I visited this exhibition in SFMOMA of the comics made by Orlando Smith, who has been incarcerated over multiple decades. The texts were too small and dense for me to see clearly in the gallery, but I was struck by the quality of the drawings, especially given his circumstances.
There is also an accompanying documentary about the life of the sick/old inmates depicted in the comics.
Nowadays it is entirely possible to let these AI agents write a research paper and code from ground up based on some initial human instructions. But I think it is important to think about which parts to automate and which parts to keep in human hands.
Personally, these are the parts that I would be happy to delegate to AI:
I would not want to delegate the parts that I need to do manually, at least the first few drafts, to help me think through the research:
This post was inspired by PaperBanana for generating paper figures, which I think would be more suitable for results figures (like statistical plots) than conceptual figures (e.g., algorithm/pipeline illustration).
I came across this interesting article about a psychiatrist who chose this profession due to his own early childhood symptoms and later decided to work in a prison because that is where the need is greatest.
For experimentation and token-minimizing I have been running some open-weight LLMs (e.g., llama3.2 for text and qwen3-coder:30b for code) locally on a MacBook via ollama within VS Code. I noticed that long-context tasks (e.g., analyzing a complex codebase and generating a new feature) can take a long time and compute, eventually heating up the device to a hazardous degree, especially under an ambient room temperature over 90°F.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DaXY3tDj8nM/
I created this little code repo as a fun exercise of LangGraph for a news agency that generates fictional news articles based on real events. Some of these articles are available on this Substack site.
Biological life forms are evolved to procreate, ideas are disseminated to propagate, and I exist to serve others instead of myself.
Anything that depends on others, can be taken away from us, and is not ours.
Which basically applies to everything, including our life, as we will all die on day.
But we can prioritize them based on their proximity to and controllability by us – mind, body, wisdom, skills, relationships, accomplishments, money, jobs, etc.
We won’t fear losing something if we don’t think it belongs to us.
During a physical training exercise today my sifu pointed out that I haven’t been making as much progress as I should have in all these years, because I haven’t been putting in enough focus and effort.
This triggered me to realize that this generalizes to other areas of my life as well.
I was very motivated and hard-pushing earlier when there were specific goals and expectations, such as getting good grades, attending prestigious schools, getting posh jobs, publishing top papers, and such.
However, as time went by, the goals and expectations became less well-defined and the pushing became less intense.
Eventually I just took it easy and settled into a cruising mode without realizing it.
Thanks to this wake-up call, I am getting back to my previous self, starting from this physical training class, and other areas of my life as well.
During my morning Caltrain rides I often see a guy waltzing across the train fist-bumping and chatting with passengers. Today I came to meet him again, and I took the chance asking him why he is so cheerful.
“I am suicidal” was his reply.
The conversation was overheard by a nearby train conductor who later brought another conductor towards me and asked me to repeat what I heard. Turned out that they need to report such cases to the police to prevent suicide attempts.
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