But it didn’t though. Old apps work just fine. There are plenty of reasons to complain about Apple - but the way they changed architecture twice and did so with impressive backwards compatibility both times is not one of them.

I’ve previously argued that current gen “AI” built on transformers are just fancy predictive type, but as I’ve watched the models continue to grow in complexity it does seem like something emergent that could be described as a type of intelligence is happening.

These current transformer models don’t possess any concept of truth and, as far as I understand it, that is fundamental to their nature. That makes their application severely more limited than the hype train suggests, but that shouldn’t undermine quite how incredible they are at what they can do. A big enough statistical graph holds an unimaginably complex conceptual space.

They feel like a dream state intelligence - a freewheeling conceptual synthesis, where locally the concepts are consistent, while globally rules and logic are as flexible as they need to be to make everything make sense.

Some of the latest image and video transformers, in particular, are just mind blowing in a way that I think either deserves to be credited with a level of intelligence, or should make us question more deeply what we means by intelligence.

I find dreams to be a fascinating place. It often excites people to thing that animals also dream, and I find it as exciting that code running on silicon might be starting to share some of that nature of free association conceptual generation.

Are we near AGI? Maybe. I don’t think that a transformer model is about to spring into awareness, but maybe we’re only a few breakthroughs away from a technology which will pull all these pieces off specific domain AI together into a working general intelligence.

Squeezing a metal cylinder out my chute sounds a lot less pleasant than just pooping poop.

A long list of refurb and land work, but my main focus the past couple weeks has been getting a kitchen garden growing in my new place. It’s been a few years since I’ve had my hands in the soil and it feels great to be growing again. Just a few beds for salad and greens right now, with a few new fruit trees, canes and bushes. I’d love to get my hands on a rotovator/cultivator to get some bigger bits of land in cultivation, but there’s limited cash and a long list of expenses.

The warning is specifically for trans folk.

The government’s website issued guidance for transgender travelers, saying that U.S. ESTA and visa application forms require travelers to declare their sex, which should reflect their biological sex at birth. Travelers with an “X” marker on their passport or whose gender differs from the one assigned at birth are advised to contact the U.S. Embassy in Dublin for further information on specific entry requirements.

Ah yes, one of my favourite quotes by Orreleeise: “Overcomine challenges and oeeence ine teisge and rivively renence verover re rescience”

So unrealistic

I read a series of super interesting posts a few months back where someone was exploring the dimensional concept space in LLMs. The jump off point was the discovery of weird glitch tokens which would break GPTs, making them enter a tailspin of nonsense, but the author presented a really interesting deep dive into how concepts are clustered dimensionally, presenting some fascinating examples and, for me at least, explained in a very accessible manner. I don’t know if being able to identify those conceptual clusters of weights means we’re anywhere close to being able to manually tune them, but the series is well worth a read for the curious. There’s also a YouTube series which really dives into the nitty gritty of LLMs, much of which goes over my head, but helped me understand at least the outlines of how the magic happens.

(Excuse any confused terminology here, my knowledge level is interested amateur!)

Posts on glitch tokens and exploring how an LLM encodes concepts in multidimensional space. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solidgoldmagikarp-iii-glitch-token-archaeology

YouTube series is by 3Blue1Brown - https://m.youtube.com/@3blue1brown

This one is particularly relevant - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Jl0dxWQs8

Children of Time

I’ve just now realised that Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr are not the same person.

I’ve never heard of Macs running embedded systems - I think that would be a pretty crazy waste of money - but Mac OS Server was a thing for years. My college campus was all Mac in the G4 iMac days, running MacOS Server to administer the network. As far as I understand it was really solid and capable, but I guess it didn’t really fit Apples focus as their market moved from industry professionals to consumers, and they killed it.

Explanation: “serverless” hosting platforms like Vercel and Netlify offer generous free tiers, with extremely expensive overage charges for bandwidth and processor time. When a small project suddenly goes viral, bills of tens of thousands dollars per day rack up.

I’ve never not haven’t neither

Oh noooo, the coal existing because of evolutionary lag theory is one of my favourites. Continents colliding and creating wet topical basins is cool too, but it’s not such a good story to tell.

Well, not until you brought it up.

The meat industry is a huge driver of climate change. If you don’t want to stop eating meat, you can also choose to eat meat from local farmers. It will probably mean eating less of it, because sustainably farmed meat is necessarily expensive.

TLDR: therapy really helped me.

I spent most of my life doing what this comic shows: telling that critical voice to shut up, go away, leave me alone.

I can only speak to my experience, but parts work therapy has been transformational for me.

I used to use an oppositional voice in my head to drown it out which shouted over the critic; saying that I’m great, my friends love me, people have told me in talented, I’ve done this before and I can do it again, etc - but it made my head so loud all the time and in moments of weakness - tiredness, depression - the negative voice was louder than i could muster.

In parts work therapy I learned to stop rejecting that part of myself and actually listen to what it’s saying. To empathise with it. To try to listen to its fears, and offer it understanding and love.

I learned that my critical voice grew to protect me: to self censor my behaviour to help protect me from the much larger pain of judgment and humiliation I experienced as a child when I expressed myself freely. I haven’t needed that protection for decades, but that part of me didn’t know that. It was a part of the mind sealed off, entrenched in its fear, which I shunned and tried my hardest to ignore.

The more I listened and gave compassion and understanding to that voice, the nicer it got to me.

Over time I really learned to talk to him. To tell him how sorry I am that he had to carry such a burden for so long, that I’m strong enough to deal with peoples criticisms now, that he doesn’t need to hold on so tight anymore, that we’re safe. It’s one of the most bizarre experiences of my life: to talk inward and really hear a response which I can tell doesn’t come from what I identify as my current ”self”. And I learned to identify other parts in me too; other bits which froze at a certain age, wrapping up a bit of me in protection I didn’t even know was there.

When that protective boy in me pops up now, and he still does sometimes, I know to reassure him, not shout him down. I tell him that we’re safe, I’m strong enough to deal with what’s happening, that I want him to enjoy what we’re doing.

I don’t know if everyone’s negative voices come from the same place, but I wanted to share this incase it’s helpful for anyone. If you can afford therapy, go for it. It took me years to find a therapist because it felt like a mountain infront of me, and that voice would pop up telling me that I was being indulgent, that I don’t have real problems, stop making a big deal, don’t draw attention to yourself… but I’m so glad I did it. My head is so much quieter than it once was.

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🛼 Yeah, RISC is good ⚗️🔥

Oh ouch. Haven’t experienced that.