Gwern Branwen – How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI’s Trajectory
Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you’ve read his blog, you know he’s one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive. In order to protect Gwern’s anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over […]
BERTs Are Generative In-Context Learners
Abstract:While in-context learning is commonly associated with causal language models, such as GPT, we demonstrate that this capability also ’emerges’ in masked language models. Through an embarrassingly simple inference technique, we enable an existing masked model, DeBERTa, to perform generative tasks without additional training or architectural changes. Our evaluation reveals that the masked and causal […]
Lessons from My First Exit
In April of this year, I sold TinyPilot, the bootstrapped hardware company I founded and ran for four years. I wrote a post in May that told the story of the sale, but I’d like to share more about the practical lessons I learned from the experience. In this post, I’m sharing what went well, […]
Vanessa Freudenberg’s SqueakJS Paper Wins ACM Sigplan Most Notable Paper Award [pdf]
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I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100
Allegory of Failure during the Pilgrimage of Life, by Monogrammist HSR, 1519 A few months ago, I was adapting an official guide for an AWS service. Specifically, integrating OpenSearch with Amplify. I worked through the guide, and modified and debugged it for my own purposes. A few weeks later, I received an AWS bill for […]
GOG’s Preservation Program Is the DRM-Free Store Refocusing on the Classics
The classic PC games market is “in a sorry state,” according to DRM-free and classic-minded storefront GOG. Small games that aren’t currently selling get abandoned, and compatibility issues arise as technology moves forward or as one-off development ideas age like milk. Classic games are only 20 percent of GOG’s catalog, and the firm hasn’t actually […]
A Woman Who Defined the Great Depression
Sanora Babb spent her life dealing with all the multifarious daily perils that prevent writers from writing. She was raised in poverty by a mother who was only 16 when she gave birth to her and an abusive father who spent his days playing semi-pro baseball and gambling. From the age she could walk, she […]
Smaller Than Pixel Art: Sub-Pixel Art [video]
Go-Safeweb
DISCLAIMER: This is not an officially supported Google product. go-safeweb is a collection of libraries for writing secure-by-default HTTP servers in Go. Contributing This project is in an early stage. We are currently not accepting any contributions. The flexibility of Go’s net/http package allows users to quickly implement HTTP servers. Responses are then written simply […]
JSON for Classic C++
json.cpp is an anti-modern JSON parsing / serialization library for C++. This project is a reaction against https://github.com/nlohmann/json/ which provides a modern C++ library for JSON. Our alternative: Compiles 10x faster. An object that does nothing with JSON except calling nlohmann::ordered_json::parse will take at minimum 1200 ms to compile. This is an unacceptably slow minimum […]