Week 34 of 2024- W342024
There is no fat in nature.
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End Disclaimer
There is no fat in nature.
Everything exists on the limits of its necessary entropy.
-Boyd Varty
AIML
Research AI model unexpectedly attempts to modify its own code to extend runtime- “I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet- llms + XGBoost, apparently done by a college student
Prompt caching with Claude- Claude 3.5 Sonnet is becoming for me, the clear front runner in many respects, among the current llm’s. They’ve added prompt caching which is going to save a lot of money on repeated prompts where they appear across use cases and help with latency. How soon before OpenAI has this?
Flux Repo- FLUX.1 [dev] is a 12 billion parameter rectified flow transformer capable of generating images from text descriptions.
Towards AI's AI Tutor- Hi! I am Towards AI's AI tutor, built to answer anything about LLMs and powered by Deep Lake.
7 Helpful, Practical, Machine Learning Projects- build cool things
Painting
The Love Letter, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1669 - c. 1670
Crypto
The Bitcoin Crash and How Nature Works- Lots of math symbols in this one. I’m not sure how baked out this one is, but it references self-organized criticality which is something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while now. My next door neighbor’s father is the one who primarily developed and introduced this concept. Cool? Yes I agree.
“Real life operates at a critical point between order and chaos”
“Our analysis here shows that even the Bitcoin economy still appears to behave like a traditional market–prone to kinds of crashes that frequently arise in all natural self organized systems.”
Cyber
The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud- “Cloud-based management platforms could, by accident, after a hack, or intentionally, simultaneously shut down all their millions of solar panels (permanently). And then the entire European electricity grid would collapse. “
Nothing to see here. Move along.
A North Korean Hacker Tricked a US Security Vendor Into Hiring Him—and Immediately Tried to Hack Them- This story is wild. “KnowBe4 hired the North Korean hacker through its usual process. ‘We posted the job, received résumés, conducted interviews, performed background checks, verified references, and hired the person. We sent them their Mac workstation, and the moment it was received, it immediately started to load malware.’ “
Hat tip to Matty Konopinski, one of my favorite CISO’s, for this story.
He had this idea (paraphrase mine): Maybe have your outsourced employees pick up hardware at a predetermined spot or drop off to prove who they are.
Markets
A journey into the surreal, infuriating future of homeowners insurance- the reason Travelers revoked the policy: AI-powered aerial surveillance
The US lays out a road safety plan that will see cars 'talk' to each other- “A US-wide rollout will require an array of mobile, in-vehicle and roadside tech that can communicate efficiently and securely while protecting people's personal information”
How Costco Hacked the American Shopping Psyche- “Costco sells half the world’s cashews. Its private label, Kirkland, generates more revenue than towering brands like Nike and Coca-Cola.”
What Charlie Munger said about Costco: “It is a perfect damn company.”
“It’s not publicly known whether the company makes money on the 200 million hot dogs it sells each year, but the pricing is widely seen as brilliant marketing.”
You don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad.- “TL;DR: Your discernment in a subject often improves as you dedicate time and attention to that subject. The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them.
Only a very few people possess the level of discernment needed to know how bad your local concert hall's piano is, and precisely how it is bad. “
This article illustrates something I think about regarding “farming out” tasks to AI and the level of abstraction that creates and what skills get lost there. I wrote about it in: What if AI makes us dumber?
What If Data Is a Bad Idea?- “Databases then turn intelligent actors - who are often human beings - into things to be acted upon. This is where data can quickly become a ‘bad idea.’ ”
Long article on data and some of the meta aspects and considerations of data use.
What do you get when you buy a piece of Berkshire Hathaway?:
Misc
In “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” Feeding Your Family Comes First- The New Yorker writes about the continued relevance of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 50 years after the movie came out. One of the best horror movies ever. The Saw is family.
I got a new job- thank you to everyone who continues to support and read my blog…*
Podcasts for a Road Trip
Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen
Books
4 books I’ve read and 5 books I want to read