Rainbow at sunset with a string of helicopters barely visible
Slightly zoom in on the helicopters and rainbow
Military helicopter part of Trumps escort
Trump flew over my house yesterday on the way to G7 in the mountains. If you zoom in you can see the string of army helicopters. Feels icky to have something so ugly marring a beautiful rainbow.
New, from me:
The DOGE project was sold as tech disruptors who would revolutionize government. To try to understand why DOGE has failed, I point to lessons that other technologists who worked in government learned, but DOGE ignored. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-doge-...
When a girl said hi to me in high school.
This was the thing about the 1933 civil service law in Germany, premised on purging non-Aryans…
People like Albert Einstein were ousted
Was running in Tampa Bay today and a long black snake went right by my foot, scaring the shit out of me... If you get bit on the first day of The Year of the Snake, is that good luck? 🫣
Statue of JFK at U of Tampa
“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” -JFK, 1961
I loved my Pebble watch. Just a great pixel aesthetic. Would be neat to have something open source and hackable. But I’m pretty locked into Apple ecosystem for day to day (though still prefer my garmin for any outdoor activity).
I’m so fascinated by this idea of your gut biome interacting with your brain.
I am a climate scientist and this is correct ⬇️
Mountains and pathway in Canmore AB. Herd of 25 or 30 elks on both sides.
Elk grazing
Energetic teenager elk staring at the camera
Out for a run in the mountains and my path took me through a herd of wild elk. Was kind of worried about one aggressive youngster but they were largely uninterested in me.
There's this potentially weird dystopian cyberpunk future where the Internet Archive loses all its copyright battles while OpenAI wins all of theirs, and our only record of the history of the Internet-that-was is locked up inside the unreliable narration of obsolete large language models.
The GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken Some of those GPT-4 models run on my laptop LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency Multimodal vision is common, audio and video are starting to emerge Voice and live camera mode are science fiction come to life Prompt driven app generation is a commodity already Universal access to the best models lasted for just a few short months “Agents” still haven’t really happened yet Evals really matter Apple Intelligence is bad, Apple’s MLX library is excellent The rise of inference-scaling “reasoning” models Was the best currently available LLM trained in China for less than $6m? The environmental impact got better The environmental impact got much, much worse The year of slop Synthetic training data works great LLMs somehow got even harder to use Knowledge is incredibly unevenly distributed LLMs need better criticism Everything tagged “llms” on my blog in 2024
Here's my end-of-year review of things we learned out about LLMs in 2024 - we learned a LOT of things simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...
Table of contents:
Marvel Rivals added game-based hero bans to mix up the meta and not have to obsessively balance each hero. Simplification as disruption.
As a product manager, are you stuck infinitely scoping legacy tweaks while competitors win by not getting pulled into the same churn?
I’m an Overwatch fan (Lucio main) and am trying out Marvel Rivals during my holiday. This video is about #productmanagement: the Overwatch PMs got pulled into a constant churn of hero balancing, whereas their new competitor simply added a feature that addressed it
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiS6...
#landback
Grain elevator at sunset with Alberta Wheat Pool logo in St Albert
Grain elevators always make me happy… a little piece of prairie legacy. The town I grew up in was the last stop on the railroad north.
Apparently you can stick a raspberry pi in this #Lego Atari and play it like the real one, connected to a tv
Life hack: weight session at a drop-in gym to reboot during Christmas chaos at Canada’s largest mall.
@westedmontonmall.bsky.social
me: [carefully placing a baby on my boss’s desk]
my boss: and the other one
me: [pauses, then unstraps an ankle holster that cradles a smaller, but just as deadly baby]
That was cool! Heh heh
As a kid: pulled on a tube behind a quad or snowbie in deep winter on open Canadian fields. We would go FAST out across the snow driftS. These snow banks would send you soaring through the air. No helmets. No parents. 13 or 14 yr olds, taking turns driving.
Cat in a box that used to hold tomatoes
Vine ripened.
Topped up my vaccines
of flu and covid, free and easy
at my pharmacy
Skin is burning hot,
a training scene for white blood
cells, forging armour.
#medsky
Still buzzing from the Lake Louise XC ski camp a couple weeks ago. Winter wonderland.
In Lyon (France), the bookshop "Le Bal des Ardents", a fabulous place to discover. You could stay hours just watching the beauty of the place. Books everywhere
Political violence is never the answer, but you can feel the simmering anger and schadenfreude in response to that assassination. Watch out for the blowback from depersonalized, automated healthcare. arstechnica.com/health/2023/...
New healthcare interop law (HTI-2) includes a new exception to allow health care providers to hide a patient's pregnancy status. Makes me so sick that this is necessary to protect a woman's safety, even though it gets in the way of providing the best care. #medsky
society.asco.org/news-initiat...
My god this is good, even for Tiny Desk standards.
Signal alone is not enough. If you are an activist, you need a complete self-defense against surveillance. @eff.org has been maintaining these resources for years: ssd.eff.org
It is necessary, but not sufficient, for good men to set a positive example for other men.
It is also necessary for good men to articulate, and enforce, the boundaries of what is acceptable behaviour and what is not from other men.
That's not up to women, not alone. First & foremost it's our fight
