Links for April 2023

Mon May 01 2023E.W.Ayers

I'm going to try to do a monthly roundup of the best content I consumed last month. I'm hoping this will make me more mindful of what I'm reading.

1. AI

• Paper of the month is definitely Generative Agents. Make a little town and populate it with language models. This is the future of NPCs in gaming, it's going to happen fast.

• The guy who made ffmpeg makes TextSynth, some kind of semi-proprietary server for LLMs.

• https://memorygpt.io is ChatGPT with some memory stuff on top using vector databases and chat history / plugin stuff. Overall there are lots of 'Toolformer v2' papers augmenting LLMs with various things.

• Robots are ok at football now

• We are slowly getting towards non-crappy video stable diffusion. This manifold question has debate and examples.

2. LW

• Toby Ord: A child's plaything

• The Waluigi Effect

• The world is mad

• Eliezer vs. Dwarkesh. Dwarkesh Patel is my favourite podcaster by far.

3. SQL

I've jumped on the SQLite hype-train. Feels like none of the persist data technologies really do what I want.

• All in on Sqlite, Litestream. Ben Johnson: _Why I Built Litestream. Something of a revolution going on in DBs. Maybe people will realise that they are not Google and have massive infra bloat you can just stick the db in a sqlite instance.

• Writing a SQL database in Zig

• how cockroachdb encodes sql tables in a kvstore

4. Media

• new album: Jack Harlow Jackman..

• holds up: Jamie xx In Colour

• Sicario is fantastic.