Quotes

I did find one area where LLMs absolutely excel, and I’d never want to be without them: AIs can find your syntax error 100x faster than you can. They’ve been a useful tool in multiple areas, to my surprise. But this is the one space where they’ve been an honestly huge help: I know I’ve made a mistake somewhere and I just can’t track it down. I can spend ten minutes staring at my files and pulling my hair out, or get an answer back in thirty seconds. There are whole categories of coding problems that look like this, and LLMs are damn good at nearly all of them. [...]

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think”, surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, "Do you have any controls?" Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, "Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?" The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, "Yes, that's what I had in mind." Then the visitor's fist really came down as he thundered, "Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death." God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, "Which half?"

...Deep Blue’s creators know its quantitative superiority over other chess machines intimately, but lack the chess understanding to share Kasparov’s deep appreciation of the difference in the quality of its play. I think this dichotomy will show up increasingly in coming years. Engineers who know the mechanism of advanced robots most intimately will be the last to admit they have real minds. From the inside, robots will indisputably be machines, acting according to mechanical principles, however elaborately layered. Only on the outside, where they can be appreciated as a whole, will the impression of intelligence emerge. A human brain, too, does not exhibit the intelligence under a neurobiologist’s microscope that it does participating in a lively conversation.

There has been a tendency to think that everything Xenophon said must be true, because he had not the wits to think of anything untrue. This is a very invalid line of argument. A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy.

Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

A year ago, Claude struggled to generate bash commands without escaping issues. It worked for seconds or minutes at a time. We saw early signs that it may become broadly useful for coding one day. Fast forward to today. In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed. Every single line was written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5.

You know, it’s the old glass box at the— At the gas station, Where you’re using those little things Trying to pick up the prize, And you can’t find it. It’s— And it’s all these arms are going down in there, And so you keep dropping it And picking it up again & moving it, But— Some of you are probably too young to remember those— Those glass boxes, But— But they used to have them At all the gas stations When I was a kid.

We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms. Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.

9. When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true. 10. People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.

If you own the tracks between San Francisco and Los Angeles, you likely have some kind of monopolistic pricing power, because there can only be so many tracks laid between place A and place B. In the case of GPU data centers, there is much less pricing power. GPU computing is increasingly turning into a commodity, metered per hour. Unlike the CPU cloud, which became an oligopoly, new entrants building dedicated AI clouds continue to flood the market. Without a monopoly or oligopoly, high fixed cost + low marginal cost businesses almost always see prices competed down to marginal cost (e.g., airlines).

To me, a successful eval meets the following criteria. Say, we currently have system A, and we might tweak it to get a system B: - If A works significantly better than B according to a skilled human judge, the eval should give A a significantly higher score than B. - If A and B have similar performance, their eval scores should be similar. Whenever a pair of systems A and B contradicts these criteria, that is a sign the eval is in “error” and we should tweak it to make it rank A and B correctly.

If this [MicroQuickJS] had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (small, fast, ANSI-C). I appreciate certain ideas in Lua, and people love it, but I was never able to like Lua, because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax and semantics without good reasons, for my taste. This creates friction for newcomers. I love friction when it opens new useful ideas and abstractions that are worth it, if you learn SmallTalk or FORTH and for some time you are lost, it's part of how the languages are different. But I think for Lua this is not true enough: it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons.

I decided therefore to use the word, 'programming'. I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying—I thought, let’s kill 2 birds with one stone. Let’s take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it’s impossible to use the word, 'dynamic', in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It’s impossible. Thus, I thought 'dynamic programming' was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to.

Ants are a curious race; One crossing with hurried tread The body of one of their dead Isn’t given a moment’s arrest -- Seems not even impressed. But he no doubt reports to any With whom he crosses antennae, And they no doubt report To the higher up at court. Then word goes forth in Formic: "Death’s come to Jerry McCormic, Our selfless forager Jerry. Will the special Janizary Whose office it is to bury The dead of the commissary Go bring him home to his people. Lay him in state on a sepal. Wrap him for shroud in a petal. Embalm him with ichor of nettle. This is the word of your Queen."

Whenever I tackled the impossible or the miraculous, I remembered the magician Rene Lavand, who had only one arm. Poet and extraordinary card manipulator, he baffled fellow illusionists by concluding his brilliant demonstrations with, "What I just showed you can also be done with two hands!"

Ian's Acid 3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It's quite explicitly about making browser developers jump - Ian specifically sought out tests that were broken in WebKit, Opera, and Gecko, perhaps out of a twisted attempt at fairness. But the Acid tests shouldn't be fair to browsers, they should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform, not about how far any given browser has to stretch to get there.

In 1736 I lost one of my Sons, a fine Boy of 4 Years old, by the Smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by Inoculation. This I mention for the Sake of Parents who omit that Operation on the Supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a Child died under it; my Example showing that the Regret may be the same either way, and that therefore the safer should be chosen.

Previously, when malware developers wanted to go and monetize their exploits, they would do exactly one thing: encrypt every file on a person's computer and request a ransome to decrypt the files. In the future I think this will change. LLMs allow attackers to instead process every file on the victim's computer, and tailor a blackmail letter specifically towards that person. One person may be having an affair on their spouse. Another may have lied on their resume. A third may have cheated on an exam at school. It is unlikely that any one person has done any of these specific things, but it is very likely that there exists something that is blackmailable for every person. Malware + LLMs, given access to a person's computer, can find that and monetize it.

The future will not be like the past. The comfortable Victorian and Georgian world complete with grand country houses, a globe-spanning British empire, and lords and commoners each knowing their place, was swept away by the events that began in the summer of 1914 (and that with Britain on the “winning” side of both world wars.) So too, our comfortable “American century” of conspicuous consumer consumption, global tourism, and ever-increasing stock and home prices may be gone forever.

