Basically, this book claims – and I’m inclined to agree – that spreading knowledge about specific techniques is really, really hard. What makes a particular thing work is often a series of unusual tricks, the result of trial and error, that never makes it into the ‘methods’ of a journal.

Kinda amazing, from a James Scott perspective, that tacit knowledge is such a big deal in science, the ultimate high modernist activity.

Barriers to Bioweapons

Berkeley EECS professor Jitendra Malik starts this lecture with the phylogeny of intelligence: hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution, fifty thousands years of human intelligence and language. Just maybe language shouldn't be considered the foundation of intelligence?

In this post I'll give a basic technical overview of large language models like ChatGPT, and talk about what they're are useful for today.

What are they?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are basically giant equations that take a sequence of words and predict the most likely next word. The equation is very, very large - gigabytes large - and creating this equation (aka training the model on existing text) can cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and repeatedly applying it to generate text can produce surprisingly sophisticated output. Som of the details get complicated, but that's all they're doing: looking at text and predicting what text should come next, based on what was in the training data.

LLMs vs chatbots, or, why chatbots are designed and not born

A lot of the attention has focused on chatbots like ChatGPT. Out of the box, LLMs are good at completing partial text like "The largest city in Europe is " but not as good at chatting, or following instructions like "Please write a Python script to concatenate video files using ffmpeg." It tends to imitate its training data too literally, which can lead to exchanges like this, in which the chatbot starts imitating forum post boilerplate:

Input: Tell me something about owls.

Output 7B LLama: Asked by kimberly at 12:54 PM on May. 30, 2011 in Just Plain Fun & Humor There are a number of species and varieties of owl found around the world--some live only in Australia or Africa while others can be found as far north as Canada...

Making a base LLM better at following instructions or chatting is known as instruction tuning. A team at Stanford describes how they created Alpaca, an instruction-tuned chatbot based on one of Meta's LLaMa models by feeding it 52,000 Q&A examples they generated with OpenAI's davinci (Q: "Explain the principle of Occam's razor", A: "Occam's razor is a principle in philosophy that states ...".) This training makes the chatbot much more likely to give appropriate-seeming answers.

Alpaca is lacking refinement compared to ChatGPT - it's more likely to provide inaccurate and/or biased (racist/sexist etc) information. OpenAI used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to increase "alignment" - basically, they paid people in Kenya $2/hr to rate responses according to set criteria, and used that to improve response quality. (The word "alignment" requires a lot of unpacking - Googling "AI alignment"can get you some pretty weird places - but it broadly means making software do things you want instead of things you don't want.) This is an important part of the process, and is expensive in terms of people's time. OpenAI can make this less expensive in the future by using feedback from users, but then has to consider whether users' ratings are consistent with the brand image OpenAI wants to have (that is, whether OpenAI's users are aligned with OpenAI.)

I'm going into so much detail here to make the point that chatbots are designed, they don't just emerge from the training data. The people building them have a lot of explicit goals for how it should answer and how it shouldn't. Choices here will make the chatbot better at some things and worse at others - better design and better implementation of the design will be a major area of competition for the foreseeable future.

Will AI increase or decrease centralization?

As I mentioned, training an LLM can be very expensive. But unlike something like Google search that depends on petabytes of data and a tremendously powerful software stack to keep it up to date and query it efficiently, LLMs are relatively simple, just a long equation. And the equation is short enough that you can run LLMs on your local machine, even if it's a smartphone. In the parlance of LLMs we're saying that inference (using a model) is incredibly cheap compared to training (creating a model.)

The idea of running LLMs locally is tremendously appealing. If you're building a business, why pay for API access and risk having the price go up and wreck your economics? Why pay someone to maintain a rack of servers, employ software engineers and baristas, when you can just download a bunch of model weights and run it locally? Why watch usage quotas when you can develop on your own machine and just pay for electricity?

