My wife had a chopsaw and knew how to use it. I didn't. Twenty-some years later I build most of what needs building around here, and I still can't name one thing I've taught her back.
Tag: achieving
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
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
Too Slow
Slow — “My father used to get frustrated with how slowly I washed dishes. He was right, and I was slow on purpose.”
The Wrong People Are Shipping
Mid-2000s, late twenties, and I got pulled into a funnel. Blogs were taking off. Everybody had an email list and a free PDF and I wanted the free prize inside, so I signed up, and then I read the thing. The copy was ridiculous. Overwritten, wandering, wild claims stacked on top of each other, and … Continue reading The Wrong People Are Shipping
