akprasad
Joined 13 years ago
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Comment · 6 months ago
Maybe it's just the frequency illusion, but "X. Not Y." in particular is a pattern I strongly associate with LLM writing.
> That’s confabulation. Not a metaphor. The same phenomenon.
> Published. Replicated. Not fringe.
> Not to validate it. Not to refute it. Not to engage with its content at all.
Comment · 1 year ago
A similar idea from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, ~7th century BCE
> 'And here they say that a person consists of desires. And as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.
Comment · 1 year ago
What is the strategy, in your view? Maybe something like this? --
1. All government employees get access to ChatGPT
2. ChatGPT increasingly becomes a part of people's daily workflows and cognitive toolkit.
3. As the price increases, ChatGPT will be too embedded to roll back.
4. Over time, OpenAI becomes tightly integrated with government work and "too big to fail": since the government relies on OpenAI, OpenAI must succeed as a matter of national security.
5. The government pursues policy objectives that bolster OpenAI's market position.
Comment · 1 year ago
I can't find an exact quote either, but AFAICT he wrote extensively on extensions and amputations, though perhaps less concisely.
Comment · 1 year ago
As a side project, I'm creating resources for learning Tamil, my parents' native language:
https://akprasad.github.io/tamil/
It's been a lot of fun getting the basic tools going: transliterators, morphological generators and analyzers, and some other things on top. But the main goal is to improve fluency as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Comment · 1 year ago
I use something similar: .. , .2 , .3 , etc.
Comment · 1 year ago
The author agrees with you:
> Not all requests for help are predatory. It’s part of your job to help out engineers on your team, and cross-org impact really does involve helping others sometimes, even if you get nothing in return. Predatory behavior is a consistent pattern of drawing on your time for nothing in return.
Comment · 1 year ago
For context, Andreessen is talking here about the Biden administration, and his revulsion to this approach is why he endorsed Trump:
> I, you know, look, and I would say like when we endorse Trump, we, we only did so on the basis of like tech policy. [...] Number two was ai, where I became very scared earlier this year that they were gonna do the same thing to AI that they did to crypto.
Comment · 2 years ago
In Hindi and some other Indian languages, it is common to drop the last short “a” of a Sanskrit word, hence Ram for Rama, Vikram for Vikrama, etc.
Comment · 2 years ago
You're thinking of koans [1], which are a specific kind of Zen speech used to shift the mind out of conceptual thinking. Outside of that context, Zen teachers often just talk in conventional language.
Comment · 2 years ago
I cut a digression on forgery to keep my comment short, but my focus is less on provenance and the habits of art owners and more on what it feels like to look at a painting that you know is forged (or copied, etc.) The mental story around that painting, which is half of the fun and most of the meaning, is quite different.
Comment · 2 years ago
For many people (most?), part of appreciating art is to engage with it beyond mere color and shape. I mean context about the artist themselves, and their life and work, and what they were trying to articulate, and why they made the choices that they did. All of this is embedded in a social context in which art expresses intention and meaning and some artifact of human experience.
It's because many/most people feel and understand this context that they react so differently to artwork that they know is forged. If a painting were just an issue of color and shape, forgery would be irrelevant to how we relate to art. But for most, a painting is embedded in the social context I described above, and forgery feels like a violation of that contract.
AI art seems to fall in a similar category, since AI systems are not social agents and not human beings.
Comment · 2 years ago
Those were fun times! (& great to see you again after all these years). It's astonishing to me how far the tech has come given what we were working on at the time.
Comment · 2 years ago
The title suddenly reminded me of this beautiful story [1] I read more than a decade ago, where spondylus plays a key role:
> [I]t was a sense of morbid attraction that led me to Diane Ackerman's newest book One Hundred Names for Love, in which she documents the stroke and subsequent language deficit suffered by her husband, novelist Paul West.
> [...]
> Oddly, it was often the most obscure words that were easiest to recover. He struggled with words like blanket or bed, or his wife's name Diane, words that you would think over time should have seeped into his genes. Nevertheless, he could recruit words like postillion or tardigrades to get an idea across.
> [...]
> At times, his speech sent even his verbally-endowed spouse scrambling for a dictionary. When trying to ask her whether she'd received a check as payment for some work done, he resorted to the word spondulicks, which prompted the following exchange:
>> "What's a spondulick?"
>> "Money."
>> "Really? Truly? Spondulicks?" In my mind's eye, I pictured a spastic duck.
>> "Yes," he said emphatically.
>> "Spondulicks?"
>> "Spondulicks. It's British."
>> Surely he was pulling my leg. I breezed into the library to look it up in an etymological dictionary, where I found this entry:
>> 1856, Amer.Eng. slang, "money, cash," of unknown origin, said to be from Gk. spondylikos, from spondylos, a seashell used as currency (the Gk. word means lit. "vertebra"). Used by Mark Twain and O.Henry and adopted into British English, where it survives despite having died in Amer.Eng.
Over time, West recovers:
> The intimate wordplay between West and Ackerman also eventually resumed, with West fashioning novel terms of endearment as gifts to his wife. The offerings were delightful. Deprived of the usual routes to language, and along with them, the common clichés that many of us struggle to shed, West bestowed on his wife exquisite pet names such as: My Little Bucket of Hair; Commendatore de le Pavane Mistletoe; Dark-Eyed Junco, My Little Bunko; Diligent Apostle of Classic Stanzas. And at one point, the man uttered what has to be the most searingly romantic sentence ever uttered in history, by anyone, in any language:
> "You are the hapax legomenon of my life."
(2022 - 2025) Evergrow, Head of Engineering (2017 - 2022) Pinterest, user+pin modeling (2016 - 2016) Startup (2013 - 2016) Google, query understanding (2008 - 2013) Stanford, BS + MS