The fact that LLMs are relatively small and cheap to run, combined with the importance of design and fine-tuning, means that there are two scenarios for how they impact centralization (and a whole spectrum in between):

1. The magic of LLMs is in fine-tuning. A thousand flowers bloom as startups design custom LLMs for every use case under the sun, and the tech industry becomes less centralized.

2. LLMs with up-to-date information from the Internet built-in turns out to be a critical competitive advantage. Doing this means using Googlebot or similar to constantly index the web, and then applying model fine-tuning - this would be so incredibly expensive that only a tech giant could do it, but the benefits are so large it will probably happen. Everyone ends up paying an LLM tax to Google (or Microsoft.) Centralization stays the same or increases.

Open-source LLMs that any developer can build on (also known as LLMs' Stable Diffusion moment) are going to unleash a lot of new stuff, some good, some bad. The bad scenarios can get panic-inducing pretty quick. In the meantime though, those of us trying to get quality results out of a local model (presumably with innocent motives) face challenges that I'll discuss in the next section.

What are they useful for?

This is the big open question. There are many, many, many examples of people doing fun things with LLMs or coaxing chatbots into weirder and weirder behavior.

However it's less clear what the big, world-changing products will be. Programming looks to be one - Microsoft continues to invest in GitHub Copilot, and even more convincingly there are plenty of detailed personal walkthroughs of how LLMs can improve workflows for engineers. The success of LLMs in programming is sort of overdetermined: not only are programmers the best-placed to integrate new tools into their workflows, code obeys very strict rules that make it easy for LLMs to predict / write it.

Microsoft has also announced LLM-powered features to roll out throughout Office, with Google quick on their heels, as well as big players in other spaces like Adobe. LLMs as a sometimes-used feature, rather than a product, are an easy sell.

There are also a thousand and one startups offering AI chatbots trained on your company's internal data and documents, like Dashworks. In my limited experience here, results here are often fine and sometimes magical, especially when the LLM is able to synthesize an answer from multiple data sources. It will also be wrong sometimes, and when it’s wrong in non-obvious ways and someone doesn’t have time to check the answer they’re getting back, that can be dangerous. This is usually mitigated by linking back the original sources, but it would be better to give users a sense for how confident the LLM is in its answer, and I haven’t seen that yet.

The basic principle so far seems to be that anything that keeps a human in the loop tends to work well. The Copilot model for programming does this, image generation AIs like Stable Diffusion do this. That means it’s not doing a ton of work independently, and its output still needs editing by an expert, but it can be a timesaver.

However, there are also startups like Tome claiming very high accuracy rates in very specific domains, without having a human in the loop. (In this case, the LLM is supposed to review certain types of contracts instead of a lawyer - so a human will look at the results, but if they’re not a lawyer, they won’t know if the LLM missed something.) It might be that if you focus on a specific enough problem and do a good enough job at fine-tuning, the human in the loop isn’t necessary.

One prediction I'll make is a lot more services feeding your life history back to you. I tried feeding ChatGPT emails I exchanged with friends over 20 years ago and asking questions about them. ChatGPT's summaries of my correspondence, written in its generic style, sometimes hit like a ton of bricks: "It appears Lukas and A were communicating about a variety of topics. They were discussing a mutual friend, B, who had attempted to commit suicide and had been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder ..."

After summer comes winter

Given all this, "thin wrapper around ChatGPT" will probably not be a winning business model long-term. I'm not convinced that most of the startups rapidly launching LLM-based apps have figured out how to build robust workflows out of unreliable LLMs. Solutions will likely involve deep workflow integration and/or a lot of fine-tuning. The trough of disillusionment will be deep.

Elsewhere

I recorded a podcast with some friends covering some of the same territory covered here.

Some caveats

This post anthropomorphizes LLMs by implying they have intentions. This is an unfortunate but makes the language easier to follow.

