David Pennington

in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.

The dulling of an era.

With more consumption of TikTok, you find your brain begins to replace facts, figures, and important cognitive skills with nothing but the endless ruminating of dances and made-up songs you’ve spent your day digesting — yes, you have begun stage one of brain fog.

I’d be even more aware from now on! I’d remember that machine learning has been defined by the people who want me to believe it works the way they say it does. But an algorithm can’t really observe anything. So it can’t really measure my behavior, and so it can’t really discover anything for me, or about me!

Here’s what I’m trying to do with my life and my work. I’m trying to fully integrate everything. So the transition from work to play to everyday life is all seamless. So that it’s all one thing. There’s no difference between living and making art. I’ve gotten really close. Music, comics, writing, painting, playing with Eli, doing dishes, cooking,... See more

"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."

A book where you can enter "sport" and end up with "a diversion of the field" -- this is in fact the opposite of what I'd known a dictionary to be. This is a book that transmutes plain words into language that's finer and more vivid and sometimes more rare.

The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.

Those who can, teach (and teach constantly). Those who can’t, administrate.