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I won Wordle! I have begun almost every one of my 1000 played games with STARE and on 30 December 2024 that was (finally) the correct answer.
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Your eyes are not deceiving you. There’s some egregious backdating going on. I am writing this very early on Thursday morning but pretending that I posted it late on Tuesday night. I’ll wish you all happy new year next update.
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Christmas itself went well. The kids got their presents, we had a traditional family Christmas lunch and I ate too much of my beloved Christmas cake.
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I wish I could report that the reason for not posting is some New Year extravaganza but the truth is that the last week has been a lot of taking it easy at Mum and Dad’s place. Still, with three young children, it never feels particularly easy. One thing I always wish I did more of while we’re here is see more films. Mum and Dad live up the road from a cinema, so ideally it would involve going to that but even just watching more movies on my iPad would feel like an achievement and yet here I am not even having made time for a solitary movie this year. Last year, I managed to get Emma and John to see Wish on Boxing Day before watching Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny late one night. The year before I watched Knives Out, Glass Onion and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore on my phone when everyone was asleep. This year I hoped to at least see Moana 2 but I tried to bring Rowan and make it our first family cinema outing. This turned out to be overly ambitious as Rowan immediately found the sound and darkness overwhelming and I had to bail before the film proper began (Eri stayed to watch the movie with Emma and John).
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We made it out to Balmoral Beach on Monday to see Eugenia and her family and I somehow managed to kick a rock as I was walking around the beach. While I briefly wondered if I’d broken a toe, there wasn’t much swelling and I figured I’d just badly bruised the toe. The lesson of course is that the beach is our enemy and we should never go there.
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I spent part of New Year’s Eve on the phone with sogaiu in a sprawling conversation that eventually involved us talking about large language models. This caused me to remember one of my favourite interviews from 2024, Ben Thompson’s discussion of artificial intelligence with journalist, Timothy B. Lee. Lee made this point during the conversation that I’ve been thinking about for almost two months now:
I think the main issue is that the transformer architecture requires all of the model state to be in these vectors for individual words, and then it keeps a record of that forever—the whole context, there’s no process where you summarise and abstract away. If you think about your life, you think about something that happened ten years ago, you don’t remember every single thing you said, everything that others said, you have a abstract memory that, “Oh, in 2014 I remember I lived in this place and I had this job”, and things you learn kind work their way into the brain, but it’s organized in a good way. LLMs just don’t have a way to do that.
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One of my favourite websites is Quote Investigator. As the name suggests, Quote Investigator investigates quotations and tries to discover their origins. I didn’t realise until reading Paul Battley’s weeknotes that Snopes sometimes does this, too. And in the case of supposed Lenin quote that ‘There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen’ quote, Snopes was able to go one better than QI and explains that not only did Lenin not say it, but that it appears the earliest example might have been a novel, The Devil by Adriaan Schade van Westrum.
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Apple Music’s Replay 2024 playlist features a lot of music that I expected to see. One track I have only the barest memory of listening to this year was Merci, Mercy’s cover of ‘Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High’ (Apple Music). See you next year!
