David Pennington

What happens when we replace boredom with constant distraction and stimulation? Warnings about the harmful effects of too much stimulation are nothing new. “For a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli,” Sigmund Freud observed. But given the range and speed of stimuli at our... See more

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of

... See more

In photography, vantage point is everything. Where the camera goes is what we see. The choices that AP photographers make in mere seconds can shape how we see our world for years.

Today you rarely see the word “idle” except when used as a pejorative; to be idle is to be wasteful, and several of the most popular Internet startup companies have targeted underutilized resources such as idle cars (Turo, ZipCar), household equipment (SnapGoods), or empty bedrooms (Airbnb), allowing people to make use of them by renting them out... 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."