Artificial Intelligence
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It figures
There is a competition called the International Math Olympiad (IMO). It’s an international competition for high school students. It consists of six questions that competitors have to answer within a time limit. There are only six questions, but these are extremely difficult questions, of course. At least at the level of excellent, but pre-university mathematicians.… Continue reading
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Home-cooked software
This article is about efforts to design and build “malleable software.” It’s an idea I think many people have had, fleetingly, and immediately dismissed because software seems to be so immutably brittle. Even a “flexible” program that can do many different things — emacs, for example, or photoshop (I guess) — can only do the… Continue reading
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Hammering spaghetti
Tech companies — and probably others as well — are in a frenzy to find an actual use for AI. I’ve been asked to “look for ways to apply it” as well. It just seems to me like the old saw about having a hammer, then thinking everything looks like a nail. Like a nice… Continue reading
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A dying empire and its assassins
Chris Hedges’ piece The Rule of Idiots rings pretty true and it’s pretty depressing. Are we really amidst the death of the American empire, the empire that never really admitted to itself that it was an empire? Or is trumpism our society can recover from? “The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots.”… Continue reading
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Business Idiots
“Every institution keeps its core constituents and labor forces at arms-length, and effectively anything built at scale quickly becomes distanced from both the customer and laborer. This disconnection — or alienation — sits at the center of almost every problem I’ve ever talked about. Why would companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of… Continue reading
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Paul Robert Lloyd nails it
And you know what it is. It’s been other things too. And there will probably be more to come. Continue reading
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The latest tool
This is about a very specific use of a particular large language model. The model is Claude, from Anthropic. The use is assistance in coding. I find that coding with Claude makes me a lot more productive than I am without. I’ve used language models quite a bit by now, and I don’t think what… Continue reading
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Thoughtfulness about fake thought
Quinn Norton wrote an insightful piece about large language models and evolved human behavior at EmptyWheel. I thought this observation was particularly on point: “They don’t even have to be engineered to charm us, and they aren’t. We’ve been engineered by evolution to be charmed.” Continue reading
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Oh good
Google, the company that originally instituted, then removed, the motto “don’t be evil,” also made a pledge about its artificial intelligence projects. Because they’re Google, a titanic pile of cash and (still in some areas) technical talent, their AI projects are world-class. They pledged that their AI applications would never involve “(1) weapons, (2) surveillance,… Continue reading
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Just the next step?
In a study just published in CHI 2025, researchers found “reductions in cognitive effort and confidence” among “knowledge workers” who made use of AI. Now, this is real research and definitely worth further investigation. But also what they found was self-reported reductions in cognitive effort and confidence. In other words, they just did a survey… 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 other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!