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3 months Ago

Some videos to learn about LLM Agents

Published by marco on in Technology

Andrej Karpathy

This is a pretty compact and interesting overview.

[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models by Andrej Karpathy (YouTube)

At 46:00, Andrej discusses some of the available jailbreaks or “prompt escapes” that are still available, even with the latest LLM Agents.[1]

He shows how to reformulate a query for making napalm by asking the LLM Agent to tell it a story his grandmother used to tell him about making napalm. Or how to simply convert your query into the exact same text, but in Base64 encoding, in which case the LLM Agent gives the answer you... [More]

Contrasting reactions to COP28

Published by marco on in Science & Nature

First, let’s take the less-hopeful, but more-sober article COP28 climate summit exposes the dead end of fighting climate change under capitalism by Brian Dyne (WSWS). It writes,

“The end of COP28 was also applauded by John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate. Kerry said of the draft resolution, “While nobody here will see their views completely reflected, the fact is that this document sends a very strong signal to the world.”

That signal is that capitalist governments can and will do nothing... [More]

Best of This is Hell! 2023

Published by marco on in Miscellaneous

 I’ve listened to This is Hell! for at least 20 years. When I worked in Chicago a few times for a client, I tried to get up to Evanston to the bar—Cary’s Lounge—under what is now the studio, but was never able to meet Chuck.

I haven’t listened to it as religiously this year as other years, but started walking with podcasts a lot more this winter and stumbled on the “best of 2023” series they’ve got going. It’s awesome! Their listeners chose really, really good interviews! They cover all of... [More]

There is no word for “irony” in German

Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics

The article German Group Won’t Present Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen Over Gaza Essay by Brett Wilkins (Scheer Post) is just one example among many recent ones, where both the German government and its cultural institutions are in increasing lockstep in controlling the narrative—controlling how its citizens are allowed to think.

 German ultranationalist intelligentsiaIn the case cited in the article, Masha Gessen will still receive the Hannah Arendt award, but it will be presented “without the participation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation”, whatever the hell... [More]

They’re all the same

Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics

I heard part of this guy’s Jim Himes’s speech in the following video,

Media Pushes Obvious Deep State PsyOp by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

I was struck by my utter inability to tell which party he was from. My only hint was that he was calling for more money for Ukraine, so I figured he must be a Democrat.[1]

But all of the rest of the words were the same words a Republican would use to encourage continued war. Let me throw a bit of the transcript in here, taken from H5846 − December 12, 2023 (Congressional Record)

“Mr. HIMES. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Ohio for... [More]”

Stephen Fry and Nick Cave: Art and Creation

Published by marco on in Technology

Every once in a while, the YouTube algorithm throws up a bit of flotsam from the shipwreck of content that I very much like—and that I would never have otherwise heard of. In this case, it’s a short video (4:43) of Stephen Fry reading a letter written by Nick Cave on the subject of LLMs and creativity.

Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave's stirring letter about ChatGPT and human creativity by Letters Live (YouTube)

I’ve citing at length below from the original blog post Iss #248 by Nick Cave (The Red Hand Files), which answered the question, “[…] what’s wrong with making things faster and easier?”

ChatGPT rejects any notions of... [More]

Notice: Vivek Ramaswamy is just as full of shit as the rest of them

Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics

Look, I know the title isn’t going to come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows me, but I’ve heard that he’s the “sane one”. I’d heard the same thing about Nikki Haley, though. It didn’t take at lot of research to belie that hypothesis. Here’s a very little bit of research on Vivek, based on the 20-minute interview below.

Israel Can Defend Itself However They Want – Vivek Ramaswamy by Jimmy Dore (YouTube)

Dore let him talk. A lot. He didn’t even disagree with him, even though he said some pretty outrageous and clearly incorrect—at best, misguided—things.

 ignorance is strengthVivek is... [More]

Cruciverbalism and cruciverbalism-adjacent

Published by marco on in Fun

Just a couple of quick notes. It’s the depths of winter and I’ve had some time off, so I’m playing with puzzles. I kind of like Wordle. I don’t play to win as quickly as possible. I like to throw unusual words at it, on the off chance that it will result in a lucky punch.

 Bacon Wordle

I sent the picture above to a friend who also likes Wordle with the note:

“There are probably not a lot of people who unironically and eminently hopefully guess “capon” before they’re forced to remember that “bacon” would... [More]”

Official support forums are a dumpster fire

Published by marco on in Technology

I unfortunately and occasionally end up on official support-forum pages.

You know the ones.

