Ninety-three degrees in downtown Oklahoma City, and a question from Sunday's sermon I haven't been able to put down: is your preparation at the level of your expectation?
Fifty Pounds
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
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


