“Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural sciences. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap” - Vladimir Arnold
On the matter of computer science having anything to do with computers, please refer to Djikstra.
It’s about computation, not computers - an application of mathematics, predominantly thanks to Turing, Von Neumann, and Claude Shannon’s masters’ thesis; though ofc many others as well but I see them as three individuals who made the minimal structurally necessary contributions - VNA and silicon are one of many possible substrates.
Wasn’t that almost the norm for both new OS drivers and subsequently GPU SoC firmware of ‘gamer cards’ to literally optimize for the latest AAA titles? I feel in that case, the interests aligned - in a world where I had a chance to actually play Crysis, I wouldn’t care why the frame rate was decent, no?
“Today, the NASDAQ fell by 18% moments after Simon Willison published his latest blog evaluating the Legend 7.4 model that rendered an animated SVG of a pelican on a bicycle and the pelican fell off”
When asked for comment an anthropic spokesperson said "it's very unusual for the pelican to fall off. They are built to very rigorous SVG engineering standards"
Agree directionally - even back in sonnet 3.5 days, I was helping some friends by showing them how to create intermediate representations for SVG building blocks mapping to parametrizable functions that can be used to make interactive SVG-rendered visualizations for various medical needs.
Not an expert on this, so won’t speculate regarding what traits would create robustness specifically attributed to SVG visual representation capability, but felt you might find this paper on reasoning models trained on physical world video data becoming better at general reasoning interesting:
What if they’re just unsuccessful at it and something about a model grokking how to create a realistic visual representation of a pelican on a bicycle ends being key to the next OOM of capability unhobbling.
And since we have established this silly routine once, I must keep going and ask - yes, you have quite a collection of bona fide pelicans you’ve seen and photographed.
Have you physically seen all the other animals you’ve evaluated as well?
I was born in Soviet Russia, so trust but verify and if still around, maybe there pelican make LLM draw Simon ride bicycle and notice Python code improve.
Simon - has no one told you about the Willison-Pelican Scaling Law?
```
if is_willison_pelican_blog_post:
[redacted]
```
You haven't seen their final form [1]
[1] final form is a frontend/react/let's not talk about it, library - it caused a great deal of PTSD to me and my previous company's team due to its dogmatic preference for "we use these axioms, end of story", over practical utility - so it was quite challenging to do state of the art tasks such as nested form fields (e.g. 'user.address.personal.line-1'). The PTSD it caused made us all block out the memories, I suppose. But - it had zero dependencies. That is what mattered. It kept us going. We weren't reaching for more. We had plenty of time.
And thank god for that. Because I'd forgotten my watch in California - and this was in Tokyo [2]
[2] a joke within a joke about Jensen's Kyoto gardener story. Beautiful story, drowned out by WatchGate memes. Why can't jokes have layers? Models have trillions. If you miss 100% of the jokes you don't make, make all the jokes. Someone will laugh (eventually, maybe?) Even if it's: "this person + comedy club = full secret service detail". If someone laughs at that - at my own expense? I don't mind. They laughed. I know this is a gibberish, off-topic message - it's also a human message. I just felt we need more such things in our lives these days.
PS: have you physically seen a pelican in real life? (not a joke)
> PS: have you physically seen a pelican in real life? (not a joke)
We have several thousand living 15 minutes walk from our house. I recently started adding my wildlife photography (from iNaturalist) to my blog, so I'm posting several new pelican photos a week at the moment: https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=pelican&type=beat%3Asigh...
Simon - thank you for not dismissing it (and surviving the text that came before the question).
I asked because I genuinely feel that the % of people working on some of the most important technology these days - things such as these 'strangely shaped tools' (to borrow from nearcyan) - large language models - the younger generation (folks in their early/mid 20s) - it is not unlikely that they have not physically seen the meatspace version of whatever digital correspondence of it that is being packed into latent space.
After all, why waste time going to the SF or Oakland zoo? One can just check Simon's latest pelican blog post and skip the zoo trip - the harnesses are waiting.
My best learnings came from mistakes - mine, my team's, my company's, other companies - but almost always, it was when those mistakes were promptly followed up with a thoughtful incident report.
For example, when I launched what is now Uber One, two days later, I got a call that I broke something. It turned out I had forgotten an edge case in a completely different service. Yes, this was 2016 Uber, 3000 microservices, but I don't think the users who didn't get their discount really cared.
The takeaway I still remember from that today is about always looking for "works by coincidence"; I often ask myself about the preconditions that must be in place for some class of mistake to be impossible.
The framing of preconditions that dissolve a class of mistakes is intriguing. I keep re-reading it, trying to picture how it actually exists day to day: is it something you run in your head when you're in the code, or is it structured into something your team shares (e.g. a checklist or similar)? I haven't had much success closing that gap.
“Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural sciences. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap” - Vladimir Arnold
On the matter of computer science having anything to do with computers, please refer to Djikstra.
It’s about computation, not computers - an application of mathematics, predominantly thanks to Turing, Von Neumann, and Claude Shannon’s masters’ thesis; though ofc many others as well but I see them as three individuals who made the minimal structurally necessary contributions - VNA and silicon are one of many possible substrates.
Also in the service of others around us.
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