David Pennington

"Specifically, we demonstrate that by injecting just 250 malicious documents into pretraining data, adversaries can successfully backdoor LLMs ranging from 600 [million] to 13 [billion] parameters."

In a culture obsessed with speed, certainty, and specialization, Leonardo’s secret feels almost rebellious: take your time, learn widely, think deeply.

In the 1960s, psychologist Jerome Singer, the grandfather of daydreaming studies, identified three kinds of mind-­wandering: the productive, creative “positive constructive daydreaming,” obsessive “guilty–­dysphoric daydreaming,” and “poor attentional control.” Singer believed daydreaming was a positive adaptive behavior—­a bold departure from the... See more

Overall, the researchers found that both deep and shallow conversations felt less awkward and led to greater feelings of connectedness and enjoyment than the participants had expected. That effect tended to be stronger for deep conversations. Participants who discussed the deep questions overestimated how awkward the conversation would be... See more

Again, the majority of Australians are sceptical about the productivity mantra. When they hear that word they see cost-cutting rather than shared benefit.

Like everything else in modernity, people want instant results without putting in any sort of effort to earn them. And then they wonder why they’re empty inside, their life the product of an ongoing process to make everything ‘more efficient’ for the sake of efficiency. They listen to podcasts at 2x, guzzle down Soylent, abuse stimulants to... See more

Attention is first philosophy—

Philosophy is not only a system of thought but a mode of attentiveness, an exercised openness to what exceeds us yet calls us to deeper participation. Its systematic aspects are downstream of this attentiveness, and can certainly become a scaffolding by which others can train their own attention, but it is at its root... See more

What AI is is an ideology—a system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting... See more