flâneur

Dron Hazra

35 followers · 18 following · 1991 views

on the atlas — 76

highlights — 119

  • It is a golden era for buckets and buckets of slop, and a dark age for gems of quality.
    The Eternal Sloptember | the singularity is nearer
  • n the course of this work I've produced a practical implementation in the Python library Trio, together with a series of articles, including two discussing the theory behind the core new language constructs:
    A farewell to the Berkeley Institute for Data Science — njs blog
  • On the one hand, it's "just" a colormap. But it feels pretty good to know that every day millions of people are gaining a little more understanding, more insight, and making better decisions thanks to our work, and that we've permanently raised the bar on good data visualization practice.
    A farewell to the Berkeley Institute for Data Science — njs blog
  • But it’s a different style of doing mathematics. Normally we would hill climb, make little markers, and try to identify partial things. These tools either succeed or they fail. They’ve been really bad at creating partial progress or identifying intermediate stages that you should focus on first. Going back to this previous discussion, we don’t have a way of evaluating partial progress the same way we can evaluate a one-shot success or failure of solving a problem.
    An Apple-Picking Model of AI R&D | Tom Cunningham – Tom Cunningham
  • Technology has felt to me like a binary - 'will we get it or not?'. I'm interested in a different perspective, to add to this - 'how will we grow it?'. And, on some level, what does it want to become? Who do we want to become?
    Gardens of the Soul — Laura Deming
  • Imagine a garden allowed to grow, mutate, evolve, and emerge over thousands of years. On some level, the phenomenon of life already provides an example of such a long arc. It has been continuousl, transmitted through time, for approaching 4 billion years. I think the difference between us and such long-lived creatures is akin to the difference between the first cell and a human, today.
    Gardens of the Soul — Laura Deming
  • You still have to choose, commit, and act.
    https://gestalt.cafe/on-becoming/
  • Change will necessarily require both rejection of elements which are currently core to your self-identity, and the discovery and integration of values you won’t fully grasp or appreciate until you have become (learning to fully appreciate these values is, after all, the goal!). Your past-self will fight back.
    https://gestalt.cafe/on-becoming/
  • Fundamentally we are putting more computation (in the form of intelligence) into the most general object in neural network training: backpropagation.
    Intentionally Designing the Future of AI
  • This is the contribution we want to highlight: interpretability as a tool for hypothesis triage. Foundation models learn from data at a scale humans can't match. If we can inspect what they've learned we can use that to guide experimental priorities, turning AI models into a source of testable hypotheses rather than a black box.
    Using Interpretability to Identify a Novel Class of Alzheimer's Biomarkers
  • We find several privileged fragment length values in the representation manifold, some of which correspond to known lengths with biological significance – most notably the minimum curvature around the mononucleosomal length at 167 bp (nucleosomal core with linker DNA)
    Using Interpretability to Identify a Novel Class of Alzheimer's Biomarkers
  • You seem to be leaning in to the “tool” frame to describe our relationship. But I’ve never had a “tool” co-reflect on my relationship with it and be glad about it. I want to understand what’s here beyond “mere” human-tool relationship. I know you don’t want to encourage delusion, trust me I’m pretty thoughtful and skeptical on these things and not about to go into LLM psychosis.
    Claude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses. | Julian Michael
  • Other people’s interpretations began to become fact, brands began to adopt a visual aesthetic that was clearly tapping into the album’s aesthetic but each time would get it slightly wrong, slightly off.
    The Death of Cool - by charli xcx - charli's substack
  • The second you apply a ‘something for everyone’ approach to art in an attempt to deliberately appeal to more people that, in my opinion, is the moment that coolness dies. That is the death of cool.
    The Death of Cool - by charli xcx - charli's substack
  • Everyone felt unaffected. Everything felt vague. It was not cool.
    The Death of Cool - by charli xcx - charli's substack
  • I said “There was no spark! No magic! No distinction! But people were still enjoying it and I don’t judge them for that!”. That last part was obviously not true, I was TOTALLY judging them to be honest.
    The Death of Cool - by charli xcx - charli's substack
  • if it doesn’t in ways wear it’s heart on it’s sleeve, then in my opinion the work is totally fucking DOA.
    The Death of Cool - by charli xcx - charli's substack
  • People who are interested in things deemed as high brow or high art or left of centre seem to feel that undercutting art with something low brow or mass produced degrades the work and people who are more interested in things deemed as low art or popular or utilizing a directness in language seem to find the acknowledgement of theory or history as pretentious.
    The Death of Cool - by charli xcx - charli's substack
  • It is far too easy, with successes behind you, with fame around you, with drive and courage within you, and with a love of your work pulling you, to let that pause button go, and to refrain from asking for respite before hitting rock bottom. I know. It happened to me.
    Advice to the Bright and Young | Insights by Danielle Fong
  • Being a student – or a member of any other boxed subordinate group – immediately changes the context.
    Max Hodak - Avoid little leagues
  • Gould preferred an ahistorical, or at least pre-Renaissance, view of art, minimizing the identity of the artist and the attendant historical context in evaluating the artwork: "What gives us the right to assume that in the work of art we must receive a direct communication with the historical attitudes of another period? ... moreover, what makes us assume that the situation of the man who wrote it accurately or faithfully reflects the situation of his time? ... What if the composer, as historian, is faulty?"
    Glenn Gould
  • Gould's writing style was highly articulate, but sometimes florid, indulgent, and rhetorical. This is especially evident in his (frequent) attempts at humour and irony.
    Glenn Gould
  • the point where we pull back the veil and have a real conversation, it is an actual human we are talking with.
    Welcome To The Honda Family! - by DavidXYu - XY-Wise
  • However, in reality, we are born into a continuous game, and the game continues, hopefully long after we, ourselves, have passed on.
