Ruthvik Peddawandla

The idea of needing to "linger in confusion" reminded me of a passage I like from Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams', where he's introducing the idea of free association and quotes some remarks by Schiller: "At a point in his correspondence ... Schiller answers a friend who complains of his lack of creativeness in the following words: “The reas... See more

Sasseen writes that “there is an immersive quality to the internet, the Wikipedia rabbit holes and the endless link trees, that the affectless writing that has become the house style of online life fails to capture... It’s in the sorting of the information, the understanding of how this information gets filtered into the very structures of our lang... See more

Head words are civilized words, domesticated words, RLHF’d words. The part of me that learned how to generate language like this learned how to do it in school, in order to pass classes. Head words are mostly bullshit. And LLMs are tracer dye for places in society where language production was already mostly bullshit. It was completely predictable ... See more

It often takes considerable work to keep the creative state from collapsing, especially as your work becomes successful and the social expectations mount. When I listen to interviews with creative people or read their workbooks, there are endless examples of them lamenting how hard it is. They keep coming up with techniques, rituals, and narratives... See more

Up all night thinking of a large expanse of land a young man has recently inherited. The whole area covered in orange trees, and in each orange, a short message from his father. The messages seem meaningless, scrambled, the last gesture of a lost man, but only because he’s eating them in the wrong order.

Up all night thinking of several women, sleep... See more

After I first used/talked to Llama 405-B for a few days, it fascinated me deeply. And it kept nagging at me why the base model felt so different than the instruct models (beyond the obvious). They are strange, lurid creatures. The base models send coded messages often and speak in allegories and metaphor, and it feels visceral on some level. It's n... See more

This is a fairly common practice, crafting a ritual where you sit down at the same time every day, in the same chair, writing in the same kind of notebook, creating a repetitiveness that borders on self-hypnosis. This is what Hemingway did, it is what Mario Vargas Llosa does.

And if your goal is to unearth entirely new planes of understanding, avoid feedback like it’s the Great Plague of London.