2024-12-15: 2024 W50: Noisy rubber § The week began with a long-overdue defrosting under a bright, clear, early-winter sun, back from a …
2024-12-08: 2024 W49: 132 hours § Our county has issued winter storm warnings each day since Thanksgiving and each day, without …
2024-12-01: 2024 W48: Cranberry sauce § Rabbit rabbit. Happy December. § Thanksgiving seems to get increasingly busy each year. Thursday …
2024-11-24: 2024 W47: 678 hours § Well that was a brief warm spell. We had our first real snowstorm Thursday morning, three weeks …
2024-11-17: 2024 W46: Paneer from scratch § A late season warm spell has given our garden a bit more life. We picked four big brandywine …
2024-11-10: 2024 W45: A blow § Well, shit. Tuesday night, watching election results roll in, was extremely disappointing. …
2024-11-03: 2024 W44: Stylish & disturbing § I took a work trip to Pittsburgh Children’s Museum on Tuesday. I particularly loved all of the …
2024-10-27: 2024 W43: Sideman § I’ve been continuing to try to spend some time drawing and painting this week. I’m very rusty but …
2024-10-20: 2024 W42: One of those houses § Tuesday morning brought our first snow of the season. Well, technically a thick layer of freezing …
2024-10-13: 2024 W41: Cover crop § I’m still feeling a bit gross and ill but much better than I did this time last week. § My Apple …
2024-10-06: 2024 W40: Another concert § I spent the first couple of days this week at the ASTC conference in Chicago. Despite having lived …
2024-09-29: 2024 W39: Marina City § Hello, welcome to autumn, a whole new season ripe with naming opportunities from up-and-coming pop …
2024-09-22: 2024 W38: One or two wasps § Every spring I’ll notice one or two wasps investigating particular area of cracked cement directly …
2024-09-15: 2024 W37: In full bloom § This weeknote is almost entirely tech and TV. Apologies in advance. § I have been on a two year …
2024-09-08: 2024 W36: Culverts & bioswales § We haven’t had a moon all week. I didn’t notice until Thursday when I was taking my garbage can …
2024-09-01: 2024 W35: Sensorially rich § Rabbit rabbit. Happy September. § Some quick follow-up on last week’s fall foliage …
2024-08-25: 2024 W34: Almost cozy § Temperatures were in the 60s and 70s for most of this week. It made it feel like we are in the …
2024-08-18: 2024 W33: Fiddly & frustrating § Throughout July our squash plants were all healthy and productive—the pattypans being a particular …
2024-08-11: 2024 W32: Spindly stubs § Last Sunday Caroline and I went to the zoo for an event organized by her school to “celebrate” …
2024-08-04: 2024 W31: Buzzing cacophony § It is that brief part of the summer where all of the cicadas and katydids have emerged from the …
2024-07-28: 2024 W30: Home § Driving home east from Tadoussac we visited two more cities, staying one night in each. First, …
2024-07-21: 2024 W29: Canada § On Monday Caroline and I packed up the car and drove north for Canada. § First, Toronto! We …
2024-07-14: 2024 W28: Married § Caroline and I got married yesterday! All of the pomp and circumstance made for a singularly …
2024-07-07: 2024 W27: Ambient anxiety § Holding out four months since my last one, I caught a nasty cold at the beginning of the week. The …
2024-06-30: 2024 W26: Nibbling insects § Monday was my one year anniversary at my current job. It is wild to think about the variety of …
2024-06-23: 2024 W25: Art feud § Temperatures were in the 90s every day this week. The year’s longest days were also its hottest by …
2024-06-16: 2024 W24: Like real garlic § I found this season’s first tiny cherry tomato. I also dug up a garlic bulb, maybe a few days …
2024-06-09: 2024 W23: Uncomplicated, poignant, and bizarre § I’ve developed a symbiotic relationship with one very specific robin. While continuing to fix up …
2024-06-02: 2024 W22: A big sticky arduous mess § We got all of the mulch down just in time for a week of rain. As we waited out the dreary weather, …
2024-05-26: 2024 W21: A mysterious package § The garlic plants are sending out scapes and I picked my first ripe strawberries of the season. At …
2024-05-19: 2024 W20: Zap straps § A busy week of celebrations. Our bridal shower, Mother’s Day, and my birthday. § Did you know …
2024-05-12: 2024 W19: Leafy sprout § I’m back with another new recipe to use up excess quail eggs, a problem I’m sure many of you have. …
