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I’d rather have a taco
Yesterday, Tuesday Sept 29, was the momentous occasion of a “Super Intelligence Luncheon” (sic) in Washington, DC. It was a fancy, formal event, and they published the seating chart: The lives of government aides and staffers seems to me like unending torture. There’s Susie Wiles, a 69-year-old woman who started out in 1978 as a… Continue reading
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20-something Hubris
A young prodigy in AI development named Alexandr Wang got a sack of cash from world-class sociopath Zuckerberg to build Facebook’s new AI program “Muse.” Now [Twitter-link warning:] he’s attempted to justify his work, in the most hubristic, egotistical way imaginable. Of course he did so on Twitter. Katie Notopoulos saw through it immediately as… Continue reading
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You can’t be a leader without followers
We pay far too much attention to “leaders.” Partly because we’re very susceptible to a halo effect where we reflexively ascribe general authority to someone who has achieved some sort of success (for any reason) in one specific pursuit. Elon Musk, for example, is very successful at accumulating wealth. That doesn’t mean he knows anything… Continue reading
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Candy Trees and Handkerchiefs
“What are you talking about, Ferret?” asked Hare. Ferret was hiding under a handkerchief, standing on Hare’s doorstep after yelling trickertree. “How did you know it was me, Hare?” “I can hear your voice,” said Hare. He twitched his ears to emphasize the point. “Rats,” said Ferret, “you aren’t supposed to know who I am… Continue reading
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Reliability: just a movie plot now?
The Ellison family, by all reports a particularly malodorous nest of ultra-rich sociopaths, is trying to buy most of the media companies in the US, if not the world. Because they’re frenemies (just wait) with the orange baby, the US regime is all for their monopoly-building. The legal teams from US states have been the… Continue reading
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Not everything is property
The court case between news organizations and AI vendors just made public some interesting internal documents from the AI folks, calling scraping news “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.” I think the intellectual foundation of this behavior goes back to the original scam of claiming that when someone creates something — by writing, for example… Continue reading
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Thought Experiment
Let’s say you’ve come up with a genuinely clever new gizmo that can do lots of things fairly well, and sparks people’s imaginations because it looks a lot like the imaginary gizmos from super-popular movies and TV shows, especially scary ones. You and your friends start companies and manage to raise insane amounts of money… Continue reading
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Can any good come of any of it?
Today is a somber date; twenty-five years since the 9/11…tragedy? Atrocity? Disaster? It’s hard to find the right word, and maybe there isn’t one. It was one of those events that will be marked in history for a very long time. With the perspective of those years since, did anybody learn anything? Was it nothing… Continue reading
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What is it about Florida?
The latest irritating, disappointing, and astonishing story coming out of Florida is about Vinita Prabhakar and Fred Hawkins. And others. Prabhakar is a professor of literature who has taught for years at “small, private liberal arts schools in Upstate New York.” By all reports, she’s quite good at it. She moved to Florida to be… Continue reading
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Why does anybody listen to this grifter?
Apparently Tesla, headed up as we all know by a certain Mr. Musk, has started trying to drum up interest in companies buying fleets of self-driving cars so they can enter the robot-taxi business. These are the killer robot cars that just claimed another victim, and of course the company, the cars, and the man… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my newsletter, Artisanal Scribbles, where I’m grappling with writing, authentic human authorship, integrity, and the craft of beauty in the AI age. You can also find some of my old software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly wrote tiny utilities in Python and shell scripts. I’m mostly retired from coding nowadays.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- I’d rather have a taco
- 20-something Hubris
- You can’t be a leader without followers
- Candy Trees and Handkerchiefs
- Reliability: just a movie plot now?
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