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Meta: If you know a company in Toronto and would like it added to this list, email me here: krishna@amitav.net 8090 (conflict of interest) NationGraph Shopify Obsidian superwhisper Modem Cohere

Hello! You should check out his site.

This is a science-fiction novel about a society in which human producers in the economy are mostly unnecessary. As for content warnings, it’s a little bit sad and makes reference to drugs and sex once or twice I believe but should be family-friendly overall. You can buy a copy here (not an affiliate link) or find the free version the author published online here. Spoilers ahead. Click here to expand this full blog post. There are heavy spoilers inside of this block. Overall the book has some good ideas, but the writing feels half-done. It doesn’t really end on a cliff-hanger, but the ending feels unsatisfying. The book feels unrealistic in many ways: ...

Summary of Gwern’s take in my own words: “We should create LLMs that are personalized to each person to the extent that they can act as a stand-in for that person.” The rest of the essay is mostly discussing the mechanisms that would enable that and/or the things that would enable. Gwern refers to this hypothetical LLM as a “guardian angel.” For the rest of this blog post I will use the word “agent” to mean what Gwern means by “guardian angel.” ...

One action item for myself from this is to read this post by Neel Nanda on asking good questions. Summary Keep in touch with people, Organize things, Be sincere, Be lenient. Zotero item: G8DA5FQT

I’m not failing enough. Today I went to the gym, and I was doing my bench press, when a fellow walked over and corrected my grip; my grip was narrow, but to workout one’s chest one must use a moderate grip. I was thinking on the bicycle ride that that’s the first time in a few weeks I’ve really failed at something. I don’t think that’s a good thing. The times in my life I got the most done were the times when I was failing a lot, and the lack of failure is indicative that I’m not trying enough things. One thing I’m going to add to these posts going forward is a failure from the day. ...

Meta: This was written a few years ago when I was in grade 7, which is why much of the writing is terrible, many of the facts misleading and wrong, and why there are so many parentheticals (like this (and sometimes nested parentheticals too)). I may return to this one day and make it better, but don’t hold your breath. You can also see some discussion from when I posted this, on Reddit. ...

One thing I have pondered of late is what I wish to deliberately practice. These thoughts have been stoked by many pieces of writing, but one that has been especially great is Tyler Cowen’s piece on this topic. One great quote Cowen mentions is the following: What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales? Sadly, I don’t have a great response to this! The area in which this is most applicable is working out. Recently I have begun weight-lifting, and while it’s not a very exciting response, that is quite comparable to a pianist’s scales. When it comes to my work however, I have never found intentional repetition to be an especially effective method to improve my abilities. The greatest difficulty I face in this sort of deliberate practice is that currently, my work is very varied. It’s a mixture of engineering, machine learning, physics, and more recently chemistry. One thing I tried to do last October was commit to reading a different machine learning every week or so, but I found that ineffective at growing my skills. The only effective method I have found as of yet to improving my skills is to simply build projects. ...

This was googled in relation to this post: https://amitav.net/posts/on-animals.html. As you can see in the second photo, the penis of the dog is relatively prominent. I considered censoring it, but I don’t think it matters that much. Zotero item: LLKP3D3K

Meta: This is a blog-ified version of this X article Hey! Alongside my good friend Krishiv Thakuria, I will be doing a long(ish) tweet everyday for the next 21 days. One random thought I had today is that animals are really weird. Above, I have photographed a goose. A goose is a bird, and it’s alive[, definitely, but it’s also definitely not human. It’s quite small. It’s oddly shaped. I have four limbs, but a goose really has just two limbs, the legs, and two wings. It’s neck is long and thin, where mine is (proportionally) thicker and shorter. And it doesn’t really have a face, instead having a hard beak where I have soft skin. Above I have photographed a dog. A dog is a mammal, so closer to me than to a goose, but still very dissimilar. the dog also has four limbs, but it’s back two limbs are almost the same length as its front two, unlike mine where my back two limbs (my legs) are quite a bit shorter than my front two. Its eyes are different than mine. In my eyes I have two black dots inside of a white orb, while its eyes appear to be an almost-black dark-brown. Its ears are floppy where mine are stiffer, and much longer too. Its nose does not so much protrude from the face as meld with it, where my nose protrudes from my face, a clearly distinct appendage. ...