Lightly edited transcripts of chats I’ve head with ChatGPT Voice, generally while walking the dog or driving.| metastable
Hey there! Hope you’re doing well. Let me know what’s on your mind today. I’m wondering something about Neuroscience. When you play a game like Beat Saber or Guitar Hero, you are taking actions to hit notes, which means authoring levels for those games are heavily based on the music itself. For example, the music has structure like an intro, verse, chorus. Then just when things are repetitive, maybe there’s a bridge or a solo. And these end up being very playable experiences, leveragi...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
What’s on your mind today? Let’s talk about three brain-like characteristics of artificial neural networks. First, there’s the fact that it’s a network of connections with extreme fan-out; in the brain one neuron can connect to ten thousand other neurons. Then all of these connections can have strengths and biases. Finally, there are activations: when the input exceeds some threshold, the output can change discreetly, it can jump. The fact that it’s a network of connections is a big...| metastable
With its new GPT-4 Vision model, ChatGPT can now answer questions about images. Below I asked ChatGPT to explain ten memes. I’ve found explaining humor is a good way to judge how well an AI understands the input. It did amazingly well. It nailed the first eight memes and got partial credit on the last two. I’m really impressed. Something about an AI which can understand images seems more human than one which can only read text.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
While Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can produce stunning images, I recently started playing around with a quite a different style of AI Art. Mine looks a bit more, um, primitive. Here’s an AI Art image I call City Scene: I created the above masterpiece using GPT-4 Code Interpreter and the Pillow library. Code Interpreter is a ChatGPT interface to a Python notebook. A notebook in this context is a running Python interpreter with multiple blocks of code. So instead of just spitting out a bl...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
You’re sitting with your friends in a coveted booth at your favorite dive bar. The band starts into their third hour while intermittently pool table sounds pierce through the excited chatter of a few hundred other patrons, their glasses and bottles clinking. Your in-ear monitor is presenting you with all of these sounds, but their volume has been carefully adjusted, as if by a sound engineer, so that you can focus on the resonate tones of your friend’s voices around the table. You can cle...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Twenty years ago today William Gibson gave a brilliant and inspiring speech to the Directors Guild of America on their first ever Digital Day about the future of media. I search for it every few years, googling half-remembered snippets like meryl streep dog head. After his blog was taken down, it’s been hard to find, so I’m reposting it below without permission until a new canonical version appears. His core insight: No matter who you are, nor how pure your artistic intentions, nor what y...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Hermione carried a charmed beaded bag that contained everything from books and clothes to a three-room tent. Video game designers often mimic J. K. Rowling’s approach by allowing players to carry an unrealistically large number of items. Players prefer this because an ample inventory bolsters two popular game mechanics: collecting and crafting. Crafting is a way to create new items from the ones you collected. Early games like King’s Quest and Ultima had forms of crafting, but it was 2011...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Podcast host Tim Ferris advocates an exercise he calls “fear-setting” — seriously considering the worst-case outcome. What would you do if the worst case actually happened? Is it as bad as you’d imagined? The phrase “existential risk” is trending in pop culture because of the dangers of AI. But even without AI, humans already have many existential risks: nuclear war, climate change, natural and engineered pathogens, political polarization, fascism, territorial disputes, terrorism,...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Alika lives on Lagos mainland, a city with twice the population of New York. Her brothers and sisters are fast asleep, but she’s restless. She’s curled on her side, facing the wall, whispering questions softly into her phone. The phone’s AI dutifully responds in her native language, patiently explaining concepts and ideas, telling stories of people she hasn’t met and places she hasn’t seen. She attends regular school and enjoys socializing with the other children during the day, and...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
ENIAC, the first programmable general-purpose electronic computer, completed in 1945, could execute four hundred floating-point operations per second: 400 FLOPS. Nearly 80 years later, in 2022, the fastest supercomputer can perform over one quintillion operations per second: 1.1 exaFLOPS. It took us only 80 years to progress from 400 FLOPS to 1,100,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS. Once you have enough atoms, you start doing chemistry, once you have enough molecules, you start doing biology, and onc...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
