Artificial Intelligence
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Personal Software
AI coding assistance makes it possible (even relatively easy) to create applications for your own personal use. They can be weird, quirky, and “missing features.” It won’t have all those dozens of menu items, hundreds of icons, and thousands of features that commercial software contains in order to cater to every possible customer. Because there’s… Continue reading
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Oh, right, “AI”
“…the world’s shadiest art dealer… is pretty sure that if we keep shoveling words into the word-guessing program it will wake up and become intelligent. Which is just, you know, stupid. It’s like thinking that if we just keep breeding our horses to run faster, one of our mares will eventually give birth to a locomotive.“… Continue reading
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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
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!
Recent Posts
- Once more, into the breach
- Be Here Now. And Sit.
- Why the fear of dead air?
- But all my friends say I should…
- War games
Categories
Artificial Intelligence
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History, sort of
Immorality
Incompetence
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Stories
Tales from the Forest
Technicalities
Tragedy
Unanticipated Consequences