Saturday, March 29, 2025
AGI podcast episodes - early 2025
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Your System Prompt
An LLM's "system prompt" is like a mantra or personal mission statement. Imagine that "system prompt" becomes such common parlance, so that when future self-help authors write about self-talk / motivation / personal codes-of-ethics, they call this "your system prompt".
It is the case that we use the language from cutting-edge science and engineering to describe the non-scientific. For example, new-age "vibrations" or corporate "DNA". A more extreme language shift would be if English mostly dropped the word "word" and just said "token" instead.
Saturday, March 8, 2025
Modernism Re-enactors
The Amish are (sort of) re-enacting a previous era of technological development. It seems to be hard work.
Imagine that the people who idealize the 1950s were to build re-enactment towns where they would have picnics on gingham and hand-wash red Thunderbirds. Or that postmodernism re-enactors would rebuild historical Xerox machines for period-accurate zines in a reconstructed Olympia, Washington.
Two challenges to living in a world that is technological and yet far from the leading edge of technology: 1) finding replacement parts is a challenge, 2) everything is more expensive because of the lack of economies of scale. Both of these seem surmountable in a post-scarcity economy, where dexterous robots can craft one-off replacements parts for old Thunderbirds or Xerox machines.
Friday, February 28, 2025
Ramadan Mubarak
Ramadan Mubarak, y'all!
I have the app "Pillars" on my phone. Which today presented this (to me) bewildering offer to automate my Laylatul Qadr.
Here's all the different religious apps on my phone right now:
- Echo: a (Christian I think?) prayer app.
- Pillars: a Muslim prayer app (with cool features like a compass that points you to the Qibala).
- Hallow: a Catholic prayer app.
- Sefaria: a Jewish holy text reader.
- Quran: a Koran reader, with a mode where Mishray Al-Afasy will sing the verses to you.
- Bible: unfortunately doesn't sing aloud, but has a mode for making inspirational-poster style images with a verse on a stock photo background.
Firmware Liberation Party
At the playground this evening, I saw a mom who looked marginally cooler than me, but she was wearing a t-shirt that said "Austin, Texas". Which is uncool, right? Wearing the band's t-shirt to their show.
As I was considering berating myself for not doing my part to keep Austin weird, I wondered what t-shirt I ought to be wearing. What would be cool? And my brain provided: "firmware". Lower-case, cryptic. As a band name, cool. Like "Floating Points". But somebody might think it's a startup. Uncool. So maybe make it punk? Firmware Liberation Now!
Friday, February 21, 2025
2025 in Preview
I love that Blogspot is still here. Assuming that I find the time / motivation / focus, here's a list of things I'd like to write about in 2025.
- LLMs broadly, but particularly:
- tool use,
- chain-of-thought / inference-time-compute,
- organizational and business structures that include LLM agents,
- Tyler Cowen's "writing for the LLM" idea.
- AGI + society, as in:
- unemployment,
- decoupling of labor and capital,
- meaning and purpose,
- acceleration of robotics,
- what percentage of Americans will be a streamer or influencer in 30 years.
- Optimism
- the era of flash mobs, what was that all about,
- lucid dreams and Linklater,
- children's books,
- bespoke detritus,
- ceramic tiles,
- lifestyle prototyping,
- spaghetti noodles for throples
- water tower passport stamps,
- etc.
Wednesday, March 9, 2022
Diana says it's time to go to sleep.
Diana says: "Are you blogging again?"
As soon as a press this button I am!