Incompetence of the powerful
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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
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Can any good come of any of it?
Today is a somber date; twenty-five years since the 9/11…tragedy? Atrocity? Disaster? It’s hard to find the right word, and maybe there isn’t one. It was one of those events that will be marked in history for a very long time. With the perspective of those years since, did anybody learn anything? Was it nothing… Continue reading
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Can’t keep a secret?
The orange baby just blurted out the number of nuclear weapons possessed by North Korea. It’s fifty-seven, by the way. This seems more than a little off for several reasons: • It seems like the number of weapons an extremely hostile nation has might be a secret worth keeping.• How did we get this information?… Continue reading
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War games
The US has been at war for 93% of its entire existence. Let’s just take the most recent ones. Korean War, 1950-1953. Two whole years of peace after that; an aberration. Then Vietnam, 1955-1975. A bit more peace, until invading Grenada for some reason in 1883, invading Panama in 1989, invading Iraq for some reason… Continue reading
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Trusting in trust
Trust is fundamental to society, to economic systems, to getting through daily life…it might be the most basic and foundational value there is. We need to trust the people and institutions we deal with locally in order to work efficiently and avoid spending time and effort trying to validate and ensure every little thing. In… 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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Weaponization?
The orange baby and its henchpuppets are planning to pay the January 6 traitors on the basis of having been prosecuted by a “weaponized” department of justice at the direction of Joe Biden. But hang on a second. Let’s look at an actual example, the “QAnon Shaman.” You remember, that shirtless oddball who stood out… 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 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
- I’d rather have a taco
- 20-something Hubris
- You can’t be a leader without followers
- Candy Trees and Handkerchiefs
- Reliability: just a movie plot now?
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