Essays
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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
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Why do we keep doing this?
I don’t know if it’s a uniquely American thing, or maybe a uniquely human thing, but damn, we fall for scams. All the time. Maybe it’s an off-the-charts ability that a few people have that make them able to come up with what they know is a lie, and get everybody within earshot to believe… Continue reading
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Contradictions
Terry Goodier’s essay The Boring Internet is all about the low level protocols that underpin Internet services. He points out that there’s nothing pretty or easy about protocols. And he points it out in a visual essay that’s lovely to see. The form of the essay and the form of its subject are a contradiction.… Continue reading
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Beauty…came too readily
There is a moment in To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, in which the moment before commencing a creative work is crystallized. “…she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy (sic) in the air. Where to begin?–that was the question at what point… Continue reading
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Well whaddaya know
Everybody knows a lot more than they’re able to explain. There are some areas where language just isn’t adequate. For example, imagine trying to explain an aroma without referring to other smells. Without “it smells like…”, there’s not a lot you can do. Even though people have amassed countless pages of written information, and that’s… Continue reading
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Oh spare us. No, really, I mean it.
I just found Dario Amodei’s apologia The Adolescence of Technology, from back in January. It’s quite long; Claude must have used tons of tokens writing it for him. Amodei can, of course, afford it. His essay is chock full of hand waving dismissals of reservations reasonable people might have about large language models (and the… 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!