Experiences vary wildly. Doing well is a black art. But one can master the black art and move very fast. LLMs are changing rapidly and will be doing so for a few years.

Good! Thank you.

Swarms of satellites are harming astronomy. Here’s how researchers are fighting back SpaceX and other companies plan to launch tens of thousands of satellites, which could mar astronomical observations and pollute the atmosphere.

The number of working satellites has soared in the past five years to around 11,000, mostly because of constellations of orbiters that provide Internet connectivity around the globe, but it comes with a series of problems. Nature explores the issues and how scientists are reacting. 🔭 🧪

Yep.

Nice job!

There was so much in it. I saw Alvin Ailey’s Revelations in this stunning moment. If you don’t know the significance of Revelations, here you go. pressroom.alvinailey.org/alvin-ailey-...

Having an environment where people can thrive together is definitely special. :)

Ever since Costco has refused to reverse their DEI policy, their stock has gone up 100 per share

This is how we make a difference

Yes it did.

Blackhawk down.

It’s a business unfriendly move. I had tried to disable this ahead of time and found settings. They were ignored, and overrode with the clippy popup. Imagine if there was something proprietary in those business files. It’s a blatant security violation.

The biggest large language models are vying to replace common sense.

And that was just to arrange a meeting.

The goal is to wear everyone down. Remember that.

Ideally those you follow would not be blocked. This would eliminate the need for a new list.

January 18, 2025 Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information a...

Fascinating on “surveillance pricing” — another nefarious use of online data.

Depressing but essential to understand. I tend to think I am paying the same price as everyone but when online it is not likely to be true.

The california out-migration lie is repeated here and is factually incorrect. So yeah tripe.

It’s only coherent if one of the goals is to destroy the alliance system.

How about if your friend list is the allow list? Seems easy peasy.

We need some kind of allowlist for people who may end up on a block list you subscribe to but you don't actually want to block.

Just found out I'd been inadvertently blocking an actual friend because they were on a block list.

When I look at investing in companies, if you have any level of dependency on Amazon, its a negative. I would love to have people post what percent of sales in fees from Amazon and Walmart they are experiencing
And other issues.

The numbers I have seen are INSANE AND UNSUSTAINABLE.

The GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken Some of those GPT-4 models run on my laptop LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency Multimodal vision is common, audio and video are starting to emerge Voice and live camera mode are science fiction come to life Prompt driven app generation is a commodity already Universal access to the best models lasted for just a few short months “Agents” still haven’t really happened yet Evals really matter Apple Intelligence is bad, Apple’s MLX library is excellent The rise of inference-scaling “reasoning” models Was the best currently available LLM trained in China for less than $6m? The environmental impact got better The environmental impact got much, much worse The year of slop Synthetic training data works great LLMs somehow got even harder to use Knowledge is incredibly unevenly distributed LLMs need better criticism Everything tagged “llms” on my blog in 2024

Here's my end-of-year review of things we learned out about LLMs in 2024 - we learned a LOT of things simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...

Table of contents:

Dan Froomkin at his Press Watch site: The best journalism in the world makes very little difference if it’s not being consumed by the people who most need to consume it. But too often, the mass audience either can’t afford that journalism, doesn’t feel it’s aimed at them, or doesn’t see it at all, because media consumption habits have changed so dramatically. Right now, paywalls are keeping some of the most important journalism in America away from the public. So the ideal nonprofit news organization would have no paywall. The language would be simple and direct, rather than effete, convoluted and euphemistic. And the news organization would use social media and other platforms not solely as a way of harvesting clicks (which doesn’t even work) but as a way to convey information to the public.

Dan Froomkin @froomkin.bsky.social on what a great nonprofit newsroom would be like, and how it would operate.. presswatchers.org/2024/12/how-...

Really good list. One thing I'd add is that for some people it's probably worth exploring passkeys for services that have them enabled, which are (1) getting easier and easier to use and (2) way more secure.

Chinese Organized Crime’s Latest U.S. Target: Gift Cards Chinese crime rings already dominate the illegal marijuana trade in the U.S. and launder cocaine and heroin profits. Now a federal task force is investigating their role in a burgeoning form of gift…

Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store to record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. They then repair the packaging and put the cards back. When a customer loads money onto a tampered card, criminals can access the funds online.

(Published April)

Give them an mc-101.

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