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The state is not going to drown. The polity of urban New Orleans is the liberal thorn in its side, and that's the area at risk.

The code block after "Welcome" is the code sample. Very literate.

This is a well-referenced essay, drawing the on writing of David Parnas [1], Peter Naur [2], and Zach Tellman [3]. As software developers we’re intimately familiar with these ideas…

I’m a violinist (amateur but play regularly). When I have an important note, which is held for a while and needs vibrato, I frequently decide to shift my left hand position so that…

Agreed. I recall being taught in college physics labs: there is no such thing as “human error”. Instead, think about the causes and mechanisms of each source of error, which helps …

Count me in as interested!

A while back I prototyped (very roughly) an auditory equivalent to “syntax highlighting”, using ambient tones and white noise, rather than discrete beeps/sound effects. [1] I’m act…

I’m glad I saw your comment!! I’ve experienced this exact phenomenon when playing Minecraft while listening to an audiobook or podcast. Returning to that area will immediately remi…

The museum was also a generous community space; I remember attending a Seattle Indies game jam and other events before the pandemic. It was very special to be surrounded by reminde…

*If* such a thing could be done under typical corporate incentives/behavior, then I suspect the “high impact” part would need to be scrapped. Because when something is important to…

Question for ML/AI people: is it still common to use the term “overfitting” for these cases, where a model is overtrained on one thing, to the detriment of another? Or is that term…

I do think it’s an interesting line of inquiry… but not robust enough. E.g. this paper would be much more interesting if it measured the threshold at which the LLM starts to become…

Yes, but in a major journal like PNAS? (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Good point - I saw the FLAN anomaly and this didn’t occur to me! A good follow up question would be: why didn’t the other models do better on the 2nd-order question? Especially BLO…

Skimming through studies like this, it strikes me that LLM inquiry is in its infancy. I’m not sure that the typical tools & heuristics of quantitative science are powerful enough. …

There are multiple senses of the word “creativity”, and this post focuses on one of them: divergent thinking. The other sense is that of constructive, goal-oriented creation, which…

This is the latest work from compelling storyteller and worldbuilder Evan Dahm. The first book concludes on Monday.

I’ve had a variety of responses to this list over my programming life (~10 years hobby, ~10 years professional). When I first encountered them as a hobbyist, they were surprising, …

Wow - can you elaborate on your process to “debug” these different layers? What comprises your personal or team’s feedback loop, given that 6 months is short? (I suspect it’s a lot…

We lack good metaphors here. Like genes, the following collections of information are plans , as other entities (workers, compilers, cells, etc) can reliably use them to produce la…

A further thought that is too much for an edit… one of Alexander’s final conclusions is: > I’m glad that some people never develop epistemic learned helplessness, or develop only a…

Summary: Scott Alexander recounts his gullibility to various well-reasoned crackpot arguments on a topic, and describes how he to decided to trust experts instead of investing time…