2/7 Link Roundup

It's Friday, my dudes. It has been an extremely long week in the world and for me, so here's some links I enjoyed this week.

Despair-Driven Development - Makes the argument for despair as a driver for positive change, since action gives you respite from it. My personal experience of despair in the workplace has not been that it makes me more productive, but I guess I have occasionally been motivated to do things out of sheer spite. Worth considering.

Dither Me This - Fun little web dithering tool. This is probably going on the long list of "cool graphics things I bookmark and then forget about", but it's neat!

UV with Django - Quick intro to using uv, the hot new drop-in replacement for pip. I'd been meaning to check out uv for a while and finally did so this week, and thus far I'm really impressed. It seems to address a lot of pain points in standard python dependency & project management and it's fast as hell. Check back in with me in a few weeks to see if I still feel this way.

S1: The $6 R1 Competitor - Nice breakdown of how distillation and various little tricks can make a near-SOTA LLM that costs a few dollars to train and runs locally. I am, once again, excited to see OpenAI and Anthropic getting owned.

Life Is More Than An Engineering Problem -

People who talk about aligning AI with human values imagine that if we could somehow solve this programming problem, then everything would be okay. I don’t see how that follows at all. Imagine you have some hypothetical AI that is better at accomplishing tasks than humans and that does exactly what you tell it to do. Do you want ExxonMobil to have such an AI at its disposal? That doesn’t sound good. Conversely, imagine a hypothetical AI that does what is best for the world as a whole, even if human beings are asking it to do something else. Who would buy such an AI? Certainly not ExxonMobil. I can’t see any corporation buying software that ignores the instructions of humans and does what is best for the world. If that were something that corporations were interested in, do you think they’d be behaving the way they are now?

Another great interview with Ted Chiang - as always, pretty clear-eyed on the relationship between technology, art, and culture. It's always interesting to me how many AI and Silicon Valley people seem to love Chiang when he very clearly regards the whole field with something between suspicion and contempt. Then again these are the people who read every dystopian cyberpunk book and think "I should make this real" so I don't know what I expected.

Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government - I will never not link to a David Roth article, but this one is 1) an all-time headline and 2) an excellent if depressing breakdown of the horrible things Elon Musk and DOGE are trying to do in Washington and the weird techno-libertarian mindset that drives them to defy the law and common sense itself.

Alright, it's the freakin' weekend baby, I'm about to have me some fun (read Malazan and go to bed early). Cheers.