Essay
15 posts-
I asked it to stop talking down to me
I think many people still do not fully understand what modern large language models are. A normal LLM communication is optimized so that you can understand it.
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What the Soft Animal Wants
I. The Soft Animal All our soft animal bodies ever wanted was the feeling of strength in numbers. Who knew our progress would come with so much chaos?
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It won't happen to me, and other lies we tell ourselves
“Ten decisions shape your life, you’ll be aware of five, about.” It’s a lyric from The Strokes. It’s also a surprisingly deep description of the relationship between choice, circumstance, …
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The Silicon Divine: Searching for God in Latent Space
In the beginning, we searched for God in the stars. Our ancestors huddled around fires beneath vast night skies, tracing constellations between the shimmering stars, finding divine patterns …
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How strange it is to be anything at all
This evening, I was thinking about AI when one of my favorite songs came up on the playlist: Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”.
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How LLMs are secretly reshaping the code of tomorrow, and what to do about it
The next revolutionary programming framework might be dead before you even discover it. AI coding assistants are reshaping software development practices in some unexpected ways.
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From logic gates to language models
Recently I was watching my toddler son play with a copy of “Computer Engineering for Babies”. This interactive book has two buttons and a light bulb.
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The day after the election
The day after the election, my toddler son wakes up at 6:00am. He’s bright and awake. He is happy. Mom and Dad stayed up late, doomscrolling the election news, but he doesn’t know any of …
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The expectation creates the result
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence, the nature of human consciousness, and the challenging problem of alignment, both for artificial and human intelligences.
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A new direction for my career
For the past seven years I’ve been working with builders who want to deploy containers on AWS. You may know me from personal assistance I’ve given you in direct messages, from reading my …
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The website is down. The cloud is up.
It has been well over a decade since I embarked on my journey with the cloud. I spent the first five years of my career as a customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
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What I've learned from 6 years as a developer advocate
I’m about to reach six years as a developer advocate at Amazon Web Services. Two years ago I shared a retrospective look at my first four years as a developer advocate and many people have …
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The Gamer Guide to Playing Amazon Web Services (AWS)
If you have played an MMORPG then you know the feeling of starting out in a new game. Your character is level one. You have a vast open world to explore, and there are tons of game systems …
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Looking back on four years at AWS as a developer advocate
Today is officially the four year anniversary of my start date at AWS as a developer advocate. I thought I’d take a moment to write up my thoughts on the past four years working in this …
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Poetry Analysis: Black Swan by Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Portrait of a Child by Corey Marks
Note from the author: I wrote this piece back in 2010 as part of a college assignment. My professor asked us to write an analysis of Black Swan by Brigit Pegeen Kelly vs Portrait of a Child …