Links - June 2024
During WWII, the US government published advertisements for products people couldn’t buy. those products were being used in the war effort, but the companies wanted to maintain brand recognition among future consumers, among other reasons.
First Steps, by Georgios Jakobides. I just think it’s a cute painting. I saw it on the wikipedia page for “Toddler”
Lincoln Mullen: The Spread of U.S. Slavery
Jimmy Carter rabbit incident - Wikipedia - a swamp rabbit tried to sink his boat.
Chapter 1 of The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a Paul Erdos memoir.
Some information on academic salaries, courtesy of SamR’s Assorted Musings:
- aaup compensation survey
- Chronical’s estimates (which don’t always match up with aaup) and “peer institution” database
- Also, the base pay of people on h1b visa’s is more or less publically viewable.
In a 1954 lecture, Dennis Robertson asked “What Does the Economist Economize?”, to which his answer was “love”. There are various cynical interpretations of this floating around, but I really appreciated Prof. Chari’s at the recent graduation ceremony: that we must save our love for those close to us and for the most needy, and that we run much of the world with cold things like markets so that our loving attention may be focused on those who need it most. Can’t find the full original lecture online, but here’s a very short page with a snippet.
Uncensor any LLM with abliteration. A blog post where they are able to fine tune a llama llm to get rid of its censorious impulses by identifying the “direction” in which those impulses point.