While the general principles here should stay valid for a while, the details about what is and isn't currently possibly will change in probably less than a day as nerds worldwide crank on a caffeine-fueled soft takeoff.

Chroma is FOSS with a hosted model on the way. Works with LangChain and llama-index.

Is it even a concept?

"It’s not clear if the polycrisis is an objective description of the material state of the world or a subjective description of psychological states, a kind of vibe."

Snowpack and reservoirs
Reservoirs only

“Remember, mindfulness is a relational activity. It’s how we are with what we’re experiencing that’s most important. So if you’re feeling the warmth of a tea cup, it’s simply that.” - Sharon Salzberg

“It doesn’t matter to what you don’t cling. Which means that we don’t have to be waiting to develop a certain experience in order not to cling to it. Might was well not cling to whatever’s happening now, whatever it is, because that’s the essence of the practice. It’s not about the experience.” - Joseph Goldstein

Favorite part of this talk is when they didn’t edit out the walking meditation, so there’s just twenty minutes or so of silence.

Having trouble getting headphone cueing working with a Scarlet 4i4 + Traktor? Open Focusrite Control, for Line Outputs 3-4 choose Custom Mix -> DAW -> Playback 3-4.

For one stranded in the middle of the lake,
in the flood of great danger—birth—
overwhelmed with aging & death,
 Kappa, I will tell you the island.

Having nothing, free
of clinging:
 That is the island,
 there is no other.

Kappa's question

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?"

Andrea del Sarto, by Robert Browning

Why computational complexity means longtermism isn't action-guiding

Someone makes a brilliant point in the comments: "Loved this post - reminds me a lot of intractability critiques of central economic planning, except now applied to consequentialism writ large."

from this thread on philosophical critiques of EA/longtermism

(8) We have been growing fast but linearly since the 1930s. Current innovations allow us to keep on adding knowledge at a good pace, but since our stock of knowledge is high, the relative changes feel small compared to the electricity revolution that too place a century ago.

— Thomas PHILIPPON (@ThomasPHI2) April 18, 2022

If this is right, innovation hasn't slowed, it just looks like it.

Use a better, more futuristic computer: a 68k Mac emulated in your browser.

Progress is a myth. KPT Bryce 4ever

"The Buddha’s teaching is aimed at liberation from suffering – the way out is through complete abandonment of clinging. Basic remedy is to pause – this is just an organic system operating, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s not personal. Don’t follow the message of mind consciousness, follow the direct experience of the body."

• Ajahn Sucitto with one of my very favorite concise summaries of the dharma.

The Khanda, me and Existence

• Near-term iin climate science usually refers to the next 1-10 (sometimes 1-20) years.
• Over the course of a single decade normal variation can overwhelm anthropogenic impacts.
• What impacts have we seen so far?
  • From 1901-2020 global average temp rose 1° C
  • Longer, more intensive heat waves (heat wave in France in 2003 killed >15,000 people) - partially due to changes in jet stream
  • More natural disasters and extreme conditions - wildfires, hurricanes, droughts
  • Impact on water supply
  • Potential impact on power generation
  • Changes in animal populations / ecosystems, which can impact food supply
• 5-20 years out
  • Massive increases in migration
  • Political instability
  • A more uncertain world
• What can we do?
  • Better ways to get information out during extreme events
  • Reality-based information provided to people
  • Market-based solutions - change incentives - eg insurance
  • Mitigation - France had another heat wave in 2019 that hit ~115F / 46C, but <1,500 people died this time - better education, planning for vulnerable populations ...

Nat Geo, NY Times, NOAA

simon freund's super minimal site

"The Hypermedia Driven Application (HDA) architecture is a new/old approach to building web applications. It combines the simplicity & flexibility of traditional Multi-Page Applications (MPAs) with the better user experience of Single-Page Applications (SPAs)."

