This column was both painful and exhilarating to write. Painful because it forced me to reconsider long-standing assumptions. And exhilarating for the same reason!
My dad flew WW2 naval aircraft and never lost his sense of wonder that planes could fly at all.
His reaction to a new (to me) feature - pins labeling landmarks on the moving flight map, with popup Wikipedia entries explaining them - would have been tears of joy.
"orcas have been observed developing “cultural ‘fads,’” including carrying dead fish on their heads, and the incidents with the boats may be nothing more than a “fashion trend.”
Here's one for the @b0rk compendium of git oddities.
Today I learned there is a difference between a lightweight tag:
$ git tag v0.20
$ git cat-file -t v0.20
commit
and an annotated tag:
$ git tag -a v0.21 -m "this is an annotated tag"
$ git cat-file -t v0.21
tag
I have only ever used the former, but it's possible for software to care about the difference between the former (the type of the object is commit) and the latter (the type is tag).
I was the perfect reader for this chapter. Without realizing it, I had always needed an explanation that I could wrap my head around and (not that I have done, but could!) reproduce. https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/112337153507129104
I've long thought I probably should stand vs sit in front of the computer, but never made it happen. Now it looks like a sore tailbone will force me to, at least for a while. I have so many questions, and will appreciate any thoughts and advice.
Ideally I'll find a way to keep using my beloved Captain Kirk Chair which is ergonomic for my hands and wrists if not my butt, but maybe I'll need to mount the keyboard on a standing desk.
@judell I will not argue for staying sitting - I wish I had a standing / convertible desk, myself - but, I’ve been using coccyx cut-out cushions for quite a few years, a previous employer provided them for me specifically, e.g. https://www.posturite.co.uk/posturite-coccyx-cut-out-wedge
There's much talk of AI-driven unemployment, not so much about AI-powered employment. Reflecting on a week in which I accomplished a lot more than I could have two years ago, I'm feeling conflicted. It's exhilarating to be empowered by tools that make me a more effective thinker and doer. It's also starting to feel exhausting. As with all forms of augmentation, we need to find balance. Just because we can exercise these new superpowers doesn't mean we always should.
"Processing unstructured data is one of the most directly useful applications of Large Language Models."
I worked hard to syndicate event data from iCalendar feeds, but they were and still are scarce. Much real-world data lives inaccessibly in event posters; that's always felt wrong.
It also feels wrong (to techies) to make feeds from pictures of posters.
I hugely respect both @simon and @baldur. How to square their opposing views? Two things can be true. Some who use LLMs are experiencing a massive boost. Others are fooling themselves about AGI.
Baldur's piece includes "This new era of tech seems to be built on superstition and pseudoscience"
I could not agree more. The superstition around these tools is wild and infuriating - "act as the world's foremost expert on X", "offer it a tip"... made even more infuriating by the fact that some of the superstitions apparently work, but we can never be completely sure which ones!
@judell the first chooses language that brings out anger and aggression in people, implying that they’re con men. I’ve long compared them to rubber duck debugging, which is a nearly identical message, but leaves you with a different attitude.
"What's happening at the data level that allows these very different complex systems with billions of moving parts to exhibit similar behavior? Theres's some sort of generality, but not generality of intelligence, I think it's generality somewhere deep inside the training data that's going into both human brains starting at birth and into large models as they're being trained."
One of many provocative insights in a long but rewarding podcast.
I've been thinking for a long time about tools to help people learn to be better writers. The latest experiment wasn't a resounding success, nor did I really expect that. But it feels promising, and I'm interest to compare notes with fellow travelers. I know wattenberger@bird.makeup is one, who else?
Although we are on opposite sides of the LLM conversation, I agree with all of what @baldur says here. Grim news, powerfully delivered, at a moment when many are wondering: "What should I do?"
"The IRA also spurring a wave of private sector investment in U.S. clean energy manufacturing facilities for solar, wind and electric vehicle parts, the majority of which will be located in Republican congressional districts represented by lawmakers who voted against the bill."