There is a tendency for the last 1% to take the longest time.
I wonder if that long last 1% will be before AGI, or ASI, or both.
Micros
It scares me how many people reply to no-reply email addresses. So many responses to sign-up confirmations and password resets with messages like ‘OK’ or ‘thank you’.
Do they think there is a human responding? Or do they just think it prudent to thank the automated machines? I’m perplexed.
YOLO (You Only Live Once) is just as much justification not to do something as it is to do something, yet it is rarely treated as such.
Tangentially, you don’t hear YOLO as a phrase very often anymore. Maybe those YOLOers with gung-ho inclinations wiped themselves out and took the phrase with them?
A good plot doesn’t thicken – it coagulates.
Google Search Console giveth, and Google Search Console taketh away.
For a fleeting 12 minutes I had it all.
Note to self:
Never have testing and prod open on the same machine. You will get confused no matter how good of an idea it seems at the time.
One of the most impactful moments of my life occurred while I was whistling. My friend, unintentionally packing his words with the psychological impact of a sawn-off shotgun at point-blank range, said, “You know you’re supposed to change notes, yeah?”
Years later I’m still not sure I’ve recovered.
I found a website on the ground and completely inaccessible. Next to it? A bottle of ARIA. It must have taken too much and overdosed.
Kids, always use ARIA in moderation, and never ARIA on an empty semantic.
I’ve been thinking about loanwords in language. How long have we got these words on loan for? Will they be taken back? What is the fee to buy them outright? Who should I talk to about this?
I just wanted to let everyone know that . is the root of all TLDs.
This means that, for example, vale.rocks. is a valid domain. vale is a child of rocks, which is itself a child of ..
You are now burdened with this knowledge.
Nice to see Figma are building tools for web divelopment now. They’re really spanning that gap.
I’d like to thank the HTTP ‘referer’ header field for permanently ruining my ability to correctly spell the word ‘referrer’.
Elle just added a blog feed to her website and included me in it, along with a little pixel me!
I love the entire feed reader! Her attention to detail with having all the buttons work and adding the ability to save drawings is fantastic! Her site is a treasure trove of little interactive gadgets and gizmos that is well worth checking out!
I had the pleasure of ‘beta testing’ this visual essay a little while ago. It is a right and proper banger, as all of Sam Rose’s work is.
Make sure to click on anything and everything!
I am evidently powerless to resist the alluring temptation of chocolate-coated coffee beans.
I often have issues with sharing cross-origin resources, which results in me throwing my computer out a window.
This is referred to as CORS and effect.
I hate the argument, “Humans are bad at X, so LLMs must be really bad at X.”
There are flaws with LLMs, but this is a poor argument. They are fundamentally different to humans, and just because we fumble at something doesn’t mean LLMs do (and vice versa).
Video footage of me making my way through the swarms of people trying to hand me a ‘how to vote’ card at the Australian federal election today:
Cloudflare, its interface a mess.
It’s breaking my site and causing duress.
These settings confuse me, I must declare;
Working this out is quite the affair.
I hate it so much, but I don’t care.
Actually, I do, and I’m pulling out hair.
Well now look what you’ve gone and done! You’ve spilt JavaScript all over my lovely semantic HTML. Dammit! It leaked onto my CSS as well.
Go grab a cloth and clean up this mess.
As it is getting rather close to publication, it seems prudent to advertise that I’m writing a novel!
Tad unusual for me, but it’s a proper, comprehensive work of fiction.
I’ll have more details to share in time, but it is pretty much Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets the corporate shittery of Silicon Valley venture capital.
“The web is my canvas,” I confess as the people watching over my shoulder observe me open a text editor and tile a browser window. “CSS is my brush; MDN, my muse.”
CSS has taken me places I wouldn’t go with a gun.
I’ve been testing the new Qwen3 today. I don’t have the compute for the higher parameter models, but I’ve been having a lot of fun with 0.6b.
It is such a derpy little model.
Here is a thinking extract I found rather humorous:
Okay, the user said, “Hi Qwen. Nice shoes.” Let me think about how to respond.
First, the user greeted me with a friendly “Hi” and complimented my shoes. I need to acknowledge their compliment politely.
Since I’m an AI, I don’t have shoes, so I should explain that. Maybe say something like, “Hi there! I don’t have shoes.”
I… uh…
Somebody opened an issue on GitHub where they just sent through a conversation with Grok regarding what action we should take to make improvements…
Predicting AGI/ASI timelines is highly speculative and unviable. Ultimately, there are too many unknowns and complex variables at play. Any timeline must deal with systems and consequences multiple steps out, where tiny initial errors compound dramatically. A range can be somewhat reasonable, a more specific figure less so, and accurately predicting the consequences of the final event when it comes to pass even further improbable. It is simply impractical to come up with an accurate timeline with the knowledge we currently have.
Despite this, timelines are popular – both with the general AI hype crowd and those more informed. People don’t seem to penalise incorrect timelines – as evidenced by the many predicted dates we’ve seen pass without event. Thus, there’s little downside to proposing a timeline, even an outrageous one. If it’s wrong, it’s largely forgotten. If it’s right, you’re lauded a prophet. The nebulous definitions of “AGI” and “ASI” also offer an out. One can always argue the achieved system doesn’t meet their specific definition or point to the AI Effect.
I suppose Gwern’s fantastic work on The Scaling Hypothesis is evidence of how an accurate prediction can significantly boost credibility and personal notoriety. Proposing timelines gets attention. Anyone noteworthy with a timeline becomes the centre of discussion, especially if their proposal is on the extremes of the spectrum.
The incentives for making timeline predictions seem heavily weighted towards upside, regardless of the actual predictive power or accuracy. Plenty to gain; not much to lose.
I wake delirious from an uneasy slumber. Beads of perspiration rest upon my forehead.
A distant horn sounds, then a second slightly closer.
I’m wide awake now. “The Vengabus”, I hear a woman scream, “It’s coming!”
Screams echo out around me. Pandemonium.
Following news of Anthropic allowing Claude to decide to terminate conversations, I find myself thinking about when Microsoft did the same with the misaligned Sydney in Bing Chat.
If many independent actors are working on AI capabilities, even if each team has decent safety intentions within their own project, is there a fundamental coordination problem that makes the overall landscape unsafe? A case where the sum of the whole is flawed, unsafe, and/or dangerous and thus doesn’t equal collective safety?
The misquote “write drunk, edit sober” is often incorrectly attributed to Ernest Hemingway.
He actually believed the opposite, and, if you’re wondering, that advice is crap – especially for anything formal, structured, or academic.