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
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
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
May 2016. The vice president over our group called and asked me to come to his office. He hardly ever talked to me. I knew before I stood up. I knocked, he waved me in, and he said it from behind his desk — times are tough, the decisions have been hard, we're going to … Continue reading Take A Nap
The rescue had named her Cookie, because her face looked a little like a chocolate chip cookie, which it did. We changed it. Neither of us wanted to spend the next decade calling out a dessert every time we opened the back door. She became Sabrina — half basset, half beagle, picked up because our … Continue reading She Hated The Car
David Willis 