Month: October 2023
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Intimate Social Networks
Why haven’t big consumer businesses been built around the Find My Friends’ (FMF) location-sharing primitive? Lots of people my age share their location with as many as tens of people. The behavior has caught on despite no marketing or real productization from Apple. Location feels like a powerful piece of…
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*Killers of the Flower Moon*
(spoilers below) There’s a criticism of some of Martin Scorcese’s movies that he makes the behavior he’s trying to condemn look cool. Scorcese’s Jordan Belfort may be insane scum, but he also oozes charisma. I think there’s a case to be made that Scorcese’s doing a Miltonian thing to show…
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Friday Links
“You must never lose gratitude for this privileged position that you put each other in.”
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Will natural language be the universal interface?
Today, an app’s functionality is usually exposed for manipulation via an application-specific programming interface. Such interfaces conveniently abstract underlying functionality for easy usage but (1) are accessed via code and (2) are different for different applications. Since LLMs solved NLP, it’s now possible for natural language to be a simple,…
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On Fandom
From Tyler Cowen’s new book on the history of economic thinkers: Do you want to know which single book probably is the biggest influence on this one? It is the Bill Simmons 2009 book The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy. I loved that book and…
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Power Electronics 101
I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of the grid, which I think will look increasingly decentralized and multi-directional. Power electronics, or devices that manipulate power with semiconductors, are a critical part of that story. They offer greater control and flexibility to facilitate the expanding variety of…
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Biden’s Moral Clarity
Too many people are trying to triangulate some kind of both-sides-ist ambivalence on Hamas’ invasion (or worse, shamelessly defending terrorism). Thankfully, President Biden is not one of those people. Instead of looking to muddy the waters by drawing false equivalences between Israel and Hamas, he understands that the only salient…
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On Shamelessness
In the aftermath of Hamas’ brutal atrocities this weekend, I found myself greeted by throngs of people celebrating outside of my apartment. They were chanting “Intifada! Intifada! Intifada!”, expressing pride in what Hamas had done, and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, expressing their hope that…
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Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning
This is a cool paper from Anthropic. They trained a model to take the (hard-to-interpret) activations of a neural net and decompose them into distinct features. The goal of this approach is to build a set of features that are causally related to the original model and each uniquely correlate…
Matthew Mandel 