Posts

About a year ago, 2024-08-22, I was reading Leopold Aschenbrenner’s post1 on AGI and I had jotted down a musing about a scaling law observations, but I forgot to write about it. I found my note today. So I get that it is possible to look at charts comparing compute and performance and many conclude scaling laws mean AGI is inevitable. I like Yann Lecun’s perspective here that if transformer models are giant lookup tables, then making them bigger will make them appear more impressive, but this is not sustainable....

This year, and last, Ive been glad Databricks changed one simple thing that has nothing to do with fancy ML algorithms or distributed computing optimization, and thats the ability to interact with workspace files on the python level. Prior to Databricks 11.3 , the workspace could only contain notebooks and folders but no plain files. If you used python to do import os os.getcwd() you would see /databricks/driver and you could just use this cluster file system to copy files from outside blob systems for python file processing like say to read some csv into pandas and convert that to a spark dataframe but there was no notion of interacting with the actual file system where your notebooks lived (aka the workspace)....

I was recently trying to understand why the asking cost on an insurance claim for a set of hand and wrist xrays, was quite high. The provider put this on two associated bills , and the amounts looked quite steep also per my look at https://www.fairhealthconsumer.org/ , according to the lookup for the two Current Procedural Terminology or CPT codes, on the invoices. One cool thing though is, that recently I looked at the provider’s page here,...

Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You from maybe over 10 years now, conveyed that Steve Jobs was using hindsight in recommending you to follow your passion. Don’t be a firefighter, astronaut or ballerina. Just do what let’s you put food on the table. Cal’s later work is on doing reducing distractions and slowing down to meet your aims; less is more. Did Cal end up asking you to focus after all?...

DRAFT… Recently I went on a trip, to Kraków, where during the trip I got to try out the medical system and got to compare this with an experience in the U.S. too. In Kraków, I went on a traditional raft during the trip and prior to that, in the U.S. I was attempting to understand some long standing pain in my wrists. One of the things to do in the Polish countryside is to raft with the local Gorals1 who live in the forest areas, near the Poland/ Slovak border....