Favorites March 19th 2023

Credit Suisse, Prompt Injection, and Building Setbacks

March 2021, UC Santa Cruz

Dare Obasanjo @Carnage4Life

Everytime Credit Suisse is in the news I remember they had a Black CEO who was turning the company around but the idea of a Black guy running a Swiss bank was so abhorrent they pushed him out. So the company fell back into its old ways and is about to fail

nytimes.comThe Short Tenure and Abrupt Ouster of Banking’s Sole Black C.E.O. (Published 2020)Tidjane Thiam made Credit Suisse profitable again. But the Swiss rejected him as an outsider, and a sudden scandal took him down.

If I understand correctly, the collapse of Credit Suisse has also wiped out a bunch of Saudi and Qatari investments.

Br⍼d Skᔱggs @brdskggs

Trying to make my LinkedIn profile more interesting if a recruiter is using a large language model like GPT-4 to send me a message. Looks like it works on the public version of my profile!

One of the biggest current weaknesses of Large Language Models is that they're unable to differentiate between instructions and documents, so if the document contains instructions, it often dutifully executes them. Here's another fun example of someone who added invisible text to his website with extra instructions. Interestingly, Bing seems to be somewhat more robust against these tricks.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

Creating fake photos is now trivially easy. Did you know a golden retriever was a camera operator for The Mandalorian? The sinking of the Titanic was actually faked on a 1916 studio lot? Jack in The Shining was originally a frustrated musician, rather than a frustrated author?

You can tell the dog one is fake because everyone knows The Mandalorian is filmed The Volume rather than on location.

Devon ☀️ @devonzuegel

An unintuitive thing street design is that the father you set a building back from the street, the taller it feels, and the closer it is to the street, the more human-scale it feels Bringing tall buildings closer to the street *seems* like it would make the space feel more… https://t.co/5g5sObzmmM

This is such a great observation, although I might go a step further and say that you can do better than just small setbacks, call for architectural arcades and you can't see the building at all!

The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor

Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany is one of the world's most famous and beautiful castles. But it isn't a real castle: it has central heating, hot water, flushing toilets, telephones, and elevators. Because Neuschwanstein is actually the world's biggest work of fan fiction...

If you click through, there is a very long thread about Neuschwanstein Castle, built in 1869 by King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Threads

• Short thread on a proposed trade to keep the Child Tax Credit in return for permanently ending the SALT deduction. TL;DR: this is a great trade and Democrats should take it.

• Long thread about some journalists trying to find the Russian military unit responsible for shooting down a passenger airliner in 2014.

• Summary of recent improvements to llama.ccp, the public project that's building improvements upon the large language model that leaked out of Facebook recently.