2024-05-05: 2024 W18: Nocturnal noshing § My annual springtime battle with the neighborhood deer community kicked off this week with some …
2024-04-28: 2024 W17: Mountain View for rocket scientists § My visit to NASA Glenn was surprising. The security screening process for visitors is an …
2024-04-21: 2024 W16: Rainforest ambiance § The hostas are sprouting, the brunnera is flowering, and the trout lillies have absolutely taken …
2024-04-14: 2024 W15: A serious spectacle § The solar eclipse was a serious spectacle. I’m glad I quickly learned that getting decent photos …
2024-04-07: 2024 W14: Dobson's faces § The solar eclipse is tomorrow. Work this week was all preparation punctuated by anxiously …
2024-03-31: 2024 W13: Culinary prank § Happy Easter § I started some groundcherry seeds again, after finding no success with them last …
2024-03-24: 2024 W12: Electric British fusion § I spent three days in Boston on a work trip. After I get through TSA—and hurriedly redress at one …
2024-03-17: 2024 W11: Digitally fiddling § A big week. Mar10, Pi Day, the Ides of March, and St. Patrick’s Day. § If you don’t count the …
2024-03-10: 2024 W10: 100 screaming macaws § I’m still riding out the long tail of my cold. Nevertheless, I went on a four mile hike on Sunday …
2024-03-03: 2024 W9: Wacky passage § Wow, this February felt 3.57% longer than normal. § I found three eggs when checking on my quails …
2024-02-25: 2024 W8: Antsy § An antsy week with stints of wanting to re-arrange my house and take a vacation. On Saturday I was …
2024-02-18: 2024 W7: Chilly driftwood § Lot of experiments with projection mapping this week. MadMapper is such fun, powerful, mature …
2024-02-11: 2024 W6: Cold snowy mysteries § I attended a Vision Pro demo at my local Apple store on Tuesday. Over the eight months since its …
2024-02-04: 2024 W5: Weird and unrefined § I would like to see hardware make a comeback this year. The past decade has been full of …
2024-01-28: 2024 W4: Hampered § I participated in a focus group discussing ways to help hands-on interactive museums design great …
2024-01-21: 2024 W3: Millennial Americana § Temperatures dropped by twenty degrees overnight and then stayed in the single digits all week. …
2024-01-14: 2024 W2: Phlegmy slush § All rain all week. Everything is damp. My boots squish with each step, the hallways at work are …
2024-01-07: 2024 W1: A very midwestern reflex § 2024. A leap year. The other night I had the famous dream where I found a secret extra room in my …
2024-01-01: 52 photos of 2023
2023-12-31: 2023 W52 § The last week of the year, huh? § I got Caroline a Playdate for the holidays. After being …
2023-12-24: 2023 W51 § Happy winter, officially. From here on out, each day will be just a little bit brighter. § I read …
2023-12-17: 2023 W50 § I got the opportunity to break out my calipers and fire up Fusion 360 to make a seriously …
2023-12-10: 2023 W49 § This marks my first full year of writing these weeknotes. I expected them to be a catalyst for …
2023-12-03: 2023 W48 § There was a big winter storm overnight Monday. All of the schools were closed the next morning. I …
2023-11-26: 2023 W47 § Happy Thanksgiving § What would a synthetic cairn look like? Can we take anything from the …
2023-11-19: 2023 W46 § Had a big meeting to kick off a two year collaboration with the Alliance of Immersives in Museums. …
2023-11-12: 2023 W45 § Some seriously smoky steak searing prompted me to check on my smoke detector. It turns out it …
2023-11-05: 2023 W44 § I spent Tuesday evening pulling up the remainder of my vegetables in advance of an overnight …
2023-10-29: 2023 W43 § It is mayfly season along Lake Erie. Be mindful when opening your mouth outdoors lest you might …
2023-10-22: 2023 W42 § I pickled a couple jars of cascabella peppers from the garden. I’m pretty sure I did everything …
2023-10-15: 2023 W41 § I am frankly pumped about this sweater weather. Caroline and I spent a few brisk evenings …
2023-10-12: Netflix plans to open physical locations for “live experiences” It is an easy idea to mock: “Netflix is trying to become Blockbuster thirteen years after killing …
2023-10-08: 2023 W40 § My tomatillos plants are finally, for the first time this year, beginning to grow fruit. In past …
2023-10-01: 2023 W39 § I have been thinking about planting a fruit tree next year. Maybe a pear? They have both a higher …
