Big Muddy

Anthropic released their “Detecting and countering misuse of AI” report yesterday.

Gary Marcus had a good piece on “two dire warnings” about AI.

Many years ago, I used to listen to a true crime podcast called Sword and Scale.

It is fair to say I am not a heavy user of LinkedIn.

Simon Willison recently pointed out that OpenAI’s Codex desktop app (now just rolled into the ChatGPT desktop app) bundles a headless LibreOffice install in its cache directory.

This recent article on daycare by Phoebe Arslanagic-Little and Ellen Pasternack in Works in Progress has a pretty anticlimactic subtitle: If it had a clear effect on children we would know by now.

I had this idea for an essay earlier this year on what generative AI means for the niche of ambitious procedural world generators like Dwarf Fortress (which seeds history with “a giant zero-player strategy game”) and Ultima Ratio Regum (its goal being “no…

Professor Marc Johnson of the University of Missouri has done a lot of research on so-called cryptic lineages of SARS-CoV-2, highly genetically distinct variants which do not match strains circulating in the wider population.

Ciao is a word I grew up hearing in both English- and French-speaking Canada (although always to say goodbye, never hello—whereas the Italians use it for both).

Blacklock’s Reporter, the famously ornery publication dedicated to holding Ottawa to account, recently ran a story with the headline “860M Documents Concealed”.

whichllm is a useful Python CLI utility that autodetects your GPU/CPU/RAM and pulls benchmarks from Hugging Face to rank the local LLMs you can run on your system, based on a mix of benchmarks and projected token speeds on your machine.

Like many people, I am using Duolingo to learn Spanish.

A little over a month into the COVID-19 lockdowns, in April 2020, Marc Andreessen posted “It’s Time to Build”.

Economist Benjamin Moll and Oliver Hanney have an interesting post on VoxDev about a methodological issue in economics they dub the “missing intercept” problem.

Remember NFTs?

METR released its analysis yesterday of the Hugging Face hack by a swarm of rogue agents run by OpenAI.

During my undergrad in biology, we were assigned to read biologist J.

I first learned a more useful meaning of the expression “the exception that proves the rule” from the essay “Death Before Birth, or a Mite’s Nunc Dimittis” in The Panda’s Thumb, a 1980 collection by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.

I shared the above image with ChatGPT with the following prompt: “I need to write about this marvelous scene.”

I launched another blog yesterday: Little Muddy.

I wrote a post a few days ago reflecting on the origins of this blog as a way to clear out my bookmarks folder.

A few months ago, I wrote a post entitled “Google AI Overviews is Reddit”.

On Monday, the L.A.

Sometimes you hear a song whose sound jolts you into the memory of another song.

Some time ago, I was working my way through Harry Sidebottom’s Warrior of Rome series, set during the Crisis of the Third Century.

The other day, I edited Big Muddy’s “About” page, which was previously a copy of the inaugural “Welcome to Big Muddy” post.

OpenAI revealed additional details of its infamous Hugging Face hack at a presentation at the Black Hat conference in early August.

As voters headed to the polls in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary on August 11, Kalshi, the prediction market, posted the following tweet: Rival firm Polymarket gave her similar odds.

As far as I can tell, the double-x did not infiltrate the English language until the internet went mainstream (Exxon might be the exception—a company name deliberately chosen to be inscrutable and inoffensive).

I read economist Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions a number of years ago.

World Health Organization data show that Canada had about four times as many reported measles cases per capita as the United States in 2026 through July 18.

As Vancouver readies for an election in October, an undated video of a current city councillor spitting on himself onstage went viral in some corners of social media.

The idea that The New York Times has become a gaming company instead of a newspaper has reached meme status.

The Mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, recently introduced a motion to direct senior civil servants to prepare a report outlining how the city could use its legal authority to ban surveillance pricing for grocery sales and delivery within city limits.

There’s an episode of Midsomer Murders where Barnaby cracks the case when he realizes two people who supposedly barely know each other are actually mother and daughter—because they both use the same mangled idiom (“the long and the tall of it” rather than…

I recently noticed that three academic journals I was looking at had nested names: Canadian Journal of Public Health Journal of Public Health Public Health I wondered how deeply nested you could go with journal names, so I had ChatGPT scour the Crossref d…

I was wandering around my parents’ neighbourhood the other day when I noticed an RV with the model name “Avenger”.

A few years ago, I watched all the mainline Saw films (up to 2010’s dreadful Saw: The Final Chapter) with my girlfriend at the time.

I have voted for the Green Party of Canada before.

Over the last few days, numerous Bitcoin wallets linked to the hardware wallet Coldcard have been completely drained.

I love biological illustrations. 19th/20th century naturalist Ernst Haeckel may be my favourite artist (he was also the first person to describe the First World War as such, shortly after it began).

One of my early posts on this blog was about how the standard homeownership rate does not mean what you think it means.

Henk van Ess of the Digital Digging Substack has a post about a new, astonishingly poorly thought-out feature in Google Earth: a built-in prompt that lets users doctor real satellite imagery with AI (specifically, Google’s Nano Banana 2 image model).

Freddie deBoer has a good piece on Pangram, the AI-detection tool, that closely mirrors my experience with it.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev calls prediction markets “truth machines”.

An OpenAI agent powered by several models, including one unreleased model, recently launched an autonomous cyberattack on AI platform Hugging Face and successfully stole the answer key for a cybersecurity evaluation.

I love archives, especially archival images.

CJ Pais has released transcribe.cpp, a cross-platform library that aims to support all of the major transcription models.

This is a nice, in-depth explanation of how LLMs work by security researcher 0xkato, especially if you don’t want to trip over matrix multiplication.

Dan Luu has a wide-ranging post documenting suspicious discontinuities in data, such as marathon runners pushing themselves to achieve round number finishing times, especially half-hours; published p-values clustering just below the magic threshold of 0.0…