In the Christian squadron, 5 stout & lofty ships were guided by skillful pilots, and manned with the veterans of Italy and Greece, long practiced in the arts and perils of the sea. Their weight was directed to sink or scatter the weak obstacles that impeded their passage; their artillery swept the waters; their liquid fire was poured on the heads of their adversaries, who, with the design of boarding, presumed to approach them; and the winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

I am a huge fan of Richard Feyman’s famous quote: “What I cannot create, I do not understand” I think it’s brilliant, and it remains true across many fields (if you’re willing to be a little creative with the definition of ‘create’). It is to this principle that I believe I owe everything I’m truly good at. Some will tell you should avoid reinventing the wheel, but they’re wrong: you should build your own wheel, because it’ll teach you more about how they work than reading a thousand books on them ever will.

In January, Facebook distributes a policy update stating that moderators should take into account recent romantic upheaval when evaluating posts that express hatred toward a gender. “I hate all men” has always violated the policy. But “I just broke up with my boyfriend, and I hate all men” no longer does.

What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzling Questions are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entred the famous Nations of the dead, and slept with Princes and Counsellours, might admit a wide resolution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above Antiquarism. Not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the Provinciall Guardians, or tutellary Observators. Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their Reliques, they had not so grosly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves, a fruitlesse continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as Emblemes of mortall vanities; Antidotes against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories which thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their Names, were never dampt with the necessity of oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the attempts of their vain-glories, who acting early, and before the probable Meridian of time, have by this time found great accomplishment of their designes, whereby the ancient Heroes have already out-lasted their Monuments, and Mechanicall preservations. But in this latter Scene of time we cannot expect such Mummies unto our memories, when ambition may fear the Prophecy of Elias, and Charles the fifth can never hope to live within two Methusela's of Hector.

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus...scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.

4chan's /b/ forum, which gets called things like the Mos Eisley spaceport of the web when people are being polite, and the asshole of the internet when they aren't, is energetic, anarchic, barely moderated, crude, irresponsible, vindictive if crossed, peculiarly creative, and full of hackers. It inspires loyalty in its core users, and makes everyone else nervous.

…How feather-frail, think, is the track of the vole On new snow! How wide is the world! How fleeting and thin Its mark of identity, breath In a minuscule issue of whiteness In air that is brighter than steel! The vole pauses, one paw Uplifted in whiteness of moonlight.…Again the owl calls, and with some sadness you wonder If at last, when the air-scything shadow descends And needles claw-clamp through gut, heart and brain, Will ecstasy melting with terror create the last little cry? Is God’s love but the last and most mysterious word for death?Has the thought ever struck you to rise and go forth—yes, lost In the whiteness—to never look upward, or back, only on, And no sound but the snow-crunch, and breath Gone crisp like the crumpling of paper? Listen! Could that be the creak of a wing-joint gigantic in distance?No, no—just a tree, far off, when ice inward bites. No, no, don’t look back—oh, I beg you!I beg you not to look back, in God’s name.

Today, safe flight inside clouds is possible using gyroscopic instruments that report the airplane's orientation without being misled by centrifugal effects. But the pilot's spatial intuition is still active, and often contradicts the instruments. Pilots are explicitly, emphatically trained to trust the instruments and ignore intuition—precisely the opposite of the Star Wars advice—and those who fail to do so often perish.

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk: then time returns to the shell. ...We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street: it is time they knew! It is time the stone made an effort to flower, time unrest had a beating heart. It is time it were time. It is time.

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.

I used to think Twitter would never catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. Now I realize I was exactly wrong. Twitter will catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. It’s blogging dumbed down for the masses, and if there’s one surefire way to build something popular, it’s to take something else that is already popular and simplify.

As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second or third generation only indirectly inspired by ideas coming from 'reality', it is beset with very grave dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing, more and more purely l’art pour l’art. This need not be bad, if the field is surrounded by correlated subjects, which still have closer empirical connections, or if the discipline is under the influence of men with an exceptionally well-developed taste. But there is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the line of least resistance, that the stream, so far from its source, will separate into a multitude of insignificant branches, and that the discipline will become a disorganized mass of details and complexities. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much 'abstract' inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration.

No, imbeciles! No! Fools and cretins, a book will not make a plate of soup; a novel is not a pair of boots; a sonnet is not a syringe; a drama is not a railway—those forms of civilization which have caused humanity to march on the road to progress. By all the bowels of all the popes, past, present and future, no! Ten thousand times no! You cannot make a hat out of a metonymy, and you cannot make a simile in the form of a bedroom slipper, and you cannot use an antithesis as an umbrella...An ode is, I have a feeling, too light a garment for the winter.

Simply put, free and open-source software is just the scientific model applied to programming: free sharing of work open collaboration; open publication; peer review; recognition of the best work, with priority given to the first to do a meaningful new piece of work; and so forth. As a programmer, it is the best arena in which to work. There are no secrets; the work must stand on its own.

I don’t have a “mission” for this blog, but if I did, it would be to slightly increase the space in which people are calm and respectful and care about getting the facts right. I think we need more of this, and I’m worried that society is devolving into “trench warfare” where facts are just tools to be used when convenient for your political coalition, and everyone assumes everyone is distorting everything, all the time.

The ideas which led to the Analytical Engine occurred in a manner wholly independent of any that were connected with the Difference Engine. These ideas are indeed, in their own intrinsic nature, independent of the latter engine and might equally have occurred had it never existed nor even been thought of at all.