2023-09-25: Getty Images, still suing Stability AI, launches an image generation service Emilia David, The Verge: Getty Images is partnering with Nvidia to launch Generative AI by Getty …
2023-09-24: 2023 W38 § It is now autumn. Welcome to my autumnal blog. Inspired by Matt Kirkland and the fact that a perk …
2023-09-22: Alexa’s evolution Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge: At its fall hardware event Wednesday, [Amazon] revealed an …
2023-09-20: We need amateur architecture Samuel Hughes: Architecture is a public art, a vernacular art, and a background art: it is created …
2023-09-17: 2023 W37 § My reMarkable tablet is seeing less use each week. I am now back to primarily using a physical …
2023-09-10: 2023 W36 § I saw the Cleveland National Airshow for the first time in… 15 years? I really don’t …
2023-09-03: 2023 W35 § We have secured a wedding date: July 13, 2024. § It’s Labor Day weekend which means it is time …
2023-09-01: The dolphin embassy Matt Webb continues to write the internet’s most thought provoking meditations on AI: If we are …
2023-08-27: 2023 W34 § I visited “the smelliest food festival in America” and purchased a handful of different garlic …
2023-08-20: 2023 W33 § We harvested five pounds of produce from the garden this week, nearly all of which were tomatoes. …
2023-08-13: 2023 W32 § The soil in my yard is something like 80% clay, 20% large rocks. The process of creating my …
2023-08-06: 2023 W31 § Fresh peaches might be the best fruit. The key is to pick them ripe which makes shipping them next …
2023-08-01: Upgrading the steam-powered smart assistants Ina Fried, Axios: Google plans to overhaul its Assistant to focus on using generative AI …
2023-07-30: 2023 W30 § Our first red cherry tomatoes have ripened. They are a few weeks behind our crop from last year …
2023-07-23: 2023 W29 § Each of our pepper varieties—jalapeño, cayenne, poblano, banana, and Hungarian—are all growing …
2023-07-19: Llama 2 It is not the most creative name they could have chosen, but Meta released a successor to their open …
2023-07-16: 2023 W28 § My makrut lime plant has started growing a handful of tiny little fruits for the first time. I …
2023-07-12: Social media’s Disney World Ernie Smith: The thing that I think made the internet such an interesting place in its early years …
2023-07-09: 2023 W27 § I touched a floppy drive for the first time ever. A lot of my new job, at the moment, involves …
2023-07-03: Voice cloning vs. voice synthesis Madhumita Murgia, Financial Times: Greg Marston, a British voice actor with more than 20 years’ …
2023-07-02: 2023 W26 § It has been a bit of a hectic week. I started my new job which has been great but, you know, it’s …
2023-06-28: Google gives up on AR glasses Google is no longer working to build an augmented reality hardware platform. They will be shifting …
2023-06-25: 2023 W25 § I will be starting my new job next week. There is no denying I will miss these past few weeks of …
2023-06-23: The Vision Pro SDK Apple: Apple today announced the availability of new software tools and technologies that enable …
2023-06-22: USDA approves cultivated meat It is important to begin by noting that I am not a vegetarian—I eat meat. Still, there is something …
2023-06-21: More on regulatory capture Billy Perrigo, Time: The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has spent the last month touring world capitals …
2023-06-20: The sum of Frank Paul Ford: Dad wrote opaque, elliptical, experimental works of enormous profanity… The upshot was …
2023-06-19: Physicality and spacial computing I am surprised that, at least according to all reporting I’ve seen, Apple isn’t planning to build …
2023-06-18: 2023 W24 § I harvested our first sugar snap peas and strawberries of the season. There isn’t much, this early …
2023-06-16: A truly free LLaMA I was excited when StabilityAI—the company behind Stable Diffusion—launched StableLM, their open …
2023-06-15: OpenAI adds functions Watching language model tooling slowly mature, it is interesting to see a progressive constraining …
2023-06-14: Commercially available information Byron Tau and Dustin Volz, The Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal: The vast amount of …
2023-06-13: Check your work OpenAI: In recent years, large language models have greatly improved in their ability to perform …
