PicoBlog

Welcome to part 2 (of 3) in my year-end series. As I mentioned in part 1: on September 7, November 4, December 9, December 11, and December 12, a prominent person I knew passed away. They ranged from someone I simply shared a meal with to a personal role model. I’ll share how I knew each person, and something I learned from or valued in them. Let’s begin… There have been times in the Iditarod — the thousand-mile dogsled race across Alaska — when a sleep-deprived musher crossing the frozen Bering Sea has gazed into the blazing sun and disrobed, only to find that it’s -50° out.

Dear Classical Wisdom Reader, Today we are going to journey to an ancient time and place not often discussed, despite it being on the second largest island in the Mediterranean. It’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to go. Though to be honest, it is because my teenage self thought it would be funny to say, “I’m sardonic in Sardinia”. Sadly it’s not on our amazing upcoming March Voyage (we’ll be visiting, however, islands no.

I’m sitting here writing this on a dark, cold night in a mostly empty house, but I have my teacher’s voice in my ears, and I get to share it with you, and that does bring me joy. This episode felt like an indulgence to me, but ’tis the season, right? I hope it will feel to you like a gift. I talked with Langdon Hammer about James Merrill’s poem— almost the very last one Merrill wrote—“Christmas Tree.

One of the big challenges of LLMs is their limited context. When you want to work on a very long text, such as books or long articles. There are several different techniques that can help address this limitation, but they have shortcomings such as low precision and high compute and memory requirements. StreamingLLM, a technique developed by researchers at Meta AI, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon University, can impressively extend the context of LLMs to millions of tokens without the need for changes to the model or high memory and compute costs.

Good morning and Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers. Since Thanksgiving is a violent colonizer’s holiday, I don’t have much of anything nice to say about it. But I do have some other news to share. The time has come. After three years of toiling in obscurity, this Jersey Boy has decided to pack his bags and move to Los Angeles. It was not an easy to decision to make. But the fact is, if you’re not working in Tech, it’s really hard to find a decent job in the Bay Area.

This is one of the most enthralling and fun interviews I’ve ever done (in 2 decades of doing them) and I hope that you’ll find it stimulating and provocative. If you did, please share with your network. Share And thanks for listening, reading, and subscribing to Ground Truths. Recorded 4 December 2023 Transcript below with external links to relevant material along with links to the audio ERIC TOPOL (00:00): This is for me a real delight to have the chance to have a conversation with Geoffrey Hinton.

Larry SmithLarry Smith is co-founder Six-Word Memoirs and co-writer of “The Joy of Cannabis: The Science and Magic of Cannabis.” His essays have appeared in The New York Times, L.A. Times, Edutopia, Popular Science, Men’s Health, and a bunch of anthologies. ncG1vNJzZmirpZfAta3CpGWcp51kjbS117Cmq5ydmrqwtdGs

Courtney Pauroso is an LA-based actor, writer and comedian, who traveled the world and the United States as the child of a military family. She co-wrote and appeared in Two Pink Doors, a series of 5-minute shorts for FX, directed by Dr. Brown, and has appeared onscreen in projects such as Jackass Forever, Reno 911, Key & Peele, and 2 Broke Girls. She’s also a former member of the Groundlings Sunday Company and Washington D.

Jared Freid is a stand-up comedian based in New York City whom you’ve most likely heard on one of his two highly popular podcasts — U Up?, a dating and relationship series he co-hosts with Jordan Abraham of Betches; and The JTrain Podcast, where he welcomes fellow comedians to help him answer questions and give advice to listeners on all sorts of topics. Since appearing as a New Face at Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival in 2017, Jared has performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, hosted shows on both Snapchat and Spotify, released a stand-up album in 2019, as well as a half-hour stand-up special on his own YouTube page in 2021.