I. Title
II. Whatever you would put in your tweet thread about the post (previous civilizations called this an introduction)
III. Poast

Probable Futures

"We started asking climate scientists practical questions about what climate change would look and feel like in different places around the world. We found the answers to be useful, intuitive, and profound. We created Probable Futures to share them with you."

The wet bulb temperature is the temperature of a bulb of mercury inside a damp cloth, in the shade. Basically, what's the temperature taking evaporative cooling into account? When the wet bulb temperature is too high, that's dangerous for human beings, since we depend on evaporative cooling - we're essentially wet bulbs. If the wet bulb temperature and the dry bulb temperature are the same, you're not getting any benefit from evaporative cooling.

Wet bulb takes a minute to grok because it's not about *heat,* per se. It's about the absorptive capacity of air. A wet bulb temperature in the mid-80s F can, and does, kill humans. Heat waves in the EU & Russia in 2003 and 2010 killed over a hundred thousand people at ~ 82 F.

— (((Matthew Lewis))) has some Shoup for you (@mateosfo) June 29, 2021

• Less than 1% of rapes and attempted rapes end in a felony conviction
• Less than a third of rapes are reported to the police
• Between 2 and 8% of reported sexual assaults are false (does not include rapes that were not reported)

Washington Post article from 2018

Saving this because literally every victim going public leads to "we have the courts for a reason" and "but what about false rape claims".

"Manichaeism ... heresy ..."

"The belt moves on regardless of the needs of men. It gets at a man's heart. The whole rhythm of his life is chained to the machine. It's called productivity, Stephen. I've seen it. All day long the ambulances here are never still."

"No ... no! I am nothing pure. Nothing pure ... my race is mixed, my sex is mixed. I am woman and man! Light with darkness! Mixed! Mixed ... I am nothing special, nothing pure. I am mud and flame!"

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, a manual and an example in one.

TextBundle

The TextBundle file format aims to provide a more seamless user experience when exchanging plain text files, like Markdown or Fountain, between sandboxed applications.

Sandboxing is required for all apps available on the Mac and iOS app store, in order to grant users a high level of data security. Sandboxed apps are only permitted access to files explicitly provided by the user - for example Markdown text files. When working with different Markdown applications, sandboxing can cause inconveniences for the user.

An example: Markdown files may contain references to external images. When sending such a file from a Markdown editor to a previewer, users will have to explicitly permit access to every single image file.

This is where TextBundle comes in. TextBundle brings convenience back - by bundling the Markdown text and all referenced images into a single file. Supporting applications can just exchange TextBundles without asking for additional permissions. Beyond being a simple container, TextBundle includes a standard to transfer additional information - to open up new possibilites for future integration.

Hmmmm

Recognize that in an uncertain contest against Nature your instinct is wrong. Bigger potential rewards are not correlated with more risk. If you are pursuing a truly uncertain endeavor, like a startup, there is no way of knowing if the larger or smaller possible outcome is more likely to succeed, so the only rational course is to pursue the biggest possible outcome you can imagine.

Uncertain decision-making and the maxi-max criterion

Of course there are other reasons you might want to not pursue "the biggest possible outcome you can imagine" ... maybe you want to pursue the best outcome you can imagine, not just the biggest; maybe you have other constraints, like resources or your desired lifestyle.

Still an important insight - more ambitious goals are not necessarily correlated with more risk.

0data

AFAICT these are webapps that work with localStorage or can sync with your cloud storage service.

Probability that I already posted this link ~51%.

Asser's Life of King Alfred
"... he was so harassed by daily and nightly sadness that he complained and made moan to the Lord, and to all who were admitted to his familiarity and affection, that Almighty God had made him ignorant of divine wisdom and of the liberal arts ..."

In Asser's account Alfred is obsessed with learning, despite (?) not learning to read until after being crowned. Interesting given Alfred's position in English history, and with this essay on oral vs written culture banging around my head.

Fighting Fantasy project
I would have loved these back in my D&D days. Choose Your Own Adventure + dice combat.

