Incompetence of the powerful
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Expectations
Everybody has expectations. Things they more or less assume to be true, based on all sorts of things; cultural norms, life experience, ethical principles, advice, reading, and so on. Some of these expectations are perceptual, and when you know that you can use people’s expectations to amuse them with a magic trick, captivate them with… Continue reading
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When are we going to get past “leaders”
I get it; it’s much easier to oversimplify something than to really understand it. It’s much easier to caricature something than to learn to write (or paint) a realistic description. It’s much more convenient to be lazy than to do work. But come on, here’s a guy who does a job at a chip company… Continue reading
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Maybe they really can’t stop lying
Ted Cruz claims:1. He went to Best Buy. This is highly suspect.2. People inside were crying. Oh come on. People drive all the way to a big box store and start crying? 3. They were crying because of the election results. Right. Exactly in line with how people act; there’s an election, they go to… Continue reading
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It would be much more efficient…
Sam Altman is generally regarded as a smart guy, right? I mean, he’s got a lot of money, which is the way we measure smarts here in the US. Have a lot of money, say something, and it’ll be featured in the media. Now he’s claiming that people shouldn’t run open-weight LLMs on their own… Continue reading
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They’ll just say anything at all
RFK Jr.:“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce literature,” Nobel Prizes Mohamed ElBaradei, Peace, 2005Ahmed Zewail, Chemistry, 1999Naguib Mahfouz, Literature, 1988Anwar Sadat, Peace, 1978Peter Brian Medawar, Physiology or… Continue reading
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Yeah but what about the Jewish Space Lasers?
It seems the Federal Communication Commission, or at least the dimwit sycophant installed as the director, has decided that there’s such a thing as “foreign surveillance chips,” and they’re very, very bad. So bad they’re banned! It doesn’t make much sense to just ban a microchip, so they’ve banned the sale of “two gadgets” that… Continue reading
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A freaking fortune
The orange baby is happy about the financial vise it’s tightening on those of us who are not billionaires. “We’re making a freaking fortune,” it said. One of the characteristics of socialism and communism is the redistribution of wealth. By the book, redistribution in those systems was supposed to lower the “peaks” (the super wealthy)… Continue reading
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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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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
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
- Expectations
- When are we going to get past “leaders”
- And neither was he.
- It boggles the mind
- My ears hurt!
Categories
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Immorality
Incompetence
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