I had a book which was published by Usborne which was part of their "Monsters" series. It was the Monsters teaching BASIC. There were several program listings and a "porting guide" which told you how to convert from APPLE BASIC (and other variants) to GW-BASIC (which is what I used). Doing the porting and implementing this really gave me a lot of perspective.
I gave a talk about this when I worked for The Archive. There was an article in Scientific American about how the average lifetime of a page on the net before it 404s is about 100 days. That article is offline now and we accessed it through the wayback machine.
My own last project before I left was to ingest records from crawl dumps from the defunct cuil.com website. About 200 TB of stuff that brought back 60 billion URLs.
The nature of the internet has changed and it's become an ephemeral place for many people where you just through things in and others mine it as "data".
It's nice to have analog/real world hobbies to reset. My kids and I have picked up whittling. A few blocks of wood, a sharp knife, some sheets of sandpaper and time just slows down. Many others too. It's nice to be completely offline for an extended period of time.
The older generation (gen-x) and before has been trained to believe traditional media (and by extension, anything that is published on a "website" and/or forwarded on Whatsapp). Images, pictures etc. add to the authenticity. Of course, it's easier to forward than to investigate and refute.
The younger generation is less influenced by this but also care less about generating and forwarding these. Most of these things are "just a joke". In a weird way, pushing out non-consensual nude of someone is the same as editing someone's face in a group photo with dog ears and sending it to a circle of friends.
I don't know what the solution is but this kind of thing erodes trust. Photographs used to be evidence that can be used to establish trust and we've been culturally conditioned to accept them that way. This takes a sledgehammer to that and it's not easy to untrain a whole society away from a deeply conditioned feeling so easily.
> I don't know what the solution is but this kind of thing erodes trust. Photographs used to be evidence that can be used to establish trust and we've been culturally conditioned to accept them that way
I'm just waiting (with some dread) for the day that you can sync up multiple cameras with AI to fake from different angles.
If you do lettering by hand, S has a bit of reputation. It's hard to get right. Small mistakes stand out even to an untrained eye. However, once you do get it (subjectively) right, it's an extremely beautiful letter. This is even more true in hands like cancellaresca corsiva (the so called "italic font") where the letters are somewhat smooth flowing rather than built with rigid lines. More interestingly, because of all these parameters, you can play a lot with the letter especially if you want to do it as a drop cap or ornament it. As an example, making the lower bowl bigger as the the above comment invites gives the letter some personality.
This is all fine. What fascinates me with Knuth's work is how he applies mathematical rigour to concepts like these which are generally considered "artistic" and subjective. It underlines how mathematical ideas of symmetry etc. play a role in making the world we live in beautiful.
Generally, when a "good" developer has a huge public presence and reputation, that's quite valuable to a company when they're competing in a tough space. Many a time, more so than the (very high) technical skill of the developer in question.
I've seen large funded companies gather good popular developers like pokemon cards and just have them go around give talks and write blog posts. It creates an aura around them which makes things like hiring, fund raising etc. much easier.
So, it's not really a statement about Karpathy himself. It's more about the company hiring him.
Yea, I say this as a marketing agency owner, not a developer or AI researcher, that besides Sam Altman, Dario, Demis and Elon, that Karpathy is one of the most influential I follow.
There’s a lot of value for the business world in learning AI from someone who has been at the top of their game but now is doing a general service by being a great educator and translator between the fields.
His recent Wiki approach may be simple to devs but is certainly an aha moment for the rest of the peanut gallery paying attention!
His LLM-wiki framework has been very useful for me for some personal research and knowledge-building projects I've been working on recently. When I get an idea for a new project, I first give it to Claude together with LLM-wiki.md and have it spend a few sessions compiling knowledge in the wiki before beginning work on the project itself. I schedule further wiki-maintenance sessions for later, too. Over time, the wikis become especially valuable when planning major changes or additions to the projects, as they help to ground both me and Claude with knowledge specific to the project.
Here's an example wiki in a public repository for a dictionary I have been having Claude build for the past few months:
I've been a TP user since 2004ish. Almost exclusively. I had to use a mac for 2 years for a job in between but other than that, T series, Two X series machines (Which were my favourite) and finally, now an X1 carbon.
The last one is the one I'm most disappointed with. The battery dropped to 75% of max charge in a month and it heats up quite quickly. I don't expect my next one to be a Thinkpad.
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