Last weekend was the first time in over 16 years that I returned to Norway, my birthplace and the home of my father’s side of the family. I don’t have any good reason for not returning sooner, and even fewer good reasons since graduating from university. As I prepared for the visit and reached out to family and old friends, I felt this internal resistance and sense of fear. But what was there to be scared of? ...
I attended EAGxBerkeley last weekend, and wanted to capture a few thoughts and ideas before my memory taints them any further. For context, this was my first EA conference, making it hard for me to compare with other EA conferences, I don’t live in the Bay Area so part of my excitement might be an artifact of the novelty and being with friends, and, I’m a software engineer who uses and builds with AI on a regular basis but I’m not an AI safety researcher. At a high-level, I would rate this among the most entertaining and worthwhile conferences I’ve attended; it was also hosted at one of the most unique venues I’ve been to, the Lighthaven. The event organizers and volunteers deserve another round of applause for all of their great work! ...
The home lab. Sounds cool, you should get yourself one ;) Here’s how I got started quickly and cheaply. Requirements Besides cost and speed, I have a few other requirements and preferences that should help make simplify the process and hopefully make it more useful long-term. First, given that I’m writing this on my M1 Macbook - with it’s arm architecture - it makes sense for me to have a dedicated x86_64 machine. Second, I want a stable, widely used, Linux OS meant for servers. One that has a package manager with large selection of packages but also plenty of resources online to help me troubleshoot and learn. ...
Grand Canyon (1924) by Gunnar Mauritz Widforss We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. This quote by Kurt Vonnegut has been on my mind since I encountered it about a month ago. Good quotes can capture a truth about the world with an elegant and poetic phrase, always making you wish you had come up with it yourself. The difficulty in trying to describe certain truths is that they cannot, by their very nature, be expressed in language. ...
Modern smartphones retain the name of the tool they were initially designed as, phones. The irony is that making traditional phone calls probably makes up only a tiny fraction of what most people use their phones for these days. If you’re an iPhone user, have a look at your Screen Time to get a more accurate sense of how you actually use your phone. If I had to guess, social media, video streaming, and messaging top the list, and perhaps in quantities that you would be a little embarrassed to admit. ...
As it currently stands, I pay for two AI services, ChatGPT Plus and GitHub's Co-Pilot but this number will surely increase in the coming months and years. I think the term “co-pilot” perfectly captures the current relationship; these are tools that help me automate some of the boring or tedious tasks while also acting as an assistant that I can use to bounce ideas off. Recently, while working on a side project, I needed a real URL for some testing. As I began to type out url = "https://, Co-Pilot generated a suggestion that I could accept by hitting tab. At this point, it didn’t matter what the URL was so I accepted the suggestion. Any guesses what the URL was for? What if I told you it was for a YouTube video? ...
Photo by Nils Rasmusson on Unsplash Forest fires bring death and destruction, yet they also catalyze the birth of new plant life. The fire clears the overcrowded underbrush to create space and opportunities for the next generation, a cycle necessary for the health of the forest. However, like so many things, the quantity matters. Too little fire and not enough space is created for the next generation, while on the other hand, too much fire and the entire forest burns down. ...
eskild.art is now live! I have plenty of ideas on what this might morph into but for now, it’s simply a gallery. Can you solve the riddle to view the image?
When this blog first launched in 2019, I decided the quickest and easiest way to get started was to use Squarespace. I don’t think I was wrong but as my desire for more control over the site grew, a change was needed. Introducing eskild.blog, now built using Hugo and hosted on GitHub Pages. Since I’m not quite ready to build my site from scratch, I figured using a static site generator would give me the control I wanted without the additional maintenance burden that comes with managing a full-fledged, dynamic website. ...
The desert is an unlikely home for a tree, yet in the Mojave Desert of the US southwest, you will find a strange and sharply unique tree, straight from another planet, the Joshua Tree (Yucca Brevifolia). Joshua Tree National Park, located two hours east of Los Angeles, is the perfect destination to appreciate these exceptional trees while they are still here. Due to a variety of factors, which naturally includes a rapidly changing climate, the long-term survival of the Joshua Tree is in jeopardy. By the end of the current century, we could see the range of these majestic trees reduced by 90%, ironically this might include the Joshua Tree National Park itself 1. ...