Category: Blog Post
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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…
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Rawls’ Theology and *The Devil Wears Prada*
I liked this tweet from Zohar Atkins the other day. What Anne Hathaway’s character missed is how her world, the water she swims in, is downstream of the deliberate creations of artists, which are in turn the result of ideas from others that influenced those artists and so on. I…
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The Economics of Whaling Excursions
I recently picked up Moby-Dick for the first time and have been enjoying learning about the economics of whaling excursions. For example, apparently retired ship captains would provide financing for a portfolio of ships, getting a stake for annuitants who weren’t involved with the day-to-day of investing, and would add…
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New Gadgets
Growing up, the tech hardware landscape was highly polytheistic. I had a Gameboy for games, an iPod for music, a camera for pictures, and a phone for communication. Then the smart phone collapsed all of that into a single device, and so for most of my adult life, the only…
Matthew Mandel 