Johann Van Tonder

Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves, as if they were working on any other project that requires logic: … doing an algebra problem.

Good writing doesn’t come naturally, though most people seem to think it does.

On Writing Well, William Zinsser

“The fact that these things model language is probably one of the biggest discoveries in history. That you (LLM) can learn language by just predicting the next word … — that’s just shocking to me.”

- Mikhail Belkin, computer scientist at the University of California

Weird GPT token for Reddit user davidjl123, “a keen member of the /r/counting subreddit. He’s posted incremented numbers there well over 163,000 times. Presumably that subreddit ended up in the training data used to create the tokenizer used by GPT-2, and since that particular username showed up hundreds of thousands of times it ended up getting it

“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.”

Naval

The most successful people. . . often aren't directly pursuing conventional notions of success. They're working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.

Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, p. 60.

One way to think about (LLM) is that about 3 years ago, aliens landed on Earth. They handed over a USB stick and then disappeared. Since then we’ve been poking the thing they gave us with a stick, trying to figure out what it does and how it works.

- Simon Williamson