3: i bet you're wondering how i got here

Author

Gavin Leech
October 30, 2024

A month of side projects; no urge to get mixed-up in any big thing. And, so, I had a lot of big ideas.

  • Things I'm thinking about: a steelman of LLM scepticism; the Transformer++; semantic duplicates of test data; why Tyler is wrong about shorting xrisks.

  • My book's metadata went up, which was a gulp despite being entirely expected. I’m still finalising the text; I keep wanting to add fine technical distinctions, but realistically I've already put in as many as I can get away with it for a trade book.

  • I spoiled my post-viva buzz with ICLR submissions, one of which went awry. (I want to get better at managing this kind of conflict; the urge to shrug and walk away is strong.)

  • Book of the year is this, which I (and Rian and Paul) rescued out of print.

  • Me and Juan briefed the government on QRPs. They were very nice, I think because people usually don't bother travelling to Manchester for them.

  • The Feast Weekend of St Francis (my belated birthday party in a big Airbnb) went well. My favourite bits were the gratitude block (writing to strangers you appreciate) and realising we were 10 minutes away from the Edward Jenner Museum.

  • Also went to the Churchill War Rooms, which is a great day out.

  • A friend stayed over for two days of reflection and bikeshedding and scheming. Very worthwhile and yet not the kind of thing I'd initiate.

  • Did 20/4 intermittent fasting all month. Good effects in general, though my mental stamina did suffer (off work round 4pm).

  • Four different people sent me one fancy job vacancy. But I have deep misgivings about having any job I don’t create.

  • I edited my thesis a good amount, half just for the joy of improving things.

  • We started this year's Shallow Review of AI Safety. Manifund worked surprisingly well, and on seeing it a private donor filled the rest.

  • Said goodbye to the Schelling Residence for the last time. Hours of singing and homemade pizza and (joy of joys) people asking me for playlists. I enjoy the melancholy of leaving a home. Thanks to Raymond for incurring admin for years.

  • Good amount of reading and writing, finally. Nature is healing.

  • New words of the month:

    • blaked: to be tricked into thinking that an AI system is sentient. After Blake Lemoine (who is hardly patient zero, but named himself).

    • nerve networks: the old name for neural nets.

    • relo: relocation.

    • disparitism: the view that any difference in outcomes between groups is proof of oppression.

Now off to Taipei with the Arb crew. We have an office — hmu if you're anywhere near in Nov and Dec.

Think on your sins
Gavin