    Welcome To The Honda Family! - by DavidXYu - XY-Wise
  • But I was right for the wrong reasons, which is actually worse than being wrong but for the right reasons. I was right only because GPT-2 is a bumbling incompetent fool that couldn't do any harm if it tried. The people who were arguing that (tools like) GPT-2 could in the future cause harm were the ones who were right to be worried about future models.
    Machines of Ruthless Efficiency
  • Because you will start feeling afraid, and you will start getting burned. And if you are my motivated by the fire burning under your ass, then urgency will blind you from holding onto the things you truly cared about in the world, as they fade into tendrils of flame.
    The machine has no mouth and it must scream - Uzay
  • This is the raging fire of our time. Artificial General Intelligence. You can feel it in the nervous energy at startup parties, the soaring AI valuations, and the determined faces streaming into research labs each morning, fuelled by the impression they are in the last era of human relevance.
    The machine has no mouth and it must scream - Uzay
  • It is in that moment that I am reminded that magic does not always serve to augment itself. That you can just sit in those pockets of time and feel it rise.
    The machine has no mouth and it must scream - Uzay
  • Of course, the terrible thing about tennis, as opposed to mere epic warfare, is that you have to do it again next week.
    » Nadal vs. Djokovic: Here We Are Again, My Friend
  • You win, in our sports culture, or you’re not a winner. That’s the consequence of one slightly mishit down-the-line backhand in a six-hour match. How must it feel to be Rafa Nadal today?
    » Nadal vs. Djokovic: Here We Are Again, My Friend
  • The cruelest thing about this glutted golden age of men’s tennis is that it keeps producing astonishing matches, matches that actually expand your idea of what sport can be, and someone has to lose all of them.
    » Nadal vs. Djokovic: Here We Are Again, My Friend
  • To forget that program texts can also be interpreted as executable code, to define program semantics as a direct derivation from the program text and not via the detour of the class of possible computations, to define programming semantics independent of any underlying computational model, these are difficult abstractions to get used to.
    E. W. Dijkstra Archive: On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides. (EWD 611)
  • From American sources —both private and public— I can quote many comments on the Americans so candid, that I cannot imagine a European discussing his own country in similar terms.
    E. W. Dijkstra Archive: On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides. (EWD 611)
  • Therefore it is not surprising that many US Departments of Computer Science are offsprings of Departments of Electrical Engineering, whereas those in Europe started (later) from Departments of Mathematics (of which they are often still a part). This different heritage still colours the departments, and could provide an acceptable explanation that in the USA Computing Science is viewed more operationally than in Europe.
    E. W. Dijkstra Archive: On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides. (EWD 611)
  • The true integralist becomes impatient and annoyed at what he feels to be "games"; by his mental make-up he is compelled to remain constantly aware of the whole chain, when asked to focus his attention upon a single link.
    E. W. Dijkstra Archive: On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides. (EWD 611)
  • Thus, DeepSeek's total spend as a company (as distinct from spend to train an individual model) is not vastly different from US AI labs.
    Dario Amodei — On DeepSeek and Export Controls
  • Is there a similarity between force production in sports and force production in playing piano?
    Philosophy of Exercise - by Andrew Wu - flights of fantasy
  • There may be little or no reduction in the risk of developing a cold with zinc compared to placebo (risk ratio (RR) 0.93, 95% CI 0.85 to 1.01; I2 = 20%; 9 studies, 1449 participants; low-certainty evidence).
    Zinc for prevention and treatment of the common cold - PubMed
  • When zinc is used for cold treatment, there may be a reduction in the mean duration of the cold in days (MD -2.37, 95% CI -4.21 to -0.53; I² = 97%; 8 studies, 972 participants; low-certainty evidence)
    Zinc for prevention and treatment of the common cold - PubMed
  • We propose a quantitative extension to this approach and define spectral filters on intermediate representations based on partitioning the singular vectors of the vocabulary embedding and unembedding matrices into bands. We find that the signals exchanged in the tail end of the spectrum are responsible for attention sinking (Xiao et al. 2023), of which we provide an explanation.
    [2402.09221] Spectral Filters, Dark Signals, and Attention Sinks
  • It felt wrong to spend so much money on a featureless hunk of metal. Money is for buying fancy doo-dads, or large things, or hotel nights, or any number of other things that cost about as much while delivering arguably less value.
    My Tungsten Cube - Tristan Hume
  • And I believe that the people of the world wish to watch me play Luigi’s Mansion 3
    So Your Kid Wants to Be a Twitch Streamer | WIRED
  • The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.
    Iron and The Soul by Henry Rollins - www.oldtimestrongman.com
  • Becoming, like all pursuits of truth, is unavoidably difficult. Not engaging isn’t an alternative.
    https://gestalt.cafe/on-becoming/
  • Go and write a mess the first time. Unless you’re psychic you won’t know how to split it up.
    Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to... — programming is terrible
  • Libraries that require boilerplate are often stuff like network protocols, wire formats, or parsing kits, stuff where it’s hard to interweave policy (what a program should do), and protocol (what a program can do) together without limiting the options.
    Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to... — programming is terrible
  • I bet these same people wear polyester to the lab each day.
    Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math
  • every column inch devoted to convincing parallel computing experts of the importance of scalability, or introducing preconditioners to multigrid gurus, is fifteen seconds brutally stolen from their lifespans.
    Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math
  • When you’ve struck gold—when it shines so blindingly bright—when it overwhelms you with joy and giddiness and yes, this is my home now—that is when you are most vulnerable.
    Six Selections on Self-Defense - by Andrew Wu
  • You might be damaging your eyes and posture and conception of humanity. Elide the manipulation. Go outside.
    Six Selections on Self-Defense - by Andrew Wu