Quotes

The tautological emptiness of a Master's Wisdom is exemplified in the inherent stupidity of proverbs. Let us engage in a mental experiment by way of trying to construct proverbial wisdom out of the relationship between terrestrial life, its pleasures, and its Beyond. If one says, "Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it's the only life you've got!" it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite (“Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air—think about eternity!"), it also sounds deep. If one combines the 2 sides ("Bring Eternity into your everyday life, live your life on this earth as if it is already permeated by Eternity!”), we get another profound thought. Needless to add, the same goes for its inversion: "Do not try in vain to bring together Eternity and your terrestrial life, accept humbly that you are forever split between Heaven and Earth!" If, finally, one simply gets perplexed by all these reversals and claims: "Life is an enigma, do not try to penetrate its secrets, accept the beauty of its unfathomable mystery!" the result is, again, no less profound than its reversal: "Do not allow yourself to be distracted by false mysteries that just dissimulate the fact that, ultimately, life is very simple—it is what it is, it is simply here without reason and rhyme!" Needless to add that, by uniting mystery and simplicity, one again obtains a wisdom: "The ultimate, unfathomable mystery of life resides in its very simplicity, in the simple fact that there is life."

Our industry has collectively taught average people over the last few decades that computers should be feared and are always a single misstep from breaking. We’ve trained them to expect the working state to be fragile and temporary, and experience from previous upgrades has convinced them that they shouldn’t mess with anything if it works. [...] The upgrade market for average PC owners is dead. We killed it.

The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that dying without reaching one's aim is to die a dog's death is the frivolous way of sophisticates. When pressed with the choice of life or death, it is not necessary to gain one's aim.

I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old. I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI). I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by a Pascal’s Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.

A critical analysis of the present global constellation—one which offers no clear solution, no "practical" advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us—usually meets with reproach: "Do you mean we should do nothing ? Just sit and wait?" One should gather the courage to answer: "Yes, precisely that!" There are situations when the only truly "practical" thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to "wait and see" by means of a patient, critical analysis.

"I see by your outfit you may be a preacher." "Yes, I am,—of the non-theistic, non-sectarian sort." ..."A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."

...One day, when one of this friends had said some handsome things of his extraordinary talents, Sir Isaac, in an easy and unaffected way, assured him, that for his own part he was sensible, that whatever he had done worth notice, was owing to a patience of thought, rather than an extraordinary sagacity which he was endowed with above other men. I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait ’till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light. And hence we are able to give a very natural account of that unusual kind of horror which he had for all disputes upon these points; a steady unbroken attention was his peculiar felicity, he knew it, and he knew the value of it. In such a situation of mind, controversy must needs be looked upon him as his bane. However, he was at a great distance from being steeped in Philosophy: on the contrary, he could lay aside his thoughts, though engaged in the most intricate researches, when his other affairs required his attendance and, as soon as he had leisure, resume the subject at the point where he left off. This he seems to have done, not so much by any extraordinary strength of memory, as by the force of his inventive faculty, to which every thing opened itself again with ease, if nothing intervened to ruffle him. The readiness of his invention made him not think of putting his memory much to the trial; but this was the offspring of a vigorous intenseness of thought, out of which he was but a common man.

There was certain person who had a passion for the handguard of a short-sword that was said to have been made from a nail-cover taken from the palace of Xianyang; he always had it at his waist and cherished it. How much did this antique, inlaid with a bird-and-flower pattern of precious metals, and evoke the splendor of a thousand years! However, asking about what proof was there that this was indeed a nail-cover from the Xianyang Palace is nonsensical talk. Somehow, if he had not claimed it was a nail-cover from the Xianyang Palace, it would have been a wonderful thing, and it is regrettable that he did. Even if it had been woodshavings from Nagara Bridge or the dried frog of Ide, I am sure that the people of today would find it contemptible and dubious. Tokiwa Tanpoku’s Korean tea bowl had been carefully preserved by the warrior Otaka Gengo; it was handed down to Tanpoku from that very Gengo, and Tanpoku bequeathed it to me. Indeed it had an eminent history of past possession, but what proof was there? Lest it should become like the nail-cover of Xianyang palace, I quickly gave it away.

Over the past several months, everyone in the industry who provides any kind of free CPU resources has been dealing with a massive outbreak of abuse for cryptocurrency mining. The industry has been setting up informal working groups to pool knowledge of mitigations, communicate when our platforms are being leveraged against one another, and cumulatively wasting thousands of hours of engineering time implementing measures to deal with this abuse, and responding as attackers find new ways to circumvent them.

Kant was proud of having discovered in man the faculty for synthetic judgements a priori. But "How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?" How did Kant answer? By saying "By virtue of a faculty" (though unfortunately not in 5 words). But is that an answer? Or rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? "by virtue of a faculty, namely the virtus dormitiva", replies the doctor in Molière. Such replies belong in comedy. It is high time to replace the Kantian question by another question, "Why is belief in such judgements necessary?"

