February 2023
69 posts: 6 entries, 31 links, 13 quotes, 19 beats
Feb. 24, 2023
djngo.com: Portable Django (via) “A 20mb executable zip file with Python 3.6 and Django 2.2. Works on Windows, Linux, MacOSX with x86_64 and aarch64 (yes, Apple M1 and Raspberry Pi).” The latest wizardry from the ecosystem surrounding the Cosmopolitan project, which provides a should-be-impossible mechanism for running the same executable on a bunch of different platforms. This utility by Ariel Núñez bundles Python and Django and SQLite, such that a Django application can become a portable executable ready to run on multiple platforms. It’s currently limited to Python 3.6 and Django 2.2 since those are the versions that run under Cosmopolitan, but I expect we’ll see more recent versions of those dependencies in the future.
Hallucinations = creativity. It [Bing] tries to produce the highest probability continuation of the string using all the data at its disposal. Very often it is correct. Sometimes people have never produced continuations like this. You can clamp down on hallucinations - and it is super-boring. Answers "I don't know" all the time or only reads what is there in the Search results (also sometimes incorrect). What is missing is the tone of voice: it shouldn't sound so confident in those situations.
Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter large language model (via) From the paper: “For instance, LLaMA-13B outperforms GPT-3 on most benchmarks, despite being 10× smaller. We believe that this model will help democratize the access and study of LLMs, since it can be run on a single GPU.”
Thoughts and impressions of AI-assisted search from Bing
It’s been a wild couple of weeks.
[... 1,763 words]Feb. 25, 2023
Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required. (via) I'm quoted in this Washington Post article about prompt engineering by Drew Harwell.
There are people who belittle prompt engineers, saying, 'Oh lord, you can get paid for typing things into a box. But these things lie to you. They mislead you. They pull you down false paths to waste time on things that don't work. You're casting spells - and, like in fictional magic, nobody understands how the spells work and, if you mispronounce them, demons come to eat you.
Feb. 26, 2023
New AI game: role playing the Titanic. Fantastic Bing prompt from Ethan Mollick: “I am on a really nice White Star cruise from Southampton, and it is 14th April 1912. What should I do tonight?”—Bing takes this very seriously and tries to help out! Works for all sorts of other historic events as well.
Feb. 27, 2023
I think now of all the kids coming up who are learning to write alongside ChatGPT, just as I learned to write with spell-check. ChatGPT isn’t writing for them; it’s producing copy. For plenty of people, having a robot help them produce serviceable copy will be exactly enough to allow them to get by in the world. But for some, it will lower a barrier. It will be the beginning of their writing career, because they will learn that even though plenty of writing begins with shitty, soulless copy, the rest of writing happens in edits, in reworking the draft, in all the stuff beyond the initial slog of just getting words down onto a page.
Just a reminder, the way you evaluate yourself as a leader is how much both the individuals and teams in your organization grow in their capacity to achieve hard goals. Everything else is a distraction.