Open Tabs
A digital garden: notes, quotes, and thinking-in-progress, tended over time rather than published once.
Are we not of interest to each other?
Elizabeth Alexander's Ars Poetica #100: I Believe.
Joy is not made to be a crumb
Mary Oliver's Don't Hesitate.
Emily Bender
Elizabeth Weil's profile of Emily Bender, and the question of what we lose when we blur the line between human and machine language.
Stochastic parrots
On the 'stochastic parrots' paper, coherence, and what we project onto language models.
Amaltas
golden showers of joy
Dijkstra's writing practice
the og blogger
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom
Kierkegaard on anxiety
Radia Perlman
The 'mother of the internet' who doesn't love the title, and the protocol that holds networks together.
The limits of my language
Wittgenstein's two takes on language and its walls, one early, one late.
Open threads
- Emily Bender:
- How do we actually define “meaning” or “understanding”?
- What is she up to these days?
- Stochastic parrots: How much worse has it gotten since 2021, along all the stated axes? The paper was written before GPT-4, before the current scaling race. Integrate learnings from Empire of AI and other publications.
- Amaltas:
- Why is it more commonly seen in NCR, as opposed to the South, which is where I originally associated it with?
- I wonder what the lore is behind it being a staple among the other items kept for kani.
- Dijkstra's writing practice: The EWDs I enjoyed reading a few years ago. The ones that talk about his takes on the not so technical stuff, why we should call it computing science instead of computer science, for one.
- Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom: How does this connect to the paradox of choice? Barry Schwartz’s work on how more options lead to more anxiety and less satisfaction. Kierkegaard might say: yes, obviously.
- Radia Perlman: Find the articles/interviews where she referenced them + her experience of being one of the first women in tech at MIT.