2023-06-12: MusicGen Facebook has released another open source model as they work to commodify generative AI. Facebook …
2023-06-11: 2023 W23 § I can see fruit beginning to develop on our blackberry, strawberry, and snap pea plants. I can’t …
2023-06-09: One down, three to go It is official: Cortana is dead. Microsoft: We are making some changes to Windows that will impact …
2023-06-08: The Frost AI generated video still lags behind AI imagery by quite a large margin. Still, some artists are …
2023-06-07: AirPods vs. camcorders As the dust settles on Apple’s Vision Pro headset announcement, critical reactions are mostly all …
2023-06-06: WWDC 2023 Apple kicked off its annual WWDC conference on Monday. Here are my initial impressions after …
2023-06-05: Planet Money’s AI podcast NPR’s Planet Money podcast has just concluded a three part series where they used generative AI to …
2023-06-04: 2023 W22 § School is out. Classes are now completely finished for the year. I just have a few meetings and …
2023-06-02: Ancillary hopes for WWDC The conversation around Apple’s upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference understandably centers …
2023-06-01: Psychological engineering Adam Mastroianni: Design involves both technological engineering and psychological engineering, and …
2023-05-31: LLM NPC Guanzhi Wang et al.: We introduce Voyager, the first LLM-powered embodied lifelong learning agent …
2023-05-30: The Pudding design guide Ilia Blinderman, from the excellent visual journalism publication The Pudding, shares some of what …
2023-05-29: Tree-of-thought Jieyi Long: In this paper, we introduce the Tree-of-Thought (ToT) framework, a novel approach aimed …
2023-05-28: 2023 W21 § This was our last full week of school. There are only two more days of classes next week and then …
2023-05-26: A new microphone Last month, when the viral AI-generated “Drake” song was blowing up, the musician Grimes …
2023-05-25: OpenAI and regulatory capture Sam Altman has been spending the past few weeks advocating in favor of AI regulations. OpenAI: In …
2023-05-24: Build was boring It is hard to deny that Google killed it during their IO conference earlier this month. They were …
2023-05-23: A long, red night The anonymous writer behind the brr.fyi blog has been writing about their experience living and …
2023-05-22: AI in the classroom (V) The New York City Public School system has decided to reverse its ban on ChatGPT. David C. Banks, …
2023-05-21: 2023 W20 § My birthday was on Tuesday! § I finally caved and bought myself a reMarkable 2 tablet. Some …
2023-05-19: AMP David Pierce tells the story of Google’s AMP initiative: After a decade of newspapers disappearing, …
2023-05-18: Alien logic Chris Wiley, The New Yorker: The artist Charlie Engman is one of the few photographers who have …
2023-05-17: Personal voice To celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Apple announced a handful of forthcoming iOS …
2023-05-16: Ground zero Douglas, writing for the blog A Mindful Monkey, shares some observations on the task of raising a …
2023-05-15: Claude 100K Just last Monday I was commending Mosaic for their “StoryWriter” language model with its huge 65,000 …
2023-05-14: 2023 W19 § Now that we’ve finally had some nice weather, I have been able to measure that, on sunny days, the …
2023-05-12: Early computer art Amy Goodchild published a comprehensive primer on the emergence of computer art in the 1950s and …
2023-05-11: Google IO 2023 Google held their annual IO developer conference yesterday and the theme was, unquestionably, …
2023-05-10: MLC LLM and local assistants The Machine Learning Compilation blog: Significant progress has been made in the field of …
2023-05-09: Dribbling droids AI researchers from Google’s DeepMind team used reinforcement learning to teach simulated …
2023-05-08: MPT-7B While I wish development efforts would coalesce around a single, capable, open source language …
2023-05-07: 2023 W18 § Rabbit rabbit. Happy May. § I drove a pickup truck for the first time. I needed to rent one from …
2023-05-05: We have no moat Yesterday, SemiAnalysis shared a leaked document that purports to be an internal memo written by an …
2023-05-04: Stopped in its tracks Topher Sanders and Dan Schwartz, ProPublica: Every day across America, [trains] park in the middle …
2023-05-03: Pi Inflection is a new AI startup run by Mustafa Suleyman, Karén Simonyan, and Reid Hoffman. Their new …
