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It’s with sadness that I witness how we reached the end of the Droste.

“ドロステのはてで僕ら” (Dorosute no hate de bokura), which literally means “We at the end of the Droste”, was a great movie you should check out if you were into recursion.

Droste, other than being the household name for the Droste Effect, was also a kick-ass cocoa, always in my pantry, in every house I lived in. The company got gobbled up by a larger one that kept the brand name, continued production of some products, but seemingly canned the cocoa. Sadness!

Pillars of life

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The project A Sign In Space reached an important milestone last year. A team of researchers was able to extract a cellular automaton and obtain a very interesting configuration, displaying what appears to be an amino acid diagram. It might still be too early to discuss the ramifications of this conclusion. But it’s not too …

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A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.

What I love about this quote is that both the word “computer” and “accountable” share an etymology that traces back to the concept of adding up numbers.

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A mismatch between the problem that a system developed to solve and the task that it is given can have significant consequences. Just as the human drive to obtain sweet and fatty foods can be maladaptive in a world where those foods are easily available, the autoregressive tendencies of LLMs can cause problems when they are given a task that is not next-word prediction.

Embers of autoregression show how large language models are shaped by the problem they are trained to solve

I love it that the junk_food / information_diet metaphor can also be applied in reverse, where the entities feeding on the wrong stuff are machines and not humans.

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