pigscantfly

Honestly probably just literary license -- this author seems to employ pretty florid prose. I'd say it actually sounds more natural to say "towards the west / mot väster" in Swedish since it's more common to use as a noun vs. as an adverb than in English.

If you're in the US, I recommend bokon.se for ebooks -- they're one of very few sites that accepts American credit cards. Otherwise, you're kind of stuck with libraries (if you have one nearby with a good foreign language section) or packing your suitcase. I'd also recommend Historiepodden on Spotify and Sommarprat on sverigesradio.se -- don't really watch TV myself but others here have mentioned svtplay.se if you're into that.

It converts to lätt svenska (simplified Swedish), which is usually intended for beginners / students and I believe is the point here. The translated text is missing a lot of details, though, yes.

The samples your input is batched with on the provider's backend vary between calls and sparse mixture of experts routing when implemented for efficient utilization induces competition among tokens with either encouraged or enforced balance of expert usage among tokens in the same fixed-size group. I think it's unknown or at least undisclosed exactly why sequence non-determinism at zero temperature occurs in these proprietary implementations, but I think this is a good theory.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00951 pg. 4 [2] https://152334h.github.io/blog/non-determinism-in-gpt-4/

This isn't really true unfortunately -- mixture of experts routing seems to suffer from batch non-determinism. No one has stated publicly exactly why this is, but you can easily replicate the behavior yourself or find bug reports / discussion with a bit of searching. The outcome and observed behavior of the major closed-weight LLM APIs is that a temperature of zero no longer corresponds to deterministic greedy sampling.

Absolutely love this project -- great job. Remarkably insightful from just a bit of input -- would love to point this at Twitter profiles.

Roast: They know so much about ancient history, it's like they lived through it! Prediction: The user might embark on an AI-driven archaeology project, blending their passion for history with machine learning.

Other folks may have more apt examples to share, but I would examine the history of Dacia and also the Sasanian fortification lines both east and west (but especially east) of the Caspian Sea -- both of which separated the empire from nomadic tribes of the steppe.

I believe these involved depopulated regions both north and south of the main defensive structures to allow harrying of invading forces while denying access to plundered resources.

Eventually, they were overcome by the Hephthalites (aka White Huns) following heavy Sasanian losses north of the limes in the AD 484 Battle of Herat, but it's interesting to note that the defensive structures separating southern 'civilization' from the steppe were considered a joint responsibility of the predominant (Roman/Sasanian) empires in spite of their generally being at war with each other, as the nomads were a shared threat.

Edit: Another great example is drawn from Caesar's description of Helvetian practices in his Gallic Wars; the Helvetians, a Germanic tribe located in modern Switzerland, had deliberately depopulated a wide area around their territory for defensive purposes.

The guy who invented psychedelic light painting is still living in SF and giving occasional shows -- have known him for a few years as a neighbor, ran with a pretty interesting crowd in the 60's and 70's.

[1] https://billhamlights.com/history/

I think this perspective is belied by the vast over-subscription of free public education in places where it has previously been paid only[1] (at this point, mainly in Africa). It does seem like there is strong evidence that most children and parents recognize the value of education and are self-motivated to pursue it where it is accessible to them. I believe it follows that lowering cost and barriers to quality education will improve outcomes without a need to otherwise coerce participation.

[1] See, most recently, Zambia

Similarly, it bears striking resemblance to the Swedish 'pojke', which can be colloquially shortened to 'pojk' and also means boy. It's apparently been derived from Finnish within the last millenium, though, so could be a false cognate.

The LOCKSS [1] digital preservation threat model (I've been told, there's a whitepaper if curious) considers nuclear first strikes and large solar storms -- they maintain a global network of servers for archiving and preserving academic research.

[1] https://www.lockss.org/why-lockss

This is a very real take on where memes 'start' nowadays in the valley.

No-fee PO Boxes also cover situations in which USPS doesn't deliver to a house in a rural area (no carrier service, as noted in your source [2]). It's very common in many small towns.