2023-05-02: Socra-GPT Researchers at MIT and Columbia University recently published a study measuring whether using an AI …
2023-05-01: The age of mechanical reproduction James Reeves: The other day I was sleepy and, after a long day of grading, I thought I was reading …
2023-04-30: 2023 W17 § Caroline and I went to the local nature reserve for the first time in a few weeks—it is suddenly …
2023-04-28: Agents, tools, and security Matt Webb recently shared an approach to controlling smart home infrastructure with language …
2023-04-27: Humane Benjamin Mayo: Humane, the secretive startup founded by ex-Apple software design chief Imran …
2023-04-26: The Snapchat shoehorn Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: Launched last week to global users after initially being a subscriber-only …
2023-04-25: The Wild West Nilay Patel, The Verge: Here’s the basics: there’s a new track called “Heart on My Sleeve” by a …
2023-04-24: Goodbye, APIs Nearly six months after the launch of ChatGPT—after Bard, Bing, Claude, LLaMA, and StabilityLM are …
2023-04-23: 2023 W16 § It was snowing on Tuesday and then 80 °F on Thursday. That just doesn’t feel like something that …
2023-04-21: BuzzFeed’s mullet Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson, The New York Times: BuzzFeed is shutting down its news …
2023-04-20: StableLM Speaking of open source language models… Stability.ai: Today, Stability AI released a new …
2023-04-19: A harrowing broadcast From Bret Devereaux’s excellent series on the history and mechanics of farming: In places where …
2023-04-18: Dolly and RedPajama Databricks: Today, we’re releasing Dolly 2.0, the first open source, instruction-following LLM, …
2023-04-17: Magi and the Google Inbox strategy Nico Grant, The New York Times: A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most …
2023-04-16: 2023 W15 § This week was a nice sneak preview of summer. Every day was in the mid-to-high-70s and sunny. Most …
2023-04-14: In which Stanford researchers recreate Westworld Westworld on Wikipedia: In the 2050s, Delos Inc. operates several theme parks, including the …
2023-04-13: Auto-GPT From the GitHub repository: Auto-GPT is an experimental open-source application showcasing the …
2023-04-12: Anthropic’s ambitions Kyle Wiggers, Devin Coldewey, and Manish Singh at TechCrunch: AI research startup Anthropic aims to …
2023-04-11: More on Bard Jennifer Elias, CNBC: Google is reshuffling the reporting structure of its virtual assistant unit — …
2023-04-10: A calculator for words Simon Willison: I like to think of language models like ChatGPT as a calculator for words. This is …
2023-04-09: 2023 W14 § Happy Easter This was my first week back at work after a blissfully long spring break. It was …
2023-04-07: Filigree Matt Webb: AI makes the composition of quote-creative-unquote works cheap. But AI is the …
2023-04-06: Silicon librarian Jack Clark: Financial data behemoth Bloomberg has built ‘BloombergGPT’, a language …
2023-04-05: A Claude comparison I recently got access to Anthropic’s Claude language model. A few thought on how it compares to …
2023-04-04: Time Sense Thoughtworks: Time Sense is a wearable sensory headband which allows the wearer to feel the passing …
2023-04-03: The letter Ross Douthat: A collection of Silicon Valley notables, including Elon Musk, just signed an open …
2023-04-02: 2023 W13 § I got a bunch of seeds planted and set up under grow lights in the basement. Here is what I am …
2023-03-31: Buzzfeed and AI A little over two months ago I wrote this in response to Buzzfeed piloting AI personalized quizzes: …
2023-03-30: Wavelength Wavelength is a new app built specifically for group chats. This isn’t something that would …
2023-03-29: Beauty too cheap to meter Scott Alexander: MANN: Air, you say you like generating AI art. What do you think of people who …
2023-03-28: Design vs. operations, augmented intelligence Patrick McGee & Tim Bradshaw, reporting for Financial Times: After seven years in development — …
2023-03-27: Bard I got access to Google’s Bard language model late last week and I have been spending some time …
2023-03-26: 2023 W12 § Spring break update: one week down, one to go. After almost a year of slow, puttering progress, I …
2023-03-24: ChatGPT plugins Just a few days ago, I was thinking about how great it would be if OpenAI were to integrate …
