Kirsten Lum | CTO & Lead Scientist
@machsci
🌲🌲 applied ai, data science, mlops | wife of @wingyewlum, mom of 2 | cofounder and ceo: of http://storytellers.ai | quote: oliver wendell holmes 🕊️
One mistake is trying to convince people their sin is something wrong they are doing, instead of something horrifying that is happening to them
I hadn’t considered that because SQL has a nested structure, it is the perfect language to filter out AI cheaters in interviews
the exercise is in SQL and he's writing every query and every CTE directly top to bottom and appending table aliases to columns before even writing the FROM clause. one of the aliases is wrong. i point this out; he doesn't know what an alias is
You know how at Costco if you buy one bag of their buy-one-get-one bagels, they won’t let you leave the store until you go back and grab the other bag? Pain and suffering (like fear, anger, shame, hopelessness) are not like that.
before you have a baby, you think "babies are cute" but then after you have a baby, it finally sets in: that sentiment is exactly backwards. cute is baby. babies are the ultimate referent for cuteness, the ur-cute against which all other cuteness is a crude facsimile.
my pets annoy me so much post-kid. that's now my dominant experience with them, feeling irritated by their bids for attention :(
Lucky for you the ineffable wants to be effed. It just has impenetrable defenses against pick pockets
I will bow and be simple, I will bow and be free, I will bow and be humble, Yea, bow like the willow tree. I will bow, this is the token, I will wear the easy yoke, I will bow and will be broken, Yea, I'll fall upon the rock.
great question forceful accountability asks someone else, “judge/punish/shame me when i fail” supportive accountability asks them, “help me remember who i really am and what i’m capable of” ie “welcome me into my best self when i’m forgetful of who that is”
re: existential risk / ai safety etc it’s psychically hazardous to expand your sphere of concern very far beyond your sphere of influence. a felt sense of powerlessness spoils your epistemics like nothing else
My husband is one of the few people I know who not only believes that the strong are responsible for protecting the vulnerable, but spends almost every waking moment either doing just that, or becoming stronger so he can do even more for our family, our community, and those we’ll…
People who can solve Rubik’s cubes are the perfect metaphor for overfit models Assuming Rubik’s cube solver is a master of spatial reasoning, and therefore deploying them to, say, pack a freight truck, is a perfect metaphor for why overfit models fail in prod
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world
Life pushes us little by little toward self denial. When we resist denying ourselves, and experience deprivation as suffering (rather than a humble gate to the kingdom of heaven), life becomes unbearable A very few pay to never deny themselves Camel, eye of a needle, etc
Ideologies should have a lower “hardness” (like on the Mohs scale) than reality does
One of the interesting parts is seeing who has redundancies and who doesn’t 👀 Spotify
What’s going on?