It is a linkblog and digital garden for the weird, wonderful, and unexpectedly useful things I find on the internet. Read what I have kept below, wander through a subject, or visit Small Web, my directory of independent blogs.
I was just testing DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on a bunch of vision tasks with old book pages, and it’s not bad at all. It had issues with some Sanskrit type and diacritic-heavy text, but it still managed reasonably well. And considering the cost, it’s pretty impressive. During off-peak hours, the API is dirt cheap. That…
keep reading — 2 min ↗keep reading — 1 min ↗"To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people." [1, 2]
keep reading — 1 min ↗Gunnar Strömmer, Sweden’s justice minister, calls gang crime “a systematic threat to society” on a par with or above that posed by terrorism. On a visit to Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city, he notes that almost a year has gone by since a deadly shooting there. So bad was the country’s reputation that politicians in neighbouring Denmark and Norway talked about “Swedish conditions” as shorthand for everything they did not want…
Post type: A very in-the-moment stream of consciousness, voice-typed and lightly cleaned up with ChatGPT. Language is probably one of the greatest inventions of mankind. I don’t think there would have been civilization, at least not in any recognizable form, without our ability to speak to one another, communicate,…
keep reading — 4 min ↗I often tell my friends that I'm white at heart because I know far more about American and European history than Indian history, and it's a shameful fact that I'm working to fix. One of the books I bought a while ago was Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi, which I hadn't got around to reading. I finally picked it…
keep reading — 1 min ↗Not bad Here's what I got
keep reading — 1 min ↗keep reading — 1 min ↗At a higher level, I guess I’d say there’s a sort of refusal to think carefully about what models are or are not useful for in a rigorous way which I find personally quite annoying, and instead a reliance on some nebulous notion of being “AGI pilled” as a replacement for serious thought. I think people are very quick to anthropomorphize LLM intelligence because humans communicate through words and we infer the intelligence of…
One older leaf, brought back into the light.
keep reading — 1 min ↗For many at the start of their careers, things are just as bad. Government analysis last month insisted that entry-level positions were declining in line with the rest of the job market, but the general feeling that AI is wiping out starter jobs is backed up by research. The sectors worst hit are the most AI-friendly – software engineers, accountants, legal assistants, data analysts. A year ago, figures showed new graduate…