It was three in the morning and Edward was lying on his back with his head dangling off the wrong end of his mattress. He was holding his phone upside down in front of his face so that it was correct from his point of view. Two months earlier, he had been laid off from his job as a customer service representative, and he hadn’t slept well since. He should have been hunting for jobs right now, but his attention span was not up to the challenge.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Atom’s head thwacked into something hard which generated a percussive metallic rattle. He squinted in pain and rubbed the bump which was forming at the base of his skull. He was sweaty. The patina of cold pizza coated the inside of his mouth. Peering out from under his desk he saw darkness. Quickly his eyes adjusted. Even in the middle of the night the lab was illuminated by hundreds of indicator LEDs. They peeked out from to humming equipment scattered throughout the space. The red, blue, ...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
The Cell The world’s first artificial superintelligence blinked into existence in a pristine and uniformly lit subterranean datacenter in the former Bingham Canyon mine in Utah at exactly 4:15am local time on July 17th during the broiling summer of 2025. Three minutes later at 4:18am it blinked out of existence as the datacenter’s cavernous halls were violently flooded with cascading sheets of searing hot flames. The supporting rock quickly melted then the entire cave imploded creating se...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
I faced down three attackers in my living room last night. I used a knife on the first one, grabbed his pistol and fired on the second, then stole his shotgun to take out the third. A message appeared in front of me indicating I had completed the level. This encounter was happening inside the virtual reality game Superhot, which I was playing with my Quest 2 head-mounted display. I was able to string together this chain of impressive maneuvers because I was immersed in a world where time wor...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Ray Kurzweil is an accomplished inventor and entrepreneur. He’s had an amazingly productive career with multiple notable inventions and ventures in deeply technical fields. He started young: in 1963 at the age of 15 he wrote his first computer program. In Malcom Gladwell’s recent book Outliers he writes at great length about how unusual it was for Bill Gates to have access to a computer in the late 1960s, and how formative it was for him. So for Kurzweil to be writing software in 1963 was...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
The site PlayPhrase is wild. Enter a phrase and instantly see a supercut with hundreds of movie clips where that exact phrase is spoken. To try it out I created three videos, one for each of these three phrases: “slow down”, “go faster” and “I’m so happy”. The generated videos are here:| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Moore’s Law predicts that the number of transistors we can pack into an integrated circuit will double every two years. This has held true since integrated circuits first appeared in 1958 and is expected to continue until around 2020 when physics will prohibit making conventional circuits any smaller. But the party won’t end there. Ray Kurzweil explains that integrated circuits are not the first “information technology” to follow this consistent doubling of capability. Instead they ar...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
A few weeks ago we had our driveway repaved. Our house is eighteen years old and it was well past time. The company did a meticulous job, but last week while doing yard work I spotted a piece of our old driveway under a holly tree near the garage. The chunk was triangular, about one foot across on the longest side and four inches thick. It was lightly colored compared to the new tar-black driveway shining in the afternoon sun.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Two thousand companies and three hundred billion dollars of market cap. These are the staggering outputs of startup incubator Y Combinator since it launched in 2005. Sam Alman was president of Y Combinator and later became the CEO of OpenAI. With one foot in startups and the other in AI, Altman has an interesting vantage point from which to make predictions. In his essay, Moore’s Law for Everything, Altman speculates that AIs will drastically accelerate the worsening wealth inequality in th...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
The Story On Sunday October 4, 2020 I came upon a reddit post in the subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions with the title How does this user post so many large, deep posts so rapidly? The body of that post and even the user account were subsequently deleted, which is curious, but the now deleted content said something like “How is it possible that this user is posting long replies to /r/AskReddit questions within seconds?” The first thing I did was check the posting history, the posts were appe...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
While the pandemic raged I would often relax into a comfy position and lose track of time watching one video after another on TikTok. The portal into other people’s homes and minds was entrancing, without the commitment of long-form TV. And TikTok is a mystery box, like a slot machine, you never know what will come up next. When you first sign up TikTok does not assign you a bunch of celebrities or popular accounts to follow; they don’t explicitly ask about your interests. Instead, it jus...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Phineas Gage was a railroad construction foreman in the mid-1800s who miraculously survived a blasting accident that drove an iron rod straight through his skull. Although he could still walk and speak, the brain damage changed him from someone known to be quiet and respectful into a person who was gross, profane, coarse, and vulgar. He was dismissed from his job and his friends said that “he was no longer Gage”.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
