A Camera, Not an Engine

There is a common human tendency here incidentally. When we discover scary new things, we try to think of them as inventions first because inventions seem to embody a contingent optionality and afford us more agency than discoveries. It feels like we don’t have to use them if we don’t like them, and that we have some sort of god-like creator-agency... See more

The history of physical computers is a list of increasingly capable “bicycles for the mind” as Jobs put it. But my list of 10 conceptual advances above, along with their instrumental realizations (involving physical computers as well as other technologies), is more like a list of “telescopes for the soul.” Ways to peer into the computational heart ... See more

When you hear a phrase like a “7B parameter model,” 7 billion parameters is a measure of the dataset, not the model . You obviously couldn’t train such a model out of, say, a text of 50 words (well you could, but it would be highly informationally degenerate). And if you gave the training protocol 100 internets worth of data, 7B parameters may not ... See more

We’re only just beginning to understand blockchainy things as a kind of “hardness” property of computational reality.