What I’m listening to
I want to share with you a song, and a true story of love. Noba, my friend and brother in Jesus, is a singer and music producer in southern Connecticut. When he first played his music for me, I couldn’t believe he made it in his own studio. I was starstruck.
He just dropped a new single and it takes me right back to the time my wife and I spent apart. Sadly my Spanish comprehension isn’t adequate so I had to translate the lyrics to understand. Noba’s song is about love that transcends distance and physical separation. It’s a story of longing, reminiscing, hoping and faith that two lovers will one day be reunited. Listen to it on YouTube.
Connecting long-lost cousins
I had the great honor of connecting two cousins who’d lost contact through the years.
Through a networking connection, I met a professional in New Jersey, who had a unique family name that I recognized. I only know one other person with that family name, and he lives not far from me in Connecticut. So I asked if he knew the other man I know with that name. He said, Yes, he’s my first cousin’s son. And they had fallen out of touch through the years
Now these two network circles are completely unrelated. It’s not like there was a common connection between these circles – it was me.
So I connected them and they were delighted to be reconnected.
Small world.
A podcast about AI
Lex Fridman is growing on me. I’m enjoying his podcast guests and his style of conversation more and more. I recently listened to his interview with artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei. If you don’t know already, Anthropic owns Claude, Sonnet and other well-known LLMs.
In this conversation, Amodei shares his thoughts, findings and projections about the limits of LLM scaling, like what might happen with machine learning after AI training catches up to human levels. An interesting concept Amodei discusses is his disbelief in the extreme outcome of AI spawning off hive-mind nanobots that self-produce energy and take over the human world.
Despite his stance there, AI safety is still a very real concern, since you may not want an all-knowing chatbot to instruct a kid how to build a bomb or a rebel how to incite a coup. At least that’s not what the CEO would want for his own company’s product offering. So safety is a fairly high-priority subject in the development process.
Following Amodei’s interview, Fridman also interviews with Amanda Askell, who brings philosophy into the Anthropic mix, and Chris Olah, an Anthropic Co-Founder with a background in interpretability. I enjoyed both of these interviews as well, although Chris’ part was a bit dry.
Clickbait: Tips for my Twenties (a series)
Stay fit. Mom and Dad aren’t around to check in everyday. Moderate these: complacency, beer, lazy days without exercise.
Eat according to the calories you burn, not according to what you’ve always eaten. Lower caloric burn means lower caloric intake.
Stay active, hike, bike, ski, climb, run, jump, swim, glide, whatever you’re into, don’t let new lifestyle, new relationships, or new challenges take these things out of your routine. This is a big part of that “be yourself” thing.
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