After years of struggling to lose weight, I’ve lost 30 pounds this year. My number one takeaway has been realizing I need to be mindful of what I eat all day, from eyes open to going to bed. For years I’d been giving up single things. No soda or juice. No desserts. No chips. No fries. Yet incredibly, whatever I did it didn’t make a dent, at least not for long. Which seemed totally impossible.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
So far this year I’ve lost 17 pounds towards my goal of losing 20 pounds in the year 2020. While it’s too early to declare victory, here are two visual aids I’ve been using to keep my mindset on track. The first is very practical and accurate, the second is a bit weird. The first visual is a car’s fuel gauge. If the car runs out of gas, you are totally screwed. You might be stuck on the side of a mountain road, at night, in a snowstorm. You might get hit by a truck just because you ra...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
The wonderful YouTuber 3Blue1Brown creates lavishly illustrated videos about Math, check out his recent one on exponentials and the spread of the coronavirus. In this self-administered interview he speaks eloquently on how to get kids interested in math, or anything else: “Let’s say you really like coffee, and someone comes to you and says I hate coffee, but you like it a lot and you’re like this snob and you really want to turn them on to it. The way to do it is not to try and find th...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
I was supposed to run a five-mile race this morning, but it snowed overnight and it was starting to get icy. I didn’t want to run with my bad knee and risk a fall. My wife is much braver than I and she ran the whole thing and did quite well. The race was located at a country club, they kindly let several hundred runners tromp around their indoor space as well as use the grounds.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Pay attention to something in the world, like your breath. As you do that cultivate an open awareness of everything that’s happening in the present moment. This includes your breath but also sounds, the sensations of your body, and any thoughts or feelings in your mind. As you discover a thought has arisen, calmly note that it happened and return your attention to your breath. When you are focusing on your breath and no thoughts are arising, that’s good. When you are focusing on your brea...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Most people sense that if you text while driving then your driving will be compromised. You might do fine if nothing bad happens, but if a deer or a child ran into the road while you are deep into a text, your reaction time would be measurably poorer than if you were intently looking directly and uninterruptedly at the road ahead with your hands at ten and two. Mindfulness is like driving without texting, you don’t necessarily stay 100% focused on the present moment non-stop, but when you f...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
I’ve been writing this blog for 10 years, and writing code for more than 30 years. Some people have asked me how did you “find your voice”? Actually no one has asked me that. However I have heard that everyone has 100,000 words of mediocre writing in them. So write often, fast-forward to the good stuff, here are some tips for writing, prose or code: Physical Space Find a quiet room in your house with a fan or white noise machine. Or a crowded place with lots of people and just let them ...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
There are two concepts that come up frequently in science and engineering, they are precision and accuracy. Precision is roughly how detailed something is, how much information there is. While accuracy is how correct that information is, how well it corresponds to reality. If you ask me what time it is, and I say “it’s ten forty-two in the morning” that’s a pretty precise answer. If in fact it’s 11:25 a.m., though, it was not a very accurate answer. If instead I answered “it’s e...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Weight Watchers has the notion of “zero point foods” which are things like skinless chicken breast or soy yogurt. What they are saying is “eat these foods as much as you want”. This seems counter-intuitive: these foods might be healthy but they still have calories. If you are watching your weight how can you advocate eating anything as much as you want? It must be that Weight Watchers believes very few people will binge eat these foods. Some people do actually like and even prefer hea...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Jeff Bezos is currently the richest man in the world, clocking in with a net worth over $90 billion. Bill Gates trails close behind. How can we comprehend wealth at that scale? Imagine a millionaire. That is easier to imagine. Now realize Bezos has 90,000 times more wealth than that millionaire. Already you’ve lost me. 90,000? That’s hard to visualize. The appropriate way to think about wealth is using a log scale. I’m proposing one called The Richer Scale and it goes like this:| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Sam Harris’s book Waking Up argues convincingly and eloquently that the potential benefits of meditation are legion. Harris has deep experience with meditation and a non-trivial amount of experience with psychoactive drugs. Both have shaped his view that altered states of awareness are achievable and desirable. He strongly recommends meditation as the preferred route to get you there cautioning that drugs very will might land you in a world of hurt.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