Thanks for sharing this -- I read the book maybe a decade ago and largely discounted it as non-replicable pop-sci; this changed my opinion of Kahneman's perspective and rigor (for the better!)

It would have gone much better for Google if the Brain team had been permitted to apply their work, but they were repeatedly blocked on stated grounds of AI safety and worries about impacting existing business lines through negative PR. I think this is probably the biggest missed business opportunity of the past decade, and much of the blame for losing key talent and Google's head start in LLMs ultimately resides with Sundar, although there are managers in between with their own share of the blame.

Yes, this is one of the top outlets focused on the valley tech scene. It's subscription based, and they are more expensive than most others, which is probably why you haven't seen it posted much.

"The Dead Mountaineer's Inn" is a fairly unique sci-fi noir also from the Strugatsky brothers that was my first introduction to their work. It interested me enough that I read all their other books afterwards -- worth checking out!

1. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/19/392634682/mountaineer-is-a-mu...

I had a foldable e-bike for two months (was great) in SF before it was stolen. Someone saw me ride up to my house and enter the basement entrance where I kept it locked to a pole in a utility closet. Later on, they grabbed a food delivery bag, told another tenant they were making a delivery, got buzzed into the building, and stole the bike. They didn't get either battery, but I haven't bought a bike since.

Just curious, are there any sources you could share on that? Or is this the kind of intel you need to be in the really, really in-crowd for in order to know what's really going on?

[Edit]: Can't reply that deep in the thread, but thanks for the insight!

95% of those people have left Google because the ethics and safety teams prevented them from releasing any products based on their research. We have those ex-Googlers to thank for ChatGPT, Character.ai, Inceptive, ... which you'll notice are not Google products but rather competitors.

Hard to pin down precisely, but the tacos are better and more consistent in my opinion than eg. the Grullenses on El Camino in Redwood City and Palo Alto. It's also a bigger spot with murals, nicer seating, full salsa bar, and usually some people watching games around the bar. Just a great spot to stop in!

El Grullense Grill (Woodside and Gordon, #2 in TFA) is the taqueria GOAT; I stop there every time I find myself in the south bay around lunch or dinner. My roommate and I ate there 3-4 nights each week in grad school. Amazing public service for taco-lovers here!

I'd suggest trying t-SNE [1] instead; you'll be losing almost all of the variance by projecting onto the first two eigenvectors produced by PCA.

[1] http://karpathy.github.io/2014/07/02/visualizing-top-tweeps-...

Linguistic displacement can occur without genetic displacement. This has happened many times in history -- usually when a society's elite are displaced by a linguistically distinct foreign elite and their language is gradually adopted down the ranks of society as people seek advancement. Many branches of Proto-Indo-European (eg. Anatolian) are thought to have spread in this manner ie. with elite but not whole-population displacement.

I wasn't aware of this Australian language family example, but it may not be as surprising as it sounds at first.

Local area code + 867-5309

Absolutely -- if money were no object, what I'd like to do most is go back to school and get a doctorate in archaeology.

No, an autoregressive language model is conditioned on all prior states, not the previous one.

Practicing civil disobedience against laws you believe unethical is not morally dubious, it's legally dubious. If anything, I'd consider it a display of moral fortitude to prize one's ethics above the potential consequences.

Decided to try it out: https://labs.openai.com/s/nHmjLYmVPdDQzUU5DvGT2JgK

I've gone shopping at Grocery Outlet (discount West Coast chain) since I was in grad school and couldn't afford anything else. I could use higher quality stores now, but it's kind of fun to work recipes around their ever-changing (and incomplete) stock, so I tend to make one stop there and then drop by another store on the way home to fill in the gaps (usually just grapefruit juice and fresh bread). It only adds ~15 min. to the trip if I know what I'm missing before I walk in.

Then why only ban Juul and not all e-cigarette products? The article points out that the company is no longer the most widely used among children (Juul is now fourth in market share among high-school-aged users), and I can assure you that Puff Bars are inferior in quality and probably less healthy.