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OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend
Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI’s founders brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might live…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
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River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres
Introducing River, a Postgres-based job queue designed for resilience and correctness through strong transactional guarantees.
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Microsoft is eating the world
If OpenAI was a public company, it's stock would have been down about 38% today in a shocking turn of events.
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Knuth Airgaps and Knuth Buffers
Knuth knows how to maintain information hygeine.
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OpenAI's misalignment and Microsoft's gain
The end of a dramatic weekend in tech is that OpenAI has split and Microsoft is partnered with one and has hired the other; this is the ultimate failure case of what should have been a for-profit c…
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The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month
One thing that often strikes me when sitting in on client interviews is how many candidates lack an historical perspective on software development. In a profession of “perpetual beginnersR…
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The Death Star and the Final Trench Run (2017)
Today, @vickschutz and I learned a detail about “Star Wars” (1977); it’s totally right there but we never grasped it. — Todd Vaziri (...
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Interactive Common Lisp Development
Common Lisp programming is often presented as “interactive”. In most languages, modifications to your program are applied by recompiling it and restarting it. In contrast, Common Lisp lets…
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A very subtle bug (2010)
6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts of a system. In my own experience…
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RSS can be used to distribute all sorts of information
Thoughts for Nov 19, 2023
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Setenv Is Not Thread Safe and C Doesn't Want to Fix It
You can't safely use the C setenv() or unsetenv() functions in a program that uses threads. Those functions modify global state, and can cause other threads calling getenv() to crash. This also causes crashes in other languages that use those C standard library functions, such as Go's os.Setenv ( Go issue ) and Rust's…
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Practical Tips for Finetuning LLMs Using LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)
Things I Learned From Hundreds of Experiments
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Bootstrapping self awareness in GPT-4: Towards recursive self inquiry
Or, Look Ma – I Made GPT-4 Self Aware!
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I cancelled my Replit subscription
I cancelled my annual Replit Hacker plan and I'll let it lapse at the end of December of 2023. Replit is a popular and growing multi lan...
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datetime.utcnow() is now deprecated
I was going through the release notes of the new Python 3.12 version the other day, and one item caught my attention in the deprecations section:datetime.datetime’s utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp()…
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Revenge bedtime procrastination
Revenge bedtime procrastination occurs when people delay going to sleep in order to feel in control of their life and schedule. This phenomenon is particularly associated with people who feel that they have little time for themselves during the day, for example due to their work schedule, so they delay sleep until…
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Lindenmayer systems
A Lindemayer system or LSystem for short consists of an alphabet of symbols that can be used to make strings, a collection of production that expand each symbol into some larger string of symbols, an initial “axiom” string from which to begin construction, and a mechanism for translating the generated strings into…
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Persuasion through status rather than argument
Intelligent individuals are better at understanding the reputational consequences of their beliefs
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A Timeline of the OpenAI Board
Yesterday, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were fired from the Board of Directors of OpenAI.
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Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)
I’m beginning to think that the Windows PC that I built in 2015 is ready for retirement (though if Joe Biden can be president at 78, maybe this […]
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A software epiphany
Even though I don't respect podcasts as an information delivery system, I recently listened to a podcast that felt like having an epiphany.
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Lockheed is now tracking phones and walkie-talkies from space
Space-based phone location-tracking firm HawkEye 360 announced its partnership with U.S. weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin this morning. The UAE military is allegedly a "strong" customer.
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I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
“People say, It’s just glorified autocomplete . . . Now, let’s analyze that. Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re…
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