I started meditating just over a year ago and I would like to share my experience. On an average day I meditate for 10-15 minutes however I skip days fairly often. Sometimes I practice “mindfulness” while doing normal activities like driving. Even with this modest level of effort, however, the results I’ve seen massively exceeded my expectations. I feel like my brain has been re-wired in a very positive way.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Something has always bugged me about voting: in essentially all big elections the outcome is not decided by a single vote. Therefore if you had stayed home and slept in instead of voting, or if you had gotten lost on the way to the polls, or if you had drawn smiley faces on the ballot instead of picking a name, the outcome of the election would have been precisely exactly the same. In this sense, your vote didn’t matter in the slightest.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Below are two depictions of Kobe Bryant. On the left is how he appeared in his first game NBA Live 97, on the right is how he looked 20 years later in NBA 2K16: Modern games produce amazing stills but watching them in action you realize there is still room for improvement. Certainly the interactivity is pretty simplistic. What you are physically doing as a player.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
10,000 years ago two scruffy fragrant people drifted away from their campfires to gaze up at the stars. The first person had no idea that the second person lived about 12,000 miles away; neither one of them would travel more than 25 miles from where they were born during their lifetime. On opposites sides of the world it was as if they were both walking on a mirror which showed the reflection of another person.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
The Game Developers Conference was held last March in San Francisco. I went with a mission: to sniff out some stock tips. I dug up only two things seemed hot: Head Mounted Displays and Mobile Ad Networks. For Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) the big player was a startup called Oculus VR, although Sony was also also demonstrating an HMD in their booth. Of course Sony also makes computers, phones, tablets, speakers, stereos, TVs, cameras, can openers and major motion pictures, so I didn’t feel th...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Yiren Lu wrote a long piece in the New York Times Magazine about the contrast between the young engineers in Silicon Valley today and those of yesteryear. She’s a good writer; the article has a breezy tone and interesting anecdotes, I enjoyed it. However her thesis is not a ray of sunshine. Lu says the bright young minds flocking to the valley today seek jobs writing “sexting apps”. They shun the legendary Silicon Valley companies which make networking hardware or computer chips in favo...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Suppose you were to sneak into a datacenter run by Google or Facebook or Twitter and take a pickaxe to a random server. What would happen? Firstly, you would be arrested. But what data would be lost? In all likelihood nothing. You might have rent RAM chips and hard drive platters asunder, but the bits that were previously inside the machine would be safe and sound. How is this possible? Careful and deliberate redundancy. At large internet companies the exact same information lives in several ...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
I will kick things up a notch on this blog with a salacious admission from my personal life: I love the Katy Perry song Firework. Or I should say I used to love it. From the moment I first heard the song I would crank it up on the radio. Eventually I half-mastered the lyrics and would sing what I knew at the top of my lungs. I got my 6 year old daughter hooked on the YouTube video, really so I could hear the song some more.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
One morning my 3½ year old son was still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes when he asked to play a game. He meant a board game, probably something we had been playing the night before like Chutes and Ladders. I tried to steer him back to the normal morning routine, “Okay how about we play breakfast?”. Instead of objecting he adopted a “hey wait a minute” look and asked quizzically “What is a game?” I dodged the question and threw some waffles into the toaster.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
There’s a Philosophy professor at Oxford who maintains an online shrine dedicated to a single question. Nick Bostrom asks “Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?”. The centerpiece is his technical paper from the Philosophical Quarterly (2003) with that question as the title, but then he also has several “popularizations” which explain his argument more simply. He has links to New York Times articles and videos and all manor of commentary about this intriguing question.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