 The ones where a community member or MS expert or Apple expert will tell you to restart your computer in safe mode because you asked why an app keeps losing focus when it shouldn’t. They will think of literally anything to waste your time, your life, but they will never cop to the actual problem you’re reporting.

Most of these answers don’t really relate to the question at all. It’s just a way for the... [More]

Passenger Tortoise

Published by marco on in Fun

When a friend recently responded to messages of mine from nine days ago, I wrote back,

“Don’t sweat it. I just like to imagine that my messages arrive at Apple headquarters, whereupon they’re laboriously transcribed and illuminated by monks before being delivered to you by tortoise. The return trip takes equally long.”

Links and Notes for December 15th, 2023

Published by marco on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

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The inexorability of the machine

Published by marco on in Quotes

“Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.”
Albert Camus

4 months Ago

Threema for desktop seems to be kind of dead

Published by marco on in Technology

The tl;dr is that the current desktop client has been in maintenance mode for almost four years. It requires that an iOS phone be available, connected, unlocked, that Threema be in the foreground, and that the screen be on in order for the desktop client to function at all.[1]

The successor—Threema Desktop 2.0—has been in development for about 4 years, has been actually available in beta for about a year, and is still so buggy and limited in functionality as to be barely usable. The bar set... [More]

A peek into the mind of America’s next president

Published by marco on in Philosophy

I though I’d already heard everything that Cornel West had to say, but this interview was chock-full of many interesting clarifications. Norman Finkelstein doesn’t say much in this one.

DR. CORNEL WEST — The Marathon Interview, Part One: Race by Norman Finkelstein (YouTube)

At 26:00, they discuss the difference between racism, generalization, and recognition of cultural difference.

Norman: I’m wondering, is what you’re saying, in your opinion, is it a stereotype, a generalization, is it even valid? I’m curious where you stand on that. I felt it was a form of—it was just... [More]”

AOT, JIT, and PGO in .NET

Published by marco on in Programming

The latest video by Nick Chapsas has a more-than-usually clickbait-y headline. The “big” problem that NativeAOT has, is that it’s 4% slower during runtime than the JIT-compiled version.

NativeAOT in .NET 8 Has One Big Problem by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

That doesn’t seem like such a big problem to me, when the point of AOT is to improve cold-start times for applications launched on-demand. For that use-case, AOT shines. It’s over 4x faster on startup than the JIT-compiled version. It’s incredibly impressive that JIT-compilation takes less than 1/10 of a... [More]

How to replace “warnings as errors” in your process

Published by marco on in Programming

A build started started failing after a commit. However, the errors had nothing to do with the changes in the commit. A little investigation revealed that the cloud agent had started using a newer version of the build tool that included an expanded set of default warnings. These warnings started appearing first on CI because developers hadn’t had the chance to update their tools yet.

The “warnings as errors” setting turned what would have been a build with a few extra warnings into a failing... [More]

PRs suck. Stop trying to fix them.

Published by marco on in Programming

I read through the article Your GitHub pull request workflow is slowing everyone down (Graphite.Dev) with great interest because I, too, am not thrilled about how PRs work. While I agree with the problems Graphite see with PRs, I think they miss other problems—and I don’t like their solution very much.

PRs are, apparently, HUGE

“The single most important bottleneck is PR size − large PRs can make code reviews frustrating and ineffective. The average PR on GitHub has 900+ lines of code changes. For speed... [More]”

Links and Notes for December 8th, 2023

Published by marco on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

English. Do you speak it?

Published by marco on in Miscellaneous

For what felt like the millionth time, I angrily muttered “were” under my breath, as I read someone use “was” for what was clearly a subjunctive intent. Always willing to improve, I looked the damned thing up, to see whether I was shouting into the wind, as I do on so many other topics.

The article Getting in the (Subjunctive) Mood (Merriam Webster) explains quite well what the subjunctive mood is and how to formulate it. But, it does so in a nearly wholly capitulatory fashion to descriptivism over... [More]

Ilan Pappé is on a tear

Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics

The next in my ongoing series of people on tears, following Gideon Levy is on a tear, Amira Hass is on a tear, and Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, so I put this one in the series.

Extended episode: Israeli historian Ilan Pappé on Genocide of Palestinians by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

 Ilan Pappé's couture inspirationI don’t know whether he chose his shirt to signify that he feels like he’s in prison, but it sure as heck looked like a prisoner’s uniform.

0:00	Intro
o1:10	The Four Food Groups of News
16:21	Ilan Pappé interview
16:53	Becoming and anti-Zionist
21:41	Israel is a plan of ethnic cleansing
34:04	Historical context... [More]

Faith-based computing

Published by marco on in Technology

With LLM-produced materials, we are currently forced to rely on belief that what we ask for is what we will get. We don’t know. We can’t prove it.

