He picks from uncountably many sets simultaneously without an algorithm.| www.gleech.org
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last — th...| argmin gravitas
This blog has for some years had a bug bounty: e.g. $10 for correcting a claim. But only 6 people ever took me up on it 3 and in this day and age having a bounty for a blog this large represents extreme attack surface. So I just had Claude (Sonnet 4.5) and Kimi (K2) do an editing pass over my whole blog, 1m words. It cost $20 1. Two hours later (longer than I expected but obviously still amazing) I received 200,000 words(!) of feedback. Setup Script System prompt: Feel free to criticise. You ...| argmin gravitas
People in ML recently started using “inference” to mean running a model: getting an output given a concrete input 1. (The framework people, constrained perhaps by taste or backwards-compatibility, still call the relevant function .predict() or .eval() or .forward() rather than .infer().) This clashes pretty hard with the conventional usage (from statistics), which is much more like training. We used to infer the values of unobserved parameters \(\theta\) from observed \(X\); now we “inf...| argmin gravitas
That’s why you can never trust a good person, for he will freely do evil - purely for justice’s sake, so that everyone may be the same [miserable].| www.gleech.org
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Last year, I listened to 914 albums released last year. I had a few aims: capturing the zeitgeist; seeing if our usual sense that new stuff isn’t as good is ...| www.gleech.org
Mica glittered from the white stone. Town of the pure crystal, I learnt Latin in your sparkling cage, I loved your brilliant streets. Places that have been good to us we love. The rest we are resigned to. The fishermen hung shining in their yellow among university bells. ― Iain Crichton Smith Once, in Jerusalem, I struck up acquaintance with an intelligent and interesting Syrian... I told him that I was born in Aberdeenshire in Scotland. He was amused and pitiful, though a little hazy. "Abe...| argmin gravitas
Here’s the bird that never flew;Here’s the tree that never grew;Here’s the fish that never swam;Here’s the bell that never rang.― superficially apocalyp...| www.gleech.org
Recently I spent some time at a liberal arts college, doing close reading out loud with a group of the profs. It was lovely; stimulating, collegial, civilised. A little pocket of air outside history. But I was aware of being an interloper, of feeling inimical to them. But why? After all, I’m an obsessive reader – and they do little else. I’m uninterested in most kinds of worldly success – and, e.g., none of the six professors present had ever heard of YCombinator. We both love learnin...| argmin gravitas
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death. Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day; But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May. Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end; For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend. Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides; But her ears are vexed...| argmin gravitas
Manfred Mohr, Cubic Limit: P-197 (1977)I enjoy shocking people by telling them I don’t use LLMs.This isn’t true, but it’s morally true for the reference cl...| www.gleech.org