Models

Berkeley, Tuesday, September 22, 2026 1:43 am

I will write the title at the end.

It might be a good day. Yet, I need to get a few hour of sleep. I will have an important meeting at 10:30 am.

I wrote quite a bit of a rough draft at the library. It is also about things to do.

Placed some boundaries, which interaction sent my brain in some distress. Particularly, because I had to be in a place at 6.30 pm. Ended up arriving at 7.30 pm. it is complicated to do everything.

Boundaries are good though.

I got done two administrative things as well, related with contacts before leaving. Well the second one was after arriving.

It was hard to zone in when I arrived. So, my brain likely was in that interaction. Ah, yes, it was, because I had to also reply from the library.

Reading was quite interesting. I continue reading McPhee.

Then, the writing and command lines for my model, which is a difference with the terminal to still some understanding I am building on the transformer based language large models. One masters a tool. Otherwise the tool really cannot be used for an specific purpose. A hammer is better for hitting a nail than for tying a bolt. It is good to prepare what to cowork with the model. It is not far from actually coding itself in terms of keeping track of the processes. Another important word in the world of transformer based language large models is the control of errors and/or model hallucinations. That is why is important to both have the knowledge to assess, and the mechanism to validate information.

Still, the best thing in the world is the field work. However, as boots are needed, and good prose, grammar, communication, and style, good numeric skills are also needed. One can find a caddisfly hidden under a pebble, and embraced by her own build shield of tiny wood and vegetation debris, or extremely small sticks.

She is not a number. But she can be as well. How a stonefly survive a high flow, is not a number, but it can be as well.

I navigated the web a bit some minutes ago. Of course, I wasted 5 minutes of time, it could be invested, to check my instagram and facebook accounts. Although, that is garbage. It is ok to be there. Sometimes is the way to reach out someone, where our only contact is there. Although I have lost many of those, and so many pictures, when I closed facebook 6 years ago or so.

I then read a bulletin. A fine one. But it cited a second source. So the bulletin could be the third source, where it said something like a researcher an anthropic thinks that there is a probability higher than a 10% that artificial intelligence would kill humanity within the next decade? i think it is a good idea to place those things in a bulletin. So, I will read also the news to have a better opinion.

My take outside of a discussion or provocation to a source, but about the bulletin, is that: cook or do craft, write, and read, and also although it would be extremely hard to make time for everything, unless is one’s discipline. One would try to make an effort to understand how the tool works, beyond how to use it. And, yes if the tools is not within one discipline, of course, one can be worried about what the news says, as we might have been with covid, where one followed the CDC recommendations, with some effort to understand the virus. But getting into the details of how the vaccine worked was beyond the self. Although a bit informed.

How many people is fully trained in large language models and beyond? I would say one way to proceed is rather on literacy of the topic. And true learning the awful things that could be done with those models could be part of literacy. But they also can do a version of what one places on the command line. And almost never a model is done to a result with one iteration. Almost never is actually done. It is a model, is the first thing, which is a extremely simplification of reality, same we describe reality or thoughts with words. One of the issues is that the scale of the model can reach everyone now, beyond trained computer scientist or so? Is that a problem? Might be. It is the same as if clorox is accessible to a young untrained yet child. Probably that example. Or television and video access reaching masses. Video is still a model. A much better description at times. But it can become an entrainment, which is not the best way. Because it loses the interactions.

One problem with the models is the mono-culture. Standardization of what to say or write. Making punks polite. Increasing fake empathy. Decreasing affection and touch. Smoothing the truth. Or not saying the truth. Asking there how to say things. So a standardization of what is right and wrong. While wisdom comes from beyond us. Then, it is a real risk of folks directed by a large language model without reaching a quiet connection to the actual fountain of wisdom. Then the bulletin is fully right to call on it.

Oh. In another topic. Last Saturday, I believe. I was reading the front pages of newspaper on the stands outside of Moffitt. There was a historic front page from the New York Times. It was about a huge earthquake, which affected Iran in 1978. The epicenter was in Tabas. Might be fifteen-thousand people died in that earthquake. One thing that I might talk in other times is about the Mercalli intensity. In this case was IX+ (Violent).

Oh and to the paragraph before the last one. In the past and might be present, a lot of the narrative of human values (might be) are dictated as well by the media industry. So, those large language models add to that. What is needed is the focus of time but also the willingness to learn about it, so one can assess the information, or detect what is bullshit and what might be true or what is questionable. The models themself I think has a measurement for that called hallucination? And as a new technology etc. Right now it might be the fever of a sort of a new thing, which would stay for a long time. But those things might pass as well, and become obsolete. Pascal at the end invented the sort of calculator to help his father to compute taxes. That is a first model of computer. It did not replaced his father job, I think. It helped in the process. Those things are tools.