Ansuz - mskala's home page

Matthew Explains

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0700

I just launched my latest project: Matthew Explains (matthewexplains.com), a subscription video service dedicated to exploring research results in artificial intelligence, computer science, and other subjects. Readers of this Web site will probably also find that one interesting. Although I'm not committing to a specific schedule, the current plan is to post a new video every Monday; one just went up today.

alden: detachable terminal sessions without breaking scrollback

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

For a long time I've wanted to have a thing for resuming interrupted ssh sessions. The typical scenario is that I connect to a server with ssh, start a long-running task, and leave the window open so I can watch it. Then something causes the connection to break. Maybe I lose my local networking connection; maybe there's a power failure at my end; maybe I need to reboot my computer for some reason. What happens to the task on the server side?

How to play Diversity

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0700

This is a card game I invented. It's a fast-paced game of tactics and shifting power, for four players, played with a standard deck of cards. As card games are classified, it's a plain-trick evasion game, with the main innovations being an unusual rule for how tricks are taken, and no requirement to follow suit. I call it "Diversity" because the rules put special emphasis on sets of four cards containing one in each suit.

Why language models need not get worse

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0800

Sam Kriss has a Substack posting in which he describes the zairja of the world and then links it to his ideas on why AI is getting worse. Basically, what I get from the piece is that he's saying successive generations of GPT models have produced less and less valuable output as they better and better approximate the average content of the World Wide Web. Nearly all of the Web is garbage, and so an approximation of the average Web document is garbage too. The output from older models is weird and interesting because more random and less accurately approximating the average Web document; the output from new models is boring and worthless. My own view is that these issues are not as serious or as inevitable as he presents them. There seem to be some gaps in Kriss's understanding of how language models, and the ChatGPT Web service in particular, work; and filling in the gaps points to some natural solutions for the problem he describes.

自分のドキュメントクラスを作ろう

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800

LaTeXで文書を書いてなら、時々すべてに体裁を指せたいです。

たとえば僕の仕事で、アナログシンサーのマニュアルを書いて、いつも同じの体裁が欲しいです。

LaTeXのデフォルトは普通過ぎます。個性的な体裁を書きたいです。でも全部のNorth Coast Synthesisユーサーマニュアルは、同じの体裁が必要です。だから、自分のLaTeXクラスファイルを作りました。

Neural networks and the Unix philosophy

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 16:13:43 -0700

There are a number of directions from which we can look at current developments in deep neural networks and the issues I raised in my streamed comments on pirate AI. Here's a summary of the implications I see from the perspective of the Unix philosophy.

Somebody but not anybody

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 15:29:43 -0700

We have a patient suffering kidney failure; he's in a lot of pain and the disease will soon kill him. He could be saved - if someone would donate a kidney to be transplanted into this patient's body. So, as a matter of ethics, somebody ought to do that, right?

But who, exactly?

On language modelling and pirate AI (transcript)

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700

I've been thinking a lot recently about the current developments in deep neural network generative models, and how they implicate free software issues. I went into a lot of this stuff in my July 25 Twitch stream, and although I'd also like to write up some of my thoughts in a more organized way, the transcript of the relevant video content is a pretty decent introduction in itself, so I thought I'd post it here.

This is an automatically generated transcript (by another of these models!), with a fair bit of manual editing - so it's spoken English written down, not the usual standard form of written English. The video itself will go online eventually, but it may be a long time before that happens, because my video archive server is at capacity now and I probably won't expand it until the Twitch stream gets enough viewers I can sell some subscriptions to pay the bills.

The end of Lotto 6/49 as we know it

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700

The rules of Lotto 6/49 are about to change in a way that I think is pretty significant. It's drastic enough that I think we might well say Lotto 6/49 is coming to an end, being replaced by a new game that is not even properly a lotto game anymore and only happens to reuse the name.

Embodying the machine

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0700

There's an idea in neuroscience that the brain maintains what is basically a 3D model of the body - the "body schema" - and that when we use tools, they become part of that schema. Claimed evidence for this concept includes studies where people were asked to perform a task with a tool, like picking up an object with a gripper like a pair of tongs, and then measurements afterward suggested their body schema had changed. For instance, the person's response time and the way they moved when picking up an object without a tool might change in a way that suggested their internal estimate of the length of their arms had increased; or their perception of the distance between two touches on their forearm might increase, as if they were at some deep level measuring against an estimated forearm length that had increased.