If you vote in the midterm election on November 2nd it is virtually certain that your vote will not change the outcome. Researchers studied 16,000 Congressional elections over a 100 year period and determined that only once was the winner decided by a single vote, which is 0.006% of the time. Whether you vote or not the same politician will be smiling at you from the morning paper. So in that sense your vote does not matter. And yet, the winner of the election will in fact be determined by vo...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
The Need for Speed racing game franchise has been around for 16 years, sold over 100 million copies and generated more than $2.7B in revenue. People love to drive fast and they love to race, and it’s much safer to do this in a video game than in the carpool lane. To make a racing game you need detailed models of the road and the nearby scenery. Some games use imaginary roads and locations created from scratch by designers. Other games painstakingly and expensively recreate real roads and re...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Intel 8088 In 1981 the original IBM PC was released. The CPU which powered the PC was an Intel 8088 running at 4.77MHz. That means the internal clock ticked 4.77 million times each second. Over the next 24 years the clock speeds of PCs rose consistently and rapidly. For PC enthusiasts the old speeds are a trip down memory lane: 12MHz, 25MHz, 33MHz, 66MHz, 90MHz, 133MHz, 300MHz, 600MHz, 1.2GHz, 2.4GHz.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Inception is an ambitious and brilliant film. But it starts badly. A very stiff and cliched setup motivates our hero to “do just one last job”. Please. Thankfully the final 2/3 is so spectacular and so well executed it completely erases your memory of the first 1/3. The director Christopher Nolan is ridiculously ambitious. A dream within a dream would have been something. But like nesting dolls he keeps packing one timeline inside another and pulls it off with tremendous visual style.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Intelligent Design is a clever modern reformulation of Creationism, stripped of all overt references to God or Religion in order to sanitize it for inclusion in public school curricula. The Intelligent Design argument is that the diversity and complexity of life on this planet simply looks designed. They assert that chance could not possibly have created the human eye, for example, or the complex ecosystem of the rainforest. Just look at it, they say, there must be an intelligent designer beh...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
On November 7, 2009 the House narrowly passed its health care bill. On December 24th the Senate passed their own version. Today several months later a “reconciliation” between the two is in progress, the final version is expected “soon”. It is a wonder of the modern age that you can pull up the full text of either bill with a single click. Each is a relatively small file, much smaller than a YouTube video. Here is the 1990 page House bill or the 2074 page Senate bill.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
The blog Singularity Hub has a post about robots in factories. The post includes 5 pretty cool videos (plus one commercial, which is fictional). I thought the best video was this one: There’s something so mundane about the task here. In a lot of ways it’s hard to believe it’s not just easier to have people do the stacking. While the robot is super fast, it’s only doing a single pancake at a time. I imagine a person would scoop up a few and plop them down already stacked together.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
On January 27th Apple announced their new iPad tablet. It’s a nearly featureless rectangular slab with a thick black frame surrounding a 9.7" screen. It has a single button on the front. The back is shiny metal with the Apple logo. It looks exactly like a big iPhone. Interaction is through the “Multi-Touch” screen, same as with an iPhone. It was designed to fill the gap in their product line between an iPhone and a MacBook. That is, it’s meant to be more computer-like and capable than...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
A statistic you won’t see on Box Office Mojo is how many CPU cycles were spent making a given film. An exact count would be impossible, but no one gives even a rough estimate! I saw Avatar in 3D the other week and I would guess it is the most computationally expensive movie ever. The complexity of the scenes and the sheer number of screen minutes which are 100% virtual is stunning.| Metastable Homepage on metastable
My previous post referenced the short film Powers of Ten which zooms out to galatic scales then down to sub-atomic particles. While the pace was quick it was glacial compared to how fast we can jump around with our thoughts. We can consider an atom, a ham sandwich, and a galaxy within two seconds. How can we move around so effortlessly? Abstraction is a tool of thought. Abstraction is the process of ignoring some details in order to focus on others. We do this all the time. It is our main wea...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
I started taking the web seriously in the summer of 1994. Before that I had used the web, but I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. That summer I had a job with Unisys in Kendall Square, Cambridge. They put me in a cold machine room and told me to learn about the web. They didn’t even have an internet connection! I had to use my roommate’s university dial-up account. I downloaded whole copies of websites so I would have something to demo. I learned about browsers and HTML and web serv...| Metastable Homepage on metastable
Humans are locked into a certain scale in both space and time.| metastable
