headache...I definitely have followed that dictum. Maybe a little too much so, in that I rarely read anything modern at all. When it comes to books. I don't follow that rule when it comes to music or movies or blogs. But on the level of books, there is so much good stuff out there that has stood the test of time, I don't run out of interesting things to read.

There are many types of monsters in this world, monsters who will not show themselves and who cause trouble. Monsters who abduct children, monsters who devour dreams, monsters who suck blood, and monsters who always tell lies. Lying monsters are a real nuisance. They are much more cunning than other monsters. They pose as humans, even though they have no understanding of the human heart. They eat, even though they've never experienced hunger. They study even though the have no interest in academics. They seek friendship even though they do not know how to love. If I were to encounter such a monster, I would likely be eaten by it because, in truth, I am that monster.

A little deeper investigation showed that nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 6. Nothing. [...] No one noticed. Not even me. It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.

I've been thinking about generative AI tools as "bicycles for the mind" (to borrow an old Steve Jobs line), but I think "electric bicycles for the mind" might be more appropriate. They can accelerate your natural abilities, you have to learn how to use them, they can give you a significant boost that some people might feel is a bit of a cheat, and they're also quite dangerous if you're not careful with them! If you like, there's a more cynical version of this where they are electric scooters for the mind: rushed to market without due diligence, irresponsibly dumped throughout cities around the world, quite impressively dangerous, loved by some and a menace to others.

One way to avoid unspotted prediction errors is for the technology in its current state to have early and frequent contact with reality as it is iteratively developed, tested, deployed, and all the while improved. And there are creative ideas people don’t often discuss which can improve the safety landscape in surprising ways — for example, it’s easy to create a continuum of incrementally-better AIs (such as by deploying subsequent checkpoints of a given training run), which presents a safety opportunity very unlike our historical approach of infrequent major model upgrades.

It was a small boldness, but they count, too. In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold. We weren’t always cowards. There have been moments for which we needn’t apologize.

I. He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. ...III. Earth, receive an honored guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

Among closed-source models, OpenAI's early mover advantage has eroded somewhat, with enterprise market share dropping from 50% to 34%. The primary beneficiary has been Anthropic,* which doubled its enterprise presence from 12% to 24% as some enterprises switched from GPT-4 to Claude 3.5 Sonnet when the new model became state-of-the-art. When moving to a new LLM, organizations most commonly cite security and safety considerations (46%), price (44%), performance (42%), and expanded capabilities (41%) as motivations.

I understand people are upset about AI art making it to the final cut, but please try to also google artist names and compare to their portfolio before accusing them of using AI. I'm genuinely pretty upset to be accused of this. It's no fun to work on your craft for decades and then be told by some 'detection site' that your work is machine generated and people are spreading this around as a fact.

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting. A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.

The progress in AI has allowed things like taking down hate speech more efficiently - and this is due entirely to large language models. Because we have large language models [...] we can do a better job than we ever could in detecting hate speech in most languages in the world. That was impossible before.

Many Web3 boost­ers see them­selves as disruptors, but “tokenize all the things” is noth­ing if not an obe­di­ent con­tin­u­a­tion of “market-ize all the things”, the cam­paign started in the 1970s, hugely suc­cessful, ongoing. I think the World Wide Web was the real rupture — “Where … is the money?”—which Web 2.0 smoothed over and Web3 now attempts to seal totally.

History relates the story of the famous Spartan, a mere boy who, when he was taken prisoner, kept shouting in his native Doric, "I shall not be a slave!" He was as good as his word. The first time he was ordered to perform a slave’s task, some humiliating household job (his actual orders were to fetch a disgusting chamber pot), he dashed his head against a wall and cracked his skull open. Freedom is as near as that—is anyone really still a slave?

We find it difficult and disturbing to hold in our minds arguments of the form ‘On the one hand, on the other.’ If we are for capital punishment we want it to be good in all respects, with no serious drawbacks; if we are against it, we want it to be bad in all respects, with no serious advantages. We want the world of facts to dictate to us, virtually, how to act; but this it will never do. We always have to make a choice.

When I was a performance consultant I'd show up to random companies who wanted me to fix their computer performance issues. If they trusted me with a login to their production servers, I could help them a lot quicker. To get that trust I knew which tools looked but didn't touch: Which were observability tools and which were experimental tools. "I'll start with observability tools only" is something I'd say at the start of every engagement.

I definitely like Python 3K's Unicode support better [...] In fact, I think I prefer Ruby 1.8's non-support for Unicode over Ruby 1.9's "support". The problem is one that is all to familiar to Python programmers. You can have a fully unit tested library and have somebody pass you a bad string, and you will fall over.

I remember that I used to say that I thought I could bear a real tragedy if it came to me with purple pall and a mask of noble sorrow, but that the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking in style. It is quite true about modernity. It has probably always been true about actual life. It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the looker on. The nineteenth century is no exception to the rule.

You count the "value" that is lost by people who would have made money selling rival goods, but can't now because they can't compete with free. But you don't count the value that is created by people who build upon the freely given goods. [...] In other words, you only look at the first-order effects. It's the same mistake a lot of people make when they accuse open source developers of "dumping" and ruining the market for competing software. That's true, in a very narrow sense, but it ignores all the other people who took that software and used it to create something else of value.

Think I would hang my head, ye fools? Think open I this golden gate? Conquered, my will could never be, think ye I would not sneer at fate?See you this gilded castle high? See you these soft and slender maids? You think the glory I have won, you’d deign touch with hands or blades?My gaze commands the fire and steel. My port, an emperor’s remains. My soul does tower over thine, my will, of this defeat disdains.Ye call this evil, trifling fools? Ye call this spite, and weakened will? Or do thee cry to see now how, my lofty soul conquers ye still?’Tis I who plunder, capture all. ’Tis I make pretty heads to roll. This final, crimson work of art, makes greater still my lofty soul.Now look—and tremble at my strength! Now look—before I’m choked in flame! By this here mound of gore and gold, I force the world to know my name!

One of the core constitutional principles that guides our AI model development is privacy. We do not train our generative models on user-submitted data unless a user gives us explicit permission to do so. To date we have not used any customer or user-submitted data to train our generative models.

Much like an oral agreement, publishing microformats is an informal agreement between you and (hopefully) a developer community that sets up a relationship with plenty of vagueness, inertial resistance to change, and potential landmines to step on. Would you create a real developer API without a TOS, agreement, or at the very least, guidelines? [...] are you prepared to announce all frontend markup changes? Does publishing a microformat without a special agreement mean that you are implicitly allowing comprehensive scraping of your web data?

After struggling for years trying to figure out why people think [Cloudflare] Durable Objects are complicated, I'm increasingly convinced that it's just that they sound complicated. Feels like we can solve 90% of it by renaming `DurableObject` to `StatefulWorker`? It's just a worker that has state. And because it has state, it also has to have a name, so that you can route to the specific worker that has the state you care about. There may be a sqlite database attached, there may be a container attached. Those are just part of the state.

In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind.

You might not know this old tree by its bark, Which once was striate, smooth, and glossy-dark, So deep now are the rifts that separate Its roughened surface into flake and plate.Fancy might less remind you of a birch Than of mosaic columns in a church Like Ara Coeli or the Lateran Or the trenched features of an agèd man.Still, do not be too much persuaded by These knotty furrows and these tesserae To think of patterns made from outside in Or finished wisdom in a shriveled skin.Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth, New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth, And this is all their wisdom and their art— To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.