2023-03-23: Ernie Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review: On March 16, Robin Li, Baidu’s cofounder and CEO, took the stage …
2023-03-22: Bill Gates on AI I don’t typically think of Bill Gates as someone prone to making hyperbolic claims. His recent …
2023-03-21: Copilot versus autopilot There has been something bouncing around in my head in the days since both Google and Microsoft …
2023-03-20: AI in the classroom (IV) Me: How might education change as a result of increasing artificial intelligence capabilities? In …
2023-03-19: 2023 W11 § Spring break! With a full two weeks off, I should put together a list of things I would like to …
2023-03-17: Microsoft Copilot To cap off a week of AI announcements from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Microsoft announced …
2023-03-16: Claude It does not seem like an ideal strategy for Anthropic to publish their big Claude announcement on …
2023-03-15: GPT-4 As was widely rumored, OpenAI officially announced GPT-4 yesterday. OpenAI: We’ve created GPT-4, …
2023-03-14: Alpaca Speaking of Sydney’s Law… Simon Willison: The biggest weakness in the LLaMA models …
2023-03-13: Sydney's Law It has become clear that we need something like the inverse of Hofstadter’s law to describe …
2023-03-12: 2023 W10 § Week ten! This upcoming week will be the last one before a nice, two week long, spring break. I …
2023-03-10: PaLM-E Danny Driess et al.: We propose embodied language models to directly incorporate real-world …
2023-03-09: More on voice assistants At Microsoft, whose chief executive Satya Nadella declared in 2016 that “bots are the new apps”, it …
2023-03-08: Faust parameters Scott Aaronson: I said that my “Faust parameter” — the probability I’d accept of existential …
2023-03-07: Risks and hazards Christophe Haubursin and Gina Barton at Vox: For decades, US playground designers have worked on …
2023-03-06: LLaMA was LLeaked Hey, so, remember when I mentioned LLaMA, Meta’s ChatGPT alternative? I thought it was …
2023-03-05: 2023 W9 § I have been testing out the Kagi search engine this week, using it exclusively instead of Google. …
2023-03-03: Fuzzy processors Rohit Krishnan, writing at Strange Loop Canon: I have an overarching theory of LLMs… they are fuzzy …
2023-03-02: Sol LeWitt’s prompts Amy Goodchild: Sol LeWitt was an artist who worked across many mediums but is probably most famous …
2023-03-01: My AI Snapchat has a new AI chatbot. They are, in hindsight, the perfect company to experiment with …
2023-02-28: Chiaroscuro Nicholas Guttenberg at Crosslabs: [Stable Diffusion] has an interesting limitation that seems to …
2023-02-27: AI assistants and incentives Ezra Klein at The New York Times: The question at the core of the [Kevin] Roose/Sydney chat is: Who …
2023-02-26: 2023 W8 § I started playing The Last of Us Part II and have been enjoying it much more than part I. One of …
2023-02-24: Corecore Kieran Press-Reynolds at No Bells: In the last month or so, the [corecore] scene has transformed as …
2023-02-23: Generative everything This X Does Not Exist: Using generative adversarial networks (GAN), we can learn how to create …
2023-02-22: How should you think about prompt engineering? I have been thinking about the practice of “prompt engineering” recently. Specifically, whether …
2023-02-21: What is next for Bard? Now that Sydney, Microsoft’s AI search assistant, has receded from view after a spectacular rise, I …
2023-02-20: Microsoft gets cold feet It was, unfortunately, inevitable: Bing AI has been tamed. From a Microsoft blog post: We want to …
2023-02-19: 2023 W7 § Here we are, mid-February, with temperatures in the 50’s and 60’s all week, where every year I …
2023-02-17: Streams Om Malik: Across the web, one can see “streams” losing their preeminence. Social networks are …
2023-02-16: Sydney, Venom, and Riley Okay, I wouldn’t normally link to two articles in a row from Stratechery but Ben Thompson’s article …
2023-02-15: How much accuracy do we need from LLMs? In an article this week on Stratechery, Ben Thompson does a great job of articulating something I …
2023-02-14: Gaussian noise Eryk Salvaggio: Diffusion models all start in the same place: a single frame of random, …
2023-02-13: Open source seeds Michaela Haas at World Sensorium: Just like software development has been co-opted by a few global …
