My Father's Technology Timeline
In 1990, my father bought a computer for his five-year-old son.
Posts
Do LLMs Have Thinking Styles? REI-40 Experiment on 5 Frontier Models
We administered the REI-40 dual-processing personality inventory to 5 frontier LLMs. The results reveal distinct ’thinking style’ profiles — from neutral responders to rational enthusiasts.
psyctl — An LLM Personality Steering Tool
Building an open-source tool that controls LLM personality using Steering Vectors.
Self-Actualization Is No Different from a Pufferfish's Sand Circle
Kenrick’s evolutionary reconstruction of Maslow’s hierarchy, and how digital services exploit our evolved motivational systems.
Two Minds in One Brain: Why We Act Irrationally Even When We Know Better
Why can’t you resist that midnight snack during a diet? Two independent processing systems live inside your head—one that calculates and one that feels. A look at Pacini & Epstein’s 1999 study on the Rational-Experiential Inventory.
The Idea That Lost and Came Back: Skinner, Chomsky, and the Talking Machines
One man argued that language was a matter of reward and habit, and lost famously. Half a century later, the machines that talk to us are trained with exactly that: reward.
Sentence Reranking Using LLM Attention Maps
Leveraging what the LLM already knows. An experiment extracting document relevance signals from Attention Maps to rerank sentences, along with a survey of related papers.
Steering GPT-2's Emotions with Sparse Autoencoders
Finding emotion-related features in GPT-2 using OpenAI’s pretrained SAE, then training one from scratch. Feature patching turns ‘good person’ into ‘shit’.
K-means, GMM, EM: Three Nested Russian Dolls of Clustering
K-means is actually an extreme case of GMM, and GMM is the canonical application of the EM algorithm. How these three connect within a single framework, and how information geometry explains the relationship.
Information Geometry: How AI Learns Most Efficiently
Just as Newton’s F=ma describes the physical world, information geometry describes how AI learns. An intuitive guide for beginners.