Feb 10, 2025

Force of Law

I do not feel particularly well qualified to write about this, but it seems to me that recent events have dramatically and urgently gestured at the nature of the rule of law, and the tenuousness of reliable enforcement. Since coming into office, the new administration has been carrying out actions that many legal experts suggest are illegal. In several cases since then, judges have issued orders which demand a pause on particular actions. Most recently, the New York Times reports that a judge has now ruled that the White House has failed to comply with a court order. While less splashy than various overt actions, this kind of failure act seems to me like to very close to the red line suggested by various commentators, including conservatives.

Dec 8, 2024

Chatbot Roulette

Nov 16, 2024

What is a Podcast?

What is a podcast? I expect we all have our own slightly idiosyncratic answer to that question. For me, podcasts are defined partly by some software I use on my phone that regularly downloads audio files from various feeds, which I periodically listen to, often as I’m doing other things. Most of these recordings feature two or more people engaged in a long-form conversation. Some of these take the form of interviews, in which a regular host interviews a rotating series of guests. Others feature rotating subsets of the same group of hosts, talking together about various issues. A few shows, like Hardcore History, are just long monologues, not so different from an audiobook.

Sep 29, 2024

Bespoke Navigation

I don’t normally do this, but I recently did a short bike trip in Michigan, and I thought I would write a brief post about it, in part because it cued various other ideas which have a more direct connection to the kinds of things I normally write about here.

Jul 30, 2024

Credible Estimates and Open Science

Jun 22, 2024

Altair vs. Bokeh (part 3): Scatterplots

This is my third entry in a series comparing two interactive data visualization libraries for python, Bokeh and Altair. In part 1, I went through a basic overview of some of the differences in terms of syntactic style and defaults. In part 2, I went slightly deeper into some of the interactive features and more fundamental limitations. In this part, I want to deepen the comparison further, by exploring the basic capabilities each package offers with respect to a basic chart type, namely scatterplots.

May 27, 2024

The OpenAI Library

The New York Times recently ran a brief article about the reading room in OpenAI’s office in San Francisco. The article was heavy on images and light on text, but the overall theme was the tension between the company’s GPT models—which have been trained on vast swaths of human culture, and are therefore able to regurgitate, remix, and approximate it—versus embracing the design and aesthetic trappings of a traditional library reading room. The article mentioned a handful of books that could be found in the OpenAI library, but many more were clearly visible in the photographs that accompanied it.

Apr 27, 2024

Sociotechnical Considerations

A whole genre of podcasts seems to have emerged recently, taking the shape of interviews with CEOs of AI companies, or similar. Although I have not listened to many of these, they mostly seem to be pretty abysmal, both because of the amount of hype they involve, and due to the lack of meaningful specifics.

Mar 31, 2024

Financing Common Crawl

Mozilla recently published an excellent new report out about Common Crawl, the non-profit whose web crawls have played an important role in the development of numerous large language models (LLMs). Written by Stefan Baack and Mozilla Insights, the report is based on both public documents and new interviews with Common Crawl’s current director and crawl engineer, and goes into some detail about the history of the organization, and how its data is being used.

Feb 22, 2024

ChatGPT Prompt Speculations

In a recent tweet that went viral, Dylan Patel claimed to have discovered or revealed the ChatGPT prompt, using a simple hack. The tweet included a link to a text file on pastebin and a screenshot of that same text with newlines removed. More interestingly, the author suggested in a reply that anyone could replicate this finding, and a subsequent tweet included a video of ChatGPT generating text in response to the same trick. That, however, is where things get somewhat strange.