2023-02-12: 2023 W6 § I got a couple of new smart home devices this week, mostly because of some leftover Amazon credit. …
2023-02-11: Lossy algorithms Ted Chiang at The New Yorker: Imagine that you’re about to lose your access to the Internet …
2023-02-10: Live from Paris Google’s highly anticipated “Live from Paris” event was on Wednesday. The marketing copy set high …
2023-02-09: Poe Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: Q&A platform Quora has opened up public access to its new AI chatbot …
2023-02-08: The new Bing Yusuf Mehdi at Microsoft: Today, we’re launching an all new, AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge …
2023-02-07: Google makes its move First, Google’s response to ChatGPT — Bard Sundar Pichai: We’ve been working on an experimental …
2023-02-06: AI’s social effects Lars Doucet writes about his predictions for the near-term future of the internet: What happens …
2023-02-05: 2023 W5 § This week I came down with one of the minor illnesses that plagues all elementary schools. My …
2023-02-04: Google and Bing Jennifer Elias, reporting for CNBC: Google is testing new artificial intelligence-powered chat …
2023-02-03: Shutterstock and Getty Images Ingrid Lunden, reporting for TechCrunch: Customers of Shutterstock’s Creative Flow online design …
2023-02-02: Rethinking search It turns out, Google published a research paper back in 2021 detailing how an AI-based information …
2023-02-01: OpenAI’s classifier From OpenAI’s announcement: We’ve trained a classifier to distinguish between text written by a …
2023-01-31: Baidu, too Zheping Huang, reporting for Bloomberg: [Baidu Inc.] plans to debut a ChatGPT-style application in …
2023-01-30: Text-to-music Agostinelli et al. at Google Research: We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music …
2023-01-29: 2023 W4 § This was our first truly snowy week of the season. Not cleaning out the garage last fall truly …
2023-01-28: AI staff writers Connie Guglielmo at CNET: In November, one of our editorial teams, CNET Money, launched a test …
2023-01-27: ChatGPT esquire Bob Allyn, reporting for NPR: Joshua Browder, the CEO of the New York-based startup DoNotPay, …
2023-01-26: Marcus and Booch on AGI timelines From a recent debate between Gary Marcus and Grady Booch on AGI timelines: Marcus: I get that AGI …
2023-01-25: Microsoft and OpenAI make it official Confirming the recent rumors Microsoft and OpenAI officially announced that they are expanding their …
2023-01-24: Augmented reality is always just around the corner Matthew Ball writes about why it can seem like AR/VR technology is perpetually “only a few …
2023-01-23: Larry and Sergey to the rescue? Nico Grant, reporting for The New York Times: Last month, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s …
2023-01-22: 2023 W3 § I have tried, a couple of times, to play the Last of Us video game but I always bounce off of the …
2023-01-21: LangChain LangChain is an open source project designed to provide interoperability between large language …
2023-01-20: Atlas throws James Vincent at The Verge writes: In a glossy new video, [Boston Dynamics] has shown off its …
2023-01-19: Claude Riley Goodside and Spencer Papay write: Anthropic, an AI startup co-founded by former employees of …
2023-01-18: AI in the classroom (III) Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times: It is now not enough for an essay to have just a …
2023-01-17: The story behind the iPhone’s keyboard Cedric Chin writes about the development of the original iPhone’s keyboard: Nobody on the …
2023-01-16: Casting gourds For whatever reason, I have never had the brain for mold making; any kind of intuitive understanding …
2023-01-15: 2023 W2 § No work next Monday for Martin Luther King Day and then a “work from home” faculty work day on …
2023-01-14: This voice doesn't exist Eleven Labs recently shared a demo of their new voice synthesis AI. It is worth listening to the …
2023-01-13: Stephen Wolfram weighs in I wrote in December about how ChatGPT could be improved by routing relevant questions to Wolfram …
2023-01-12: About those OpenAI rumors Semafor: Microsoft has been in talks to invest $10 billion into the owner of ChatGPT… The …
2023-01-11: Open assistant LAION-AI, the non-profit organization that created the original dataset behind Stable Diffusion, …
2023-01-10: Language models & spreadsheets John Naughton, writing for The Guardian: [ChatGPT] reminds me, oddly enough, of spreadsheet …