Here's the thing: if nearly all of the time the machine does the right thing, the human "supervisor" who oversees it becomes incapable of spotting its error. The job of "review every machine decision and press the green button if it's correct" inevitably becomes "just press the green button," assuming that the machine is usually right.

Nature is commonly viewed as harmonious and human markets as full of strife, yet the above comparison suggests the opposite. The psychological prominence of unusual phenomena may explain the apparent inversion of the common view. Symbiosis stands out in biology: we have all heard of the unusual relationship between crocodiles and the birds that pluck their parasites, but one hears less about the more common kind of relationship between crocodiles and each of the many animals they eat... Similarly, fraud and criminality stand out in markets. Newspapers report major instances of fraud and embezzlement, but pay little attention to each day’s massive turnover of routinely satisfactory cereal, soap and gasoline in retail trade. Crime is unusual and interesting; trade is common and boring. ...Imagine that predation were as fundamental to markets as to biology. Instead of confronting occasional instances of theft in a background of trade, one would be surrounded by neighbors who had stolen their cars from dealers who had mounted an armed assault on factories in Detroit, which in turn had grabbed their parts and equipment by pillaging job-shops in the surrounding countryside.

Most researchers don’t share their data. If you’ve ever read the words “data is available upon request" in an academic paper, and emailed the authors to request it, the chances that you'll actually receive the data are just 7 percent. The rest of the time, the authors have lost access to their data, changed emails, or are too busy or unwilling.

Question: how do you upgrade servers when you need to pass new information between them? It's a fool's game to try to upgrade both servers at the same time. So you need a communication protocol that is not only backward compatible (a new server can speak the old protocol) but also forward compatible (an old server can speak the new protocol). Protocol Buffers provide that because new additions to the protocol can be ignored by the old server.

But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.

The paradox of ChatGPT is that it is both a step forward beyond graphical user interfaces, because you can ask for anything, not just what’s been built as a feature with a button, but also a step back, because very quickly you have to memorise a bunch of obscure incantations, much like the command lines that GUIs replaced, and remember your ideas for what you wanted to do and how you did it last week

The opposite intellectual sin to wanting to derive everything from fundamental physics is holism which makes too much of the fact that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Sure, but scientific progress is made by finding where the connections are weak enough to allow separate theories.

The talk track I've been using is that LLMs are easy to take to market, but hard to keep in the market long-term. All the hard stuff comes when you move past the demo and get exposure to real users. And that's where you find that all the nice little things you got neatly working fall apart. And you need to prompt differently, do different retrieval, consider fine-tuning, redesign interaction, etc. People will treat this stuff differently from "normal" products, creating unique challenges.

8. A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.…\&19. A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.…\&54. Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.

The first generation of AI-powered products (often called “AI Wrapper” apps, because they “just” are wrapped around an LLM API) were quickly brought to market by small teams of engineers, picking off the low-hanging problems. But today, I’m seeing teams of domain experts wading into the field, hiring a programmer or two to handle the implementation, while the experts themselves provide the prompts, data labeling, and evaluations. For these companies, the coding is commodified but the domain expertise is the differentiator.

To prize every thing according to its real use ought to be the aim of a rational being. There are few things which can much conduce to happiness, and, therefore, few things to be ardently desired. He that looks upon the business and bustle of the world, with the philosophy with which Socrates surveyed the fair at Athens, will turn away at last with his exclamation, 'How many things are here which I do not want'.

I have not trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a University course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as startling.

Contrast [Apple Intelligence] to what OpenAI is trying to accomplish with its GPT models, or Google with Gemini, or Anthropic with Claude: those large language models are trying to incorporate all of the available public knowledge to know everything; it’s a dramatically larger and more difficult problem space, which is why they get stuff wrong. There is also a lot of stuff that they don’t know because that information is locked away — like all of the information on an iPhone.

'We name things & then we can talk about them: can refer to them in talk.'—As if what we did next were given with the mere act of naming. As if there were only one thing called 'talking about a thing'. Whereas in fact we do the most various things with our sentences. Think of exclamations alone, with their completely different functions. Water! Away! Ow! Help! Fine! No! Are you still inclined to call these words 'names of objects'?...

What we need to do is come up with a way to help people understand that there are ways to never be lost again, and to listen to any music you want, and to video chat with someone on the other side of the world, without them having to feel disquieted about it. That it's not OK that you're made to feel weirded out. That it's possible for there to be alternatives. That having to feel someone rooting around in your life is not a price you should have to pay.

The problem of the poet is to unite freedom with precision; to give the pleasure of color, and be not less the most powerful of sculptors. Music seems to you sufficient, or the subtle and delicate scent of lavender; but Dante was free imagination,—all wings,—yet he wrote like Euclid. And mark the equality of Shakespeare to the comic, the tender and sweet, and to the grand & terrible. A little more or less skill in whistling is of no account. See those weary pentameter tales of Dryden and others. Turnpike is one thing and blue sky another. Let the poet, of all men, stop with his inspiration.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.