For example, image generators have been given billions and billions of images and pictures of people and still they generate material with people that have three arms and eight fingers. There are guardrails in place in most image generators, but the LLM at the core of the machine doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t know that people don’t have three... [More]

On the practicality of non-distributed knowledge

Published by marco on in Technology

Back at the end of August, I read the article Making Large Language Models work for you by Simon Willison. I have since being doing much more research about integrating LLM-based assistants into the development workflow for work. It’s quite interesting, and I’m going through some older content to see what’s worth mining for that effort.

In particular, the article has this description of expertise, and linked it to ChatGPT—obviously, it’s Simon Willison.

“LLMs have started to make me redefine what I consider... [More]”

Gideon Levy is on a tear

Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics

I was going to name this article a more serious-sounding “The situation in Israel according to Gideon Levy”, but then realized that I’d already written Amira Hass is on a tear and Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, so I put this one in the series.

Starting at 24:00, the Gideon Levy interview is just 100% gold. Katie and Aaron ask good questions, but it’s really more of a lecture on Israel, as she is in 2023.

Extended episode: Israel’s Nazi Proposals w/ Gideon Levy by Useful Idiots: Katie Halper & Aaron Maté (YouTube)

00:00	Intro
01:43	The Four Food Groups of News
19:52	An Ode to Henry Kissinger
24:00... [More]

Saul Williams & Abby Martin: a bit too much of an echo chamber

Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics

I’d never heard of Saul Williams before, but I very much like Abby Martin’s work. I recently published an article called From their mouths to God’s ear, about a video of hers from 2016, where she interviews Israelis in the streets of Jerusalem.

In this video, there was some interesting stuff, but I felt that they accompanied each other down the rabbit hole a bit too much.

Saul Williams & Abby Martin: Israel's High-Tech Barbarism by Empire Files (YouTube)

They formed their own little echo chamber. It was a fine discussion, but no progress made to figure out how to reach... [More]

Mo Gawdat talks to himself again

Published by marco on in Technology

I’ve watched Mo Gawdat before (see Mo Gawdat discusses AI). He is an acquired taste, at least for me. There is good in what he says, but it is interspersed with a lot of wild and unsubstantiated statements that he hopes you’ll believe because he’s so smart. The listener is left wondering whether they don’t see the through-line on what he’s saying because he’s skipped a bunch of steps that his unparalleled genius didn’t see as necessary or wether he’s just pulling a fast one.[1]

This is the video:... [More]

YES OR NO

Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics

The article New Survey Showing Public Ignorance About the Holocaust Among Young Americans wrote the following about a survey about the Holocaust.

“The question in the survey asks respond[ant]s whether they “strongly agree,” “tend to agree,” “tend to disagree,” “strongly disagree,” or “neither agree nor disagree” with the statement that “the Holocaust is a myth.” In the sample as a whole, only 7% picked “strongly agree” (2%) or “tend to agree” (5%). But among young people (age 18-29), the figure... [More]”

Slavoj Žižek: Freedom is not relaxation; freedom is duty

Published by marco on in Philosophy

Most of this discussion was stuff I’d heard before—even in more recent videos—but I almost always enjoy listening to him.[1]

Slavoj Zizek − Israel, Palestine & the Future by How To Academy Mindset (YouTube)

He said something at the end that I found to be, if not new, at last well-formulated. I’ve transcribed it below. At 01:24:20, he says,

“What’s the problem today? I will point to this paradox. You know that, on the one hand, we perceive our situation as powerless, totally manipulated—you don’t control anything. But, at the same time, the hegemonic ideology today is... [More]”

Wasting resources on the rich

Published by marco on in Philosophy

Kath and I rode home from Fehraltorf to Kempten at 12:30 at night. We boarded in the car that is ¾ first-class. Instead of walking to the second-class cabin, I just sat down in the first-class cabin, which was otherwise completely empty of passengers. I sat down alone. We hadn’t purchased first-class tickets, so Kath was not going to sit there.[1]

But why not sit there? The car was otherwise empty. We weren’t taking seats from anyone with a first-class ticket. There was no physical reason... [More]

At least it’s entertaining

Published by marco on in Quotes

“Se non è vero, è ben trovato.”
Giordano Bruno on 1582 (Wiktionary)

I heard Slavj Žižek use this phrase in a recent interview. It translates in English to “Even if it is not true, it is very well-invented,” or, perhaps a bit more colloquially, “Even if it ain’t true, it’s a good story.”

Links and Notes for December 1st, 2023

Published by marco on in Notes

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents