Month: January 2024

“Comparisons between different TinyStories models don’t suffer from the same confounding factors. Eldan and Li observed hints that networks with fewer layers but more neurons per layer were better at answering questions that required factual knowledge; conversely, networks with more layers and fewer neurons per layer were better at keeping track of characters and plot points from earlier in the story. Bhagavatula found this result especially intriguing. If it can be replicated in larger models, he said, “that would be a really cool result that could stem out of this work.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/tiny-language-models-thrive-with-gpt-4-as-a-teacher-20231005/?mc_cid=9201f43448&mc_eid=f83944a043

In a way we should have seen the quality and quantity issues with training data for AI models coming – after all, the jokes about unread Silicon Valley types who are just reinventing tired tropes as they never bothered to read a novel or history book all ring true for a reason.

“The ceremony tapped the same idealistic part of me that led me to quit my job and join the Army in the first place. I’m enough of a realist to know that this little assembly in an elementary school outside Pittsburgh doesn’t fix anything. Our recent wars were tragically misguided, and we remain a painfully divided country. Veterans will continue to struggle with myriad problems, and some will sadly choose to end pain that feels insurmountable.

Yes, I was inspired by the sense of unity, however transient, as the attendees gathered in a politically divided school district in a “battleground” state and yet all came together in a spirit of fraternity and appreciation.”

https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/guest-columns/2023/11/19/bardenwerper-veterans-iraq-afghanistan-army/stories/202311190011

It doesn’t seem like there will be swift rapprochement between the fringes of the US anytime soon (or really, any other nation, we’re all kinda stuck in this awkward phase into the 21st century). And, as alluring as the Fourth Turning and other theories are, I’m not sure that millennials will finally somehow resolve a fair number of our current challenges, although, it is possible that the last generation raised pre-internet may be best positioned to do so. But maybe, I’m wrong – maybe those millennials that have kids will finally forge sufficient compromises, for their kids’ sake.

“Ray reassured me that I was not crazy. Google results today do feel different from how they felt just five or six years ago for two major reasons. The first was Google’s response to the disinformation panic around the 2016 election, which involved questioning the notion that the most reliable information could be chosen by a form of popularity, meaning how many links a site received from other sites. As a result, the algorithm seemed to change its approach to links, especially when it came to news and sites offering legal, financial, or health advice, and instead paid more attention to what Google came to call E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.”

https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results

Don’t think the internet is going to totally collapse but I do think it is going to evolve into walled gardens, which will be a bit amusing as then it seems to resemble 19th century newspapers that espoused much more nationalist views than the faux-cosmpolitan vibe the likes of the NYT sought to give off.

“According to this brilliant conversation between Beth & Shawn Dougherty and Marc Barnes of New Polity, this is precisely the wrong way to look at it. For them, ontological waste does not, and in God’s world indeed cannot, exist; things are only waste in relation to goals, but never in and of themselves. Beth in a profound moment says about so-called food waste, “It’s not not there. When I devalue it, I unmake it. I deny its existence.” Even for the non-religious this must have the ring of truth. The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy, in which all material reality subsists, cannot be created or destroyed, only changed into different forms.

Gardening failures due to circumstances, which are enormously disappointing, and failures due to my weakness, which are even more so, land this now-dying or -dead organic material into the pile next to my house. When failure occurs, a quick snip and a toss later these leaves and plants and fruits find themselves, not in the trash can, but in the compost heap instead. I reflect on what caused this in the first place. As a result, I become a better gardener and my failure becomes earth.”

https://thebluescholar.substack.com/p/lessons-from-the-compost-heap

The resurgence of gardening should incur a tax break, somewhere, somehow. It just seems like one of the few win-win scenarios for pretty much every participant, including scavenging birds.

“With fewer insects, “we’d have less food,” said ecologist Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex. “We’d see yields dropping of all of these crops.”

And in nature, about 80% of wild plants rely on insects for pollination. “If insects continue to decline,” Goulson said, “expect some pretty dire consequences for ecosystems generally — and for people.”

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/INSECT-APOCALYPSE/egpbykdxjvq/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn

I don’t worry about a lot of climate change aspects or effects – this, ocean pollution/warming, depleting aquifers and a few others are ones that should be more alarming than really hot summers. Also, beautiful visuals in this one.

“We will likely have to accustom ourselves to a lower energy situation. If we’re manufacturing things and selling them to each other, maybe urbanization is viable [if we are manufacturing food in cities], but I don’t think it’s a long-term, sustainable solution. We’re looking at deurbanization unless there’s some miraculous ecomodernist energy transition. I’d like to think there’s still a place for towns and cities and a mixed landscape of geographic levels. I’m not massively into big cities because, in terms of consumption, they [draw on a great deal of resources from the developing world]. We need to relocalize urbanism so that towns have a real economic and ecological relationship with the hinterland.”

https://civileats.com/2023/11/15/re-localizing-the-food-system-to-fight-a-farm-free-future/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Could%20Dry-Farming%20Wheat%20in%20San%20Diego%20Seed%20a%20Local%20Grain%20Economy%3F&utm_campaign=CE%20Weekly%2020231115

Lab-grown meats scream Tower of Babel to me – not that it they are impossible, but I find it very difficult to believe that there are not unintended consequences, and, oh, by the way, such processes are actually more overall intensive than rearing a pig on a smallholding. We can all agree factory farming is immoral and unhealthy at best, and much reform must occur, but vats of pseudo-protein are not the solution. Soylent Green, anyone?

“One recent study found that farms up to 10ha in size are currently producing 55 per cent of the food supply calorically on 40 per cent of the agricultural land, consistent with the well-established ‘inverse productivity’ relationship with farm size. The underlying complexities are numerous, but it’s not true on the face of it that small-scale local farming can’t feed the world.”

https://theecologist.org/2023/nov/13/peasant-food-web

This is one of the truly fascinating things I have been tempted to dive into – can we avoid famine if we reform the food system?

“Second, attempts to single out one ethnic group for a national holiday may fall foul of the spirit—if not the letter—of the constitutional principle mandating equal treatment of all groups. Even if this is not the case, an Indigenous People’s Day seems almost guaranteed to foster divisiveness, rather than unity, because of the same tribal impulses that caused the ethnic strife in the first place. It is far better to encourage universal civic nationalism than to highlight differences between population groups. The recent addition of the Juneteenth holiday (celebrated on 19 June) to the national calendar is an excellent example of how to do this. Although the holiday is important to many black Americans, it’s not merely a “black” holiday. It marks the elimination of slavery—something all Americans can and should celebrate.”

https://quillette.com/2023/10/09/columbus-day-a-fraught-celebration/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter

It is an interesting what-if scenario if the Columbian exchange had never happened. However, the onus of proof that it was a good thing ultimately really is borne out by the state of life wherever such things did not occur, e.g., Central Asia, parts of China and Africa. Celebrating any historical figure is dubious – even saints had their issues – so perhaps if you really wanted to stress a more time-tested approach, never make a single holiday for a single person. They’ll inevitably let you down (unless you’re the Catholic Church, but then again, history doesn’t usually go in for trying to celebrate only saints).

“That last point is essential, because the social engineering mindset that has damaged our communities so deeply says, “I know what’s best for you. I’ll rescue you. You must be poor because you’re incapable of doing anything to help yourself, so I won’t even bother asking for your input.” I was struck by something in Lucas Rouggly’s When the Sirens Stop: A True Story of Restoration in North St. Louis, a moving memoir about Lucas’ neighbors on Enright Boulevard. A younger, very sincere, but perhaps less wise Lucas organized a block party. He insisted that everything be provided for free so that no one had to buy or contribute food. But he was stopped in his tracks by the neighborhood matriarch, Miss Sharon, who rebuked him: “Don’t you dare take away their chance to help own the block.” Lucas observed that Miss Sharon “knew the hearts of her neighbors, and she knew that they had something to offer.” He changed gears, recruiting various neighbors to bring side dishes and drinks, direct traffic, and set up a basketball hoop. A few neighbors formed a blues band and provided the entertainment! Others discreetly handed Lucas a little cash to cover hot dog costs and, having listened to Miss Sharon’s wisdom, he happily took it.”

https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-33-number-4/saving-st-louis-one-block-time

The most frustrating thing about current partisan discourse in US politics, and, well, elsewhere, is the bipolar swing between subtly racist tinges of “they can’t help themselves” when it comes to poor people of color, to the insane individualism of libertarians. We all benefit from some aspects of social cohesion and coordination. In many rich nations, both or multiple political parties do not care for fiscal balance and are fine milking the taxpayer base for as long as they can take it, blaming the other side to cloak their own part. We must not get distracted with the inanities of federal level anymore – we have to start with our own city blocks, and that’s how we’ll fix this state of affairs.

“Astronomers took these oddball stars as evidence of a titanic collision between the Milky Way and another galaxy. The merger, which probably happened between 8 billion and 11 billion years ago, would have catastrophically disrupted the young Milky Way, ripped the other galaxy to shreds, and sparked a firestorm of new star formation.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-the-milky-ways-stars-a-history-of-violence-20230928/?mc_cid=70650062a4&mc_eid=f83944a043

The cosmos is somehow always more awesome than we think it is.

“Although the sense of the black legend arose in earlier times, the actual term black legend has a rather contemporary origin, having been coined by Julián Juderías in the early twentieth century, but in a relatively short time, less than fifty years, the term seems to have become widely understood and well accepted. It was Rómulo Carbia in his Historia de la leyenda negra hispano-americana who seems to have made Las Casas the focal point of the term black legend. Carbia calls Las Casas’s reports of Spanish abuses of the indigenous peoples of the Americas into question by citing testimonies from other early European settlers. He proceeds, then, to accuse Las Casas not only of bias but also of bad faith in his accounts of Spanish activity in the Americas.”

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-new-black-legend-of-bartolome-de-las-casas/?utm_campaign=CLJ_Weekly%20Subscriber%20Email_19-0507&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=278666684&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–W-JVZLnUYz0pbSyUxZ6g4dJV9QbIC_4DyCTmwhSphyDdgJaJ6Kbc6l1WeTa0iPSYbZeBzJPLrQ6gXAHxx8oVfQzcm1D-cjGNf6sM_XCCKXxI1i1w&utm_content=278666684&utm_source=hs_email

It’s so easy and alluring to judge anyone, that judging someone against the context of current times and mores is even easier, especially since they usually tend to be dead if they’re historical figures. Such actions present unusual problems with somehow even simpler solutions – if that past hero was a horrible human being in actuality judged by today’s standards, then can we admire any historical figures? What about ourselves, against whatever mores exist in 100 years? Will we be judged harshly for having ever consumed factory-farmed meat, for example? But if we all end up being so flawed, then how could we ever trust any human system or institution that much? And thence, the pathway toward divinities’ or Divinity’s existence.

“In light of these successes, is it reasonable to dream that we might one day really repair American society one zip code at a time using Kaplan’s sideways approach? Conversions to the localist creed are certainly possible. Within a couple years of being unable to identify our mayor, I was knocking doors for his opponent during a primary challenge. (Flag distribution having proven a poor proxy for good governance.) But an intense focus on place is very much swimming against the cultural tide. In describing his own close-knit neighborhood, Kaplan notes the role played by Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest. For one day each week, Kaplan and his neighbors turn off their devices, avoid cars and public transportation, and refrain from activities like cooking and shopping. Instead, they pack the local parks and pay each other long social calls. In the words of a visiting friend, it is as if the community has temporarily returned to “a time before automobiles, television, and apps dominated daily life.” As Kaplan acknowledges, this method of community bonding is unlikely to be widely replicated anytime soon. Indeed, most of society seems headed in the exact opposite direction, with daily lives steadily more dominated by work, by overscheduled child-rearing, and by technology.”

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/10/the-smallest-of-seeds-a-review-of-fragile-neighborhoods/

In my more optimistic moments, it is possible to think that the increasing economic pressures that are converging across most people will potentially render such small neighborhoods and/or towns in vogue. But then I realize that that will only happen when, uh, bad things happen. Under the twin pressures of deglobalization and crushing debt in developed nations after the orgy of spending conducted by the last flurries of politically powerful baby boomers to maintain power and also defend their benefits, we will be forced to live simpler lives within our own neighborhoods.

“That clock synchronizes our bodies to the light-dark cycle of the planet by controlling the expression of more than 40% of our genome. Genes for immune signals, brain messengers and liver enzymes, to name just a few, are all transcribed to make proteins when the clock says it’s time.

That means you are not, biochemically, the same person at 10 p.m. that you are at 10 a.m. It means that evenings are a more dangerous time to take large doses of the painkiller acetaminophen: Liver enzymes that protect against overdose become scarce then. It means that vaccines given in the morning and evening work differently, and that night-shift workers, who chronically disobey their clocks, have higher rates of heart disease and diabetes. People whose clocks run fast or slow are trapped in a hideous state of perpetual jet lag.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-our-cellular-clocks-shes-found-a-lifetime-of-discoveries-20231010/?mc_cid=cc4eb576af&mc_eid=f83944a043

The universe is a never-ending layering of countless systems, and we have barely begun to tap the surface of what even our own physical systems conduct every day.

“This is why I find the endless barbs about nostalgia, turning the clock back, bucolic idylls and what have you so much chaff. Whatever the downsides of premodern societies, they generally knew how to make a local livelihood, and they handed on a liveable world to their descendants. Present generations don’t seem to be doing a brilliant job on those fronts. Is it too much to ask that we get over ourselves just a bit and imagine we might be able to learn something from peoples who’ve figured out how to live low energy local lives?”

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-10-23/new-worlds-to-build/

Although it’s only the “nice” parts of indigenous peoples’ ways of life that tend to get focused on, e.g., the Pacific Northwest tribes’ tending to salmon runs, berry-picking, etc. as opposed to their tendency to brutally slaughter up and down the US West Coast, I do think it is a good thing that we learn from their agricultural and sociocultural practices that inevitably were shaped by the land and climate in which they lived. Yes, this is a precursor to my constant plug for us in northern latitudes to better adapt to short winter days and just agree to all sleep 12 hours a day and only work for about four.