Essays
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Sigmund Freud observed that humanity has suffered three great “humiliations.” Galileo found that we are not the center of the universe, Darwin found that we are not the culmination of nature, and he himself (Freud) found that we are not in control of our own minds. Ayad Akhtar recently made the point in The Yale… Continue reading
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I’m with stupid
Large language models actually work. They’re not fake, and they’re surprising, amazing technology. LLMs are real. The LLM vendors and their business models, though, might be something else again. They’ve raised historic amounts of money, which the venture capitalists are going to want repaid at some point. But if you examine their revenues, expenses, and… Continue reading
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Author! Author!
What is writing for? What matters, who wrote some text, or who reads it? One idea is that text — I’ll call it “literature” here — only matters, and only really exists as a significant entity at all when someone reads it. This is a key idea from “reader-response criticism,” a branch of literary theory.… Continue reading
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Speed, oversimplification, and delusion
Artificial intelligence seems to be mostly about speed. Instead of days, weeks, or months working on your software, book, or other project, it can be done in hours or even minutes! Well…okay…but so what? There are certainly cases where speed is an important component of an outcome. Dousing a fire. Removing a steak from the… Continue reading
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Unincorporating
My most recent employer recently decided the jobs I and many of my colleagues were doing no longer needed to be done. We had, of course, been doing exactly the work that same employer specified. We were doing it pretty well, too, judging by the performance reviews, bonus payments, and acclaim we were receiving. But… Continue reading
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The intelligence is the words
Kevin Kelly asks If programmers did not program ChatGPT with logical deduction skills, where does the intelligence in its models come from? He hypothesizes that It is the architecture of language that conveys the intelligence. I have another idea: our intelligence is the language, and that’s been hidden in plain sight for centuries or more.… Continue reading
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Juneteenth
Today is Juneteenth. Not everybody knows that the official title is Juneteenth National Independence Day. It’s the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the US. Slavery was declared over by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but it took another two and a half years for the traitorous slavers to be defeated. That… Continue reading
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Less than zero
Is “economics” the worst, most egregious example of nonsense claiming to be some sort of science? It might not quite as far afield as, say, “ufology,” “astrology,” or “numerology,” but I think that’s because those other pursuits are not taken seriously except by their adherents. As far as I know, you can’t study or earn… Continue reading
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Dark Tower indeed
The Dark Tower , Stephen King’s multivolume epic, takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting he describes with “the world had moved on.” Everything fell apart. Nobody knew why, but nearly everything people depended on simply stopped working and went into decline and decay. Full disclosure: I’ve read some of the series but not all of… Continue reading
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Writing and reading
I was reminded of the memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. I read it a few years ago, mostly because I found the title intriguing. What reminded me was this post from Herman Martinus, the developer and maintainer of Bear. He cited this passage from Murakami:“…I can’t grasp… 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!