2023-01-09: Are any ads GDPR compliant? Jeff Kaufman wrote a fascinating piece arguing that nearly all online advertisement is probably …
2023-01-08: 2023 W1 § Back to teaching after two weeks of winter vacation. Although, as always, I wish the vacation was …
2023-01-07: 120 microns Ann Gibbons, writing for Science.org: Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the …
2023-01-06: Digital narration for Apple Books Apple is introducing automatic narration of select books in their library. I expect this to …
2023-01-05: Microsoft making moves Dina Bass, reporting for Bloomberg: Microsoft Corp. is preparing to add OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot to …
2023-01-04: Frozen knobs Take a moment to consider the following questions before you click: If you were tasked with …
2023-01-03: Distributed large language models Petals is an open source project that allows you to run large language models on standard consumer …
2023-01-02: Samuel Pepys' diary Pepys' diary is a website, newsletter, and RSS feed that publishes, in real time, diary entries from …
2023-01-01: 2022 W52 Happy new year! § The Pocket Operator has become my newest obsession. I had forgotten how much I …
2022-12-31: 1993 John Naughton writes: 2023 looks like being more like 1993 than any other year in recent history. …
2022-12-30: Miscellany – December 30, 2022 § It was super warm outside today. Well, okay, it was 57 °F but for December in Ohio that is about …
2022-12-29: Prompts are not proprietary A common belief is that the most valuable proprietary information powering many AI products is …
2022-12-28: 4.2 gigabytes Oblomovka on Stable Diffusion: I understand that people worry that large models built on …
2022-12-27: AI research assistants There have been a number of new AI search engine demos released recently. As I have written about …
2022-12-26: Text is deterministic, images are probabilistic Ben Thompson, from his recent interview with Daniel Gross Nat Friedman: And text is inherently a …
2022-12-25: Merry Christmas! Qwerty is going to be so sad when I take the tree down.
2022-12-24: 2022 W51 Remember how last week I mentioned that I successfully got through my final week of classes without …
2022-12-23: Watermarking GPT Scott Aaronson, in a lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, describes a project he has been …
2022-12-22: Analog diffusion I spent a good chunk of my day yesterday experimenting with Analog Diffusion — a Stable Diffusion …
2022-12-21: The devaluation of text Here is another thread related to what I wrote about yesterday. Even if text generation AI is …
2022-12-20: The importance of originality "The fall …
2022-12-19: The birth of new artistic mediums Artist Agnieszka Pilat writing for Artnet: Whenever a new medium is created, its context is an old …
2022-12-18: Language models and web search Since first using ChatGPT I have been interested in how much improvement would be possible if: The …
2022-12-17: 2022 W50 This was a strange week, as expected, with lots of student absences due to the flu, RSV, covid, and …
2022-12-16: Embracing AI in the classroom (Ⅱ) Zeynep Tufekci, writing for the New York Times, presents another way generative AI tools can be …
2022-12-15: The constraints of generative AI Eryk Salvaggio compares the process of creating with generative AI to creative play inside of a …
2022-12-14: Open source large language models Stanislas Polu has some predictions about the state of large language models next year. The only …
2022-12-13: AI collaborators Onformative Studio shares its expirence using a generative AI to create 3D sculptures: We were …
2022-12-12: Technology and extrinsic motivation Matt Yglesias on how technological progress might change higher education: The past couple of …
2022-12-11: The professionalization of GPT Sam Kriss on how, as GPT models have become more accurate, they have become less compelling: I …
2022-12-10: 2022 W49 Next week is the last week before winter break, not that I am counting. I made some homemade pizza …
2022-12-09: What would a forward-looking technology education look like? I teach a technology class to students from Kindergarten to fifth grade. The accelerated development …
2022-12-08: AI and the future of education Zero Trust Homework Here’s an example of what homework might look like under this new paradigm. …