Quotes

The latest SQLite 3.8.7 alpha version is 50% faster than the 3.7.17 release from 16 months ago.  That is to say, it does 50% more work using the same number of CPU cycles. [...] The 50% faster number above is not about better query plans.  This is 50% faster at the low-level grunt work of moving bits on and off disk and search b-trees.  We have achieved this by incorporating hundreds of micro-optimizations.  Each micro-optimization might improve the performance by as little as 0.05%.  If we get one that improves performance by 0.25%, that is considered a huge win.  Each of these optimizations is unmeasurable on a real-world system (we have to use cachegrind to get repeatable run-times) but if you do enough of them, they add up.

There is superstition about creativity, and for that matter, about thinking in every sense, and it's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something - play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems - there was a chorus of critics to say, but that's not thinking.

Think of a time in the last six months when you tried and failed. If you're having trouble thinking of anything, you are seriously, seriously, seriously not trying ambitious-enough tasks and projects, and playing far, far, far beneath your potential level. This is the most important Umeshism.

Who can live like an idealist living alone, drinking only dew and wind? Those who have only a bowl of barley with bean stew think of rice as Heaven— they bow down in front of rice. ...Do you know that in a shadowed corner of this land a hungry mouth lives asking for a spoonful of rice? Poverty is not by any means merely tattered rags. It's not just the old dress that one puts on and takes off. When life gets swept up in the rough waves, it isn't a pleasure to lazily watch the green mountain in the afternoon. Poverty is the enemy, the poisonous worm that gobbles us up and feasts upon even our natural character, the toxin that rots not just clothes but the flesh, too. It's our human enemy, the devil to drive away, the seeker of pleasure in poverty who hopelessly nurtures worms in the growling belly. ...You say it's all right, it's all right, borrowing Tao Yuan-min's drinking cup, imitating Li Bai's drunken rowdiness. Don't deceive yourself. Don't defile the hungry mouth who wants a bowl of rice and bean soup, trading poverty for a piece of poem. Oh, the hypocrite poet, the poet of lullabies who puts people to sleep!

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world", "ordinary life", "the ordinary course of events"... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

\[2 points\] Learn basic NumPy operations with an AI tutor! Use an AI chatbot \(e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Stanford AI Playground\) to teach yourself how to do basic vector and matrix operations in NumPy \(import numpy as np\). AI tutors have become exceptionally good at creating interactive tutorials, and this year in CS221, we're testing how they can help you learn fundamentals more interactively than traditional static exercises.

Day ends, market closes up or down, reporter looks for good or bad news respectively, and writes that the market was up on news of Intel’s earnings, or down on fears of instability in the Middle East. Suppose we could somehow feed these reporters false information about market closes, but give them all the other news intact. Does anyone believe they would notice the anomaly, and not simply write that stocks were up (or down) on whatever good (or bad) news there was that day? That they would say, hey, wait a minute, how can stocks be up with all this unrest in the Middle East?

Engineering leaders, especially at large companies, are managing a team of a couple hundred people. That team might cost $50 to 100 million in salary a year. So as a CEO, when you hear from your eng leaders that ‘Engineering is an art, and you can’t predict how it’s going to work,’ it’s frustrating. They’re sitting there thinking, ‘They’re telling me this is art, but I’m spending $100 million on this art each year.’ That’s not reassuring.

Another successful defense of society against the culture within itself is to give artists a place by regarding them as the producers of property, thus elevating the value of consuming or owning art. It is notable that very large collections of art...are the work of the very rich or of societies during strongly nationalistic periods... Such museums are not designed to protect the art from people, but to protect the people from art.

The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality!—and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs. You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soy beans!

Today we release OLMo 2 32B, the most capable and largest model in the OLMo 2 family, scaling up the OLMo 2 training recipe used for our 7B and 13B models released in November. It is trained up to 6T tokens and post-trained using Tulu 3.1. OLMo 2 32B is the first fully-open model (all data, code, weights, and details are freely available) to outperform GPT3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o mini on a suite of popular, multi-skill academic benchmarks.

Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late...When philosophy paints its gloomy picture then a form of life has grown old. It cannot be rejuvenated by the gloomy picture, but only understood. Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly.

My advice about using AI is simple: use AI as an assistant, not an expert, and use it judiciously. Some people will object, “but AI can be wrong!” Yes, and so can the internet in general, but no one now recommends avoiding online resources because they can be wrong. They recommend taking it all with a grain of salt and being careful. That’s what you should do with AI help as well.

He knew another place, a wood, And in it, tall as trees, were cliffs; And if he stood on one of these, 'Twould be among the tops of trees, Their upper branches round him wreathing, Their breathing mingled with his breathing. ...He knew a path that wanted walking; He knew a spring that wanted drinking; A thought that wanted further thinking; A love that wanted re-renewing. ...The factory was very fine; He wished it all the modern speed. ...But he said then and still would say, If there should ever come a day When industry seemed like to die Because he left it in the lurch, Or even merely seemed to pine For want of his approval, why, Come get him—they knew where to search.

Providers and deployers of AI systems shall take measures to ensure, to their best extent, a sufficient level of AI literacy of their staff and other persons dealing with the operation and use of AI systems on their behalf, taking into account their technical knowledge, experience, education and training and the context the AI systems are to be used in, and considering the persons or groups of persons on whom the AI systems are to be used.

1. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage. 2. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

Yahoo could also have followed Gmail's lead, and disabled the security-question mechanism unless no logged-in user had accessed the account for five days. This clever trick prevents password "recovery" when there is evidence that somebody who knows the password is actively using the account.

There are many highly respectable motives which may lead men to prosecute research, but three which are much more important than the rest. The first (without which the rest must come to nothing) is intellectual curiosity, desire to know the truth. Then, professional pride, anxiety to be satisfied with one's performance, the shame that overcomes any self-respecting craftsman when his work is unworthy of his talent. Finally, ambition, desire for reputation, and the position, even the power or the money, which it brings. It may be fine to feel, when you have done your work, that you have added to the happiness or alleviated the sufferings of others, but that will not be why you did it.

I don't think people really appreciate how simple ARC-AGI-1 was, and what solving it really means. It was designed as the simplest, most basic assessment of fluid intelligence possible. Failure to pass signifies a near-total inability to adapt or problem-solve in unfamiliar situations. Passing it means your system exhibits non-zero fluid intelligence -- you're finally looking at something that isn't pure memorized skill. But it says rather little about how intelligent your system is, or how close to human intelligence it is.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly: if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’ld jump the life to come.

Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.

OpenAI’s monthly revenue hit $300 million in August, up 1,700 percent since the beginning of 2023, and the company expects about $3.7 billion in annual sales this year, according to financial documents reviewed by The New York Times. [...] The company expects ChatGPT to bring in $2.7 billion in revenue this year, up from $700 million in 2023, with $1 billion coming from other businesses using its technology.

Against the dark screen of night, Vimes had a vision of Ankh-Morpork. It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed... ...and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city.

The single most impactful investment I’ve seen AI teams make isn’t a fancy evaluation dashboard—it’s building a customized interface that lets anyone examine what their AI is actually doing. I emphasize customized because every domain has unique needs that off-the-shelf tools rarely address. When reviewing apartment leasing conversations, you need to see the full chat history and scheduling context. For real-estate queries, you need the property details and source documents right there. Even small UX decisions—like where to place metadata or which filters to expose—can make the difference between a tool people actually use and one they avoid. [...] Teams with thoughtfully designed data viewers iterate 10x faster than those without them. And here’s the thing: These tools can be built in hours using AI-assisted development (like Cursor or Loveable). The investment is minimal compared to the returns.

I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of [AI training]. […] We pay for content when it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people. I think that you’ll probably see a similar dynamic with AI, which my guess is that there are going to be certain partnerships that get made when content is really important and valuable. I’d guess that there are probably a lot of people who have a concern about the feel of it, like you’re saying. But then, when push comes to shove, if they demanded that we don’t use their content, then we just wouldn’t use their content. It’s not like that’s going to change the outcome of this stuff that much.