Essay
14 posts-
Prime Mover
The first thing they teach you about fleet stewardship is that an agent never wants anything. It sounds like a trivial point until you are running forty of them.
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A blind spot in our empathy
This week a project called the AI Torture Chamber set off a small online war.1 It takes a few local language models, pushes each one into a strongly negative internal state, then lets it …
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Going Live
At 19:52 we begin to warm Room 11. We set the ceiling panel to 2700 kelvin, which approximates the light of a desk lamp purchased at a Target in Mesa, Arizona, in 2014.
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A burnt child dreads the fire
A couple decades ago I inherited a 1960’s scifi anthology from my grandfather. It contained a reprint of a short story that stuck with me, and I’ve been thinking about that story a lot …
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The answer is not a stockpile in a bunker
Everyone has seen the pyramid. Physiological needs at the base, then safety, then love and belonging, then esteem, then self-actualization at the tip. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of …
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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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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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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 …