There's a photograph of me from Christmas 2004. I'm twenty-six, grinning at the camera, holding a fifty-pound punching bag my wife had just given me. Two weeks before that picture I'd had surgery to remove a tumor. The doctor's instruction was that I was not to lift anything over ten pounds. I don't remember deciding … Continue reading Fifty Pounds
Tag: Blog
Halftime
I turned forty-eight today and spent almost all of it in my own house. My son made waffles. My family gave me cards, and the things written in them were better than the presents (and the presents were awesome too!), which is a thing you can say honestly at forty-eight and mean it. Then we … Continue reading Halftime
Ripe
A few weeks ago at an estate sale I found a notebook that had to be from the seventies or eighties. Somebody had owned it for forty-some years and never written a word in it. Not one page. It had been sitting in a house that long, blank the whole time, and now it was … Continue reading Ripe
Estimating
There's a finding in AI research called emergent misalignment. Researchers took an aligned language model and fine-tuned it on one narrow thing: examples of insecure computer code. Bad code, nothing else. No malice anywhere in the training data. The model didn't just start writing bad code. It started giving harmful advice on subjects that had … Continue reading Estimating
Chemotherapy And Donuts
In 2005 I was twenty-six years old and the youngest person in the chemotherapy room by about forty years. I can walk through all of it now. The doctor telling me. The surgery. Getting the port put in that they'd run the chemo through. Driving myself to treatment, then to work, then home. The discomfort, … Continue reading Chemotherapy And Donuts
David Willis 