Week 35 of 2024- W352024
Thou mayst not wander in that labyrinth
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my current or any previous employer. This blog may also contain links to other websites or resources. I am not responsible for the content on those external sites or any changes that may occur after the publication of my posts.
End Disclaimer
Thou mayst not wander in that labyrinth; There Minotaurs and ugly treasons lurk
- William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part One
AIML
AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products. Good.-
The race towards building actual, useful, practical llm applications is on now that the“llms can do everything!” bubble is popping.
“When ChatGPT launched, people found a thousand unexpected uses for it. This got AI developers overexcited. They completely misunderstood the market, underestimating the huge gap between proofs of concept and reliable products. This misunderstanding led to two opposing but equally flawed approaches to commercializing LLMs. “
Hedge Funds Battle to Turn ChatGPT from Intern to Analyst- Are all these ideas for genAI assistants at these hedge funds, fully baked out, or still in the drawing board- “hope to have” stages? Either way, they are coming…
“Hedge fund managers, including Two Sigma Investments and Man Group, are racing to exploit the disruptive potential of the technology by integrating chatbots in their day-to-day research and investing processes.”
A Visual Guide to Quantization- What the hell is quantization? This is one of the best articles I’ve seen on how to make large language models smaller through methods that seek to remove some of the specificity without sacrificing accuracy and performance. It’s sort of like saying that it’s “10am”, when it’s actually “9:56am”. Conveying more or less the same information without having to use an extra couple of digits.
“Quantization aims to reduce the precision of a model’s parameter from higher bit-widths (like 32-bit floating point) to lower bit-widths (like 8-bit integers).”
Claude LLM Most Recent System Prompts- How Anthropic guides Claude’s “personality”.
“Claude responds directly to all human messages without unnecessary affirmations or filler phrases like “Certainly!”, “Of course!”, “Absolutely!”, “Great!”, “Sure!”, etc. Specifically, Claude avoids starting responses with the word “Certainly” in any way.”
Prompt Engineering with Anthropic Claude- 8 Prompt Writing Tips from Anthropic’s “Prompt Doctor”. I don’t know exactly with a Prompt Doctor does, but the tips are good.
Judge Rules $400 Million Algorithmic System Illegally Denied Thousands of People’s Medicaid Benefits- Yikes
“built by Deloitte and other contractors for more than $400 million”
“But in practice, the system often doesn’t load the appropriate data, assigns beneficiaries to the wrong households, and makes incorrect eligibility determinations, according to the decision from Middle District of Tennessee Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr.”
Painting
The Duel After the Masquerade, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1857
Cyber
Bypassing airport security via SQL injection- Wanna get on the list to bypass airport security and/or the list to access the cockpit?
“This was a very bad sign, as it seemed the username was directly interpolated into the login SQL query. Sure enough, we had discovered SQL injection and were able to use sqlmap to confirm the issue. Using the username of ' or '1'='1 and password of ') OR MD5('1')=MD5('1, we were able to login to FlyCASS as an administrator of Air Transport International!”
We found North Korean engineers in our application pile. Here's what our ex-CIA co founders did about it.- The 7 characteristics that the North Korean applicants share in common including…crappy cover letters?
US dismantles laptop farm used by undercover North Korean IT workers- Well, here’s a workaround to what I mentioned last week about sending the hardware to a person to prove their identity- have that American accepting the hardware be working for the North Koreans.
"The North Korean IT workers who used Knoot's laptop farm generated revenue for North Korea's nuclear weapons program and were each paid over $250,000 for their work between July 2022 and August 2023.”
"Based on the volume and scale of activity we've seen, North Korean IT workers are widespread in Fortune 500 companies, using their earnings to incentivize others to aid their operations."
Markets
***Article I most enjoyed this Week***
Longread. Palmer Luckey is closer to a real life Tony Stark than Elon Musk. Anduril is Stark Industries.
American Vulcan: Palmer Luckey
“Next step doesn’t matter. What’s the last step?”
“The one thing money can’t buy is people who liked you before you had money.”
I exchanged texts with the author, Jeremy Stern. He would like to expand the article into a book. In the meantime, to holdover, I recommend The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
Pandemic Darlings That Never Bounced Back- I’m not sure all of these massive drawdowns are due to a post pandemic, special sits-type exit, but interesting to see the performance of the usual suspects like Zoom, Etsy, and Peloton.
'Pressure Cooker': Why Millionaire Nvidia Employees Are Still Working Until 2 a.m.- Working hard on hard problems to get to make a ton of money is a gift
Nearly half of Nvidia’s revenue comes from just four mystery whales each buying $3 billion–plus-
“Four customers, whose identities were kept anonymous for competitive reasons, directly purchased goods and services collectively worth 46% of Nvidia’s $30 billion in turnover. “
Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway- Asteroid mining is…a rocky endeavor. I’ll see myself out.
The End of Fabulous Money Market Rates Is Near- “Money market outperformance isn’t likely to last”
Home Insurance is a Really Big Problem- A deep-ish dive into the growing issues facing the home insurance market.
Give less time to the ineffectual “meeting brokers”, more time to the “builders to build”:
Misc
Why Aging Comes in Dramatic Waves in Our 40s and 60s- The turning points for age may be 44 and 60.
Near Real-time Global Lightning Strike Map- Super cool
Did you lose your AirPods?- You find a pair of AirPods on the ground. Now find the owner. And don’t use “Find my”.
Risking His Own Extinction to Rescue the Rarest of Flowers- If Indiana Jones were a research horticulturist.
Podcasts for a Road Trip
Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen
Books
4 books I’ve read and 5 books I want to read