West Wind, 8
The young, tall English poet–soon to die, soon to sail on his small boat into the blue haze and then the storm and then under the gray waves’ spinning threshold–went over to Pisa to meet a friend; met him; spent with him a sunny afternoon. I love this poet, which means nothing here or there, but is like a garden in my heart. So my love is a gift to myself. And I think of him, on that July afternoon in Pisa, while his friend Hunt told him stories pithy and humorous, of their friends in England, so that he began to laugh, so that his tall, lean body shook, and his long legs couldn’t hold him, and he had to lean up against the building, seized with laughter, abundant and unstoppable; and so he leaned in the wild sun, against the stones of the building, with the tears flying from his eyes–full of foolishness, howling, hanging on to the stones, crawling with laughter, clasping his own body as it began to fly apart in the nonsense, the sweetness, the intelligence, the bright happiness falling, like tiny gold flowers, like the sunlight itself, the lilt of Hunt’s voice, on this simple afternoon, with a friend, in Pisa.

• Mary Oliver

The manga

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

A Left-Handed Commencement Address by Ursula K. LeGuin

Gone

• Cities founded in the fire-prone frontier by anti-government types that didn't want to be told how to build (proper infrastructure, firebreaks etc.)
• Real estate has been the main wealth generator for a while, "Selling out to a developer was the only retirement plan most farmers knew."
• "What was once sparse is now densely packed with pine, fir, cedar, and manzanita. A forest that supported 64 trees an acre in pre-settlement times now boasted 160 trees an acre ... 'I don't think we could have managed the forests any worse.'"
• "as Wilson and his staff studied the fires more closely, he could see that their oddly linear pattern of ignition clusters corresponded to major electrical power lines."
• “These weren’t outlier events,” Wilson said. “These same spots had a history of fire. They had burned before and were destined to burn again. If you charted it out, we weren’t having far more wildfires than in the past. But the wildfires we were experiencing were far more deadly and destructive, and that had to do with mismanaging the forest and building communities in the wildland-urban interface. The state’s population was exploding in the very areas most susceptible to wildfires.”
• Forestry management and fire prevention - prescribed burns, reducing fuel load - curtailed in favor of military-style firefighting.
• "To justify its high costs, [Cal Fire] had to figure out a way to make itself essential throughout the year. This was how it evolved into a 24/7 provider of emergency services to the sprawling mountain communities ... instead of trying to slow down the suburbanization of forestlands, Wilson said, the department served the growth — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in funding."
• "In their filings, each attorney traced the historic blazes to a culture of mismanagement, corruption, and cover-up that had taken hold inside PG&E decades before. A pattern of venality, they argued, began in the company’s early years and became more recalcitrant in the 1980s and 1990s, when PG&E, with the connivance of the California Public Utilities Commission, its watchdog, made a decision to place profits and bonuses to top executives — and dividends to shareholders — over safety."
• "It was fiction that the California Public Utilities Commission exercised any watchdog role over PG&E, he said. “They don’t have the resources, they don’t have the trained personnel or mindset, to monitor and audit PG&E’s compliance with safety regulations. PG&E can literally get away with murder.”"

Awesome reading list with special focus on techno as black music.

See also this talk from DeForrest Brown Jr.

"It’s amazing how great computer products can be when they don’t need to deal with corporate bullshit, don’t have to promote a brand or to sell its users."

Maybe look into this. And hey yeah, there is an Android app.

EVERYONE HAS ONCE READ, for it comes up many times in literature, of that pilot in the reign of Tiberius, who, as he was sailing along in the Aegean on a quiet evening, heard a loud voice announcing that "Great Pan was dead." This engaging myth was interpreted in two contradictory ways.

Part of a larger work that locates creation myths with a change about 6,500 years ago when the position of the sun during the equinoxes stopped lining up with the Milky Way.

The rest of the site ... lotta wild stuff there.