links (81)
Blurb, writing books, running, freezer jesus, old fonts, postcards with veggies
The End of the Blurb. Thank God.
Asking for praise is an undignified business. It is inherently awkward, especially if the person you’re asking is an acquaintance, friend or, worse yet, someone who sells more books than you do (in my case, roughly 98 percent of the author-sphere).
I know this from experience. After six books and almost two decades of mendicancy, my knees had to be surgically unbent.
How To Be A Professional Author And Not Die Screaming And Starving In A Lightless Abyss
Treat Your Publishing Money Like A Demonic Bargain - You should always be fairly dubious of that money. Not that it’ll disappear — it’s just, it’s wildly inconsistent, as I hope I’ve made clear. It’s inconsistent in its timing, in its amount, in everything. It’s constantly shifting ground, and that unsteadiness of the financial earth should leave you particularly touchy.
The Amazing Story of Running Legend Cliff Young
Today, the “Young-Shuffle” has been adopted by ultra-marathon runners because it is considered more energy-efficient. At least three champions of the Sydney to Melbourne race have used the shuffle to win the race. Furthermore, during the Sydney to Melbourne race, modern competitors do not sleep. Winning the race requires runners to go all night as well as all day, just like Cliff Young.
Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs
In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively
This report stands as a kind of caution against the high risk of big advances because the lesson we take away again and again is: Thank goodness we stopped bidding when we did because even at the advance we offered, we would have lost money… Very frequently, the winning bid in our calculation is a money loser.
The image emerges just after dusk, when a neighbor's bright porch light casts a mixture of light and shadow on the freezer. Most say the image is a human face. Some say they believe it is a vision of the popular image of the face of Jesus as bearded and prayerful.
The hardest working font in Manhattan
The font is so ubiquitous, but also profoundly unrecognizable, sporting no designer and no name. Gorton is a decidedly toy-like, amateurish font deployed to for some of the most challenging type jobs: nuclear reactors, power plants, spacecraft. More than most other fonts, Gorton feels it’s been made by machines for machines – but in its use, it’s also the font that allows you to see so many human mistakes and imperfections.
Internally, Nutrimatic uses a trie which includes every word or phrase that occurs in Wikipedia at least five times -- 23,744,883 all told, packed into a 258MB index file. Every node in the trie includes a frequency count. (For example, the prefix "th" occurs 75,979,024 times; "qu" occurs 1,446,508 times.)
Hang on, are there ANY lost minerals?
I kept looking for exhausted things. Given a fair few species of animal and plant have become extinct in recent centuries, I figured I might have more chance finding a type of wood or herb we don’t have anymore. But even here the commonplace suggestions weren’t quite as compelling as you might have thought.
ranskanperunat
When Mr. Carrot fell in love,
At least so I’ve been told,
He gave Miss Bean
A wedding ring
Of fourteen carrot gold
