I've been a vocal skeptic of quantum computing economic opportunities. I poo-pooed a recent poll showing that 25% of business executives felt that quantum computing would have a significant positive impact. But I read today, Satya hyped quantum in a quarterly phone call. Satya's no fool and I don't think …

I'm setting programming aside for the next year. I'll continue to mentor HS students in programming and I'll continue writing short programs and scripts to help me deal with large amounts of data (particularly, in my case, my 80,000+ photographs), but I won't be embarking on a third version …

A while back I wrote about how we needed a word for citing statements that had been sourced from an LLM but which are low-stakes enough not to have been fact-checked.

I like the word "sprently," for this. It's already an English word that seems more or less interchangeable with …

I found myself writing "s/apparently/according to Claude 3.7 Sonnet/".

There needs to be a word.

(That string is programmer code for "whenever I write 'apparently' switch it to 'according to a possibly-hallucinating LLM.')

The essay in which I found myself writing that substitution doesn't use "apparently," except …

OpenAI claims ChatGPT 04-mini-high is its best model for coding. Screw that. The thing lies about its ability to correct its hallucinating behavior after I gave it every chance to clarify its shortcoming. If I were a junior, much less "vibe" coder, I would likely believe its assurances about doing …

If there are two equivalently capable paradigms, the one with the shallower learning curve will enjoy a positive feedback loop of learning resources and tooling. The result will be more people learning the arguably less elegant paradigm.

(This is my kinder version of “worse is better.”)

ML Architecture and papers

Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet Really important article, seemingly a breakthough in peering inside LLMs. A nice adjunct to this article is the less dense An Intuitive Explanation of Sparse Autoencoders for Mechanistic Interpretability of LLMs. My big worry about this is …

“Hundreds of Beavers” restored my faith in the comedic art of cinema.

It's a silent b&w movie that combines a few live-action actors with Terry Gilliam-style animation to tell the story of Our Hero learning to survive and become a competent-enough trapper to win the hand of The Fur-Trader's …

LLMs are bland. Two new papers, Art or Artifice? Large Language Models and the False Promise of Creativity and A Robot Walks into a Bar: Can Language Models Serve as Creativity Support Tools for Comedy? An Evaluation of LLMs’ Humour Alignment with Comedians ] reinforces the findings of a more rigorous …