Quotations
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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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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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We must hold to what is difficult
Along with many of my former colleagues, I find myself unexpectedly “standing in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing.” In our case today it’s due to a disembodied decision somewhere in an enormous organization. In the case of the author of that quotation, Rainer Maria Rilke, the transition belonged to Franz… Continue reading
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weekend reading
“the old is dying and the new cannot be born” –Antonio Gramsci “We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit.” –Paul Feyerabend “How do LLMs affect productivity and quality? (Much like leaded petrol. There’s some potential benefit for individual users with literally decades of expertise,… Continue reading
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Everything learns
I don’t think it’s true that the orange baby isn’t rational. The problem it has is what it has experienced its whole life and career: getting away with everything it tried, no matter what. In some way you could look at it (the o.b.) as simply a statistical outlier, like an astonishingly lengthy string of… Continue reading
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Why? Why? Why?
“Because [it is] insane. Because [it’s] venal. Because [it’s] a malignant narcissist. Because [it’s] a sociopath. Because [it]e has a fragile ego. Because those around [it] exacerbate and play to those traits to advance their own interests. Because CEOs and investors do likewise to fill their coffers. Because to some people, whether it is insane… Continue reading
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The lost gatekeepers and the watchers
This is a followup to a previous post, where I complained that the internet information environment shifts a lot of work from the creation/dissemination side to the consumer/user side. Walter Benjamin offered another much richer analysis in his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He lived long before the… Continue reading
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Weird disconnect
Tesla is not doing well at its core business of selling new cars. as [Indranil Ghosh](notes), in 2025 their deliveries fell “8.6% to 1.6 million vehicles.” That’s the second year in a row that sales dropped. However, “The sales decline hasn’t affected Tesla’s stock price.” What’s going on? Ghosh suggests that Wall Street investors are… Continue reading
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Agreed
“…offering serious policy advice to the current U.S. government is like preaching to baboons: You won’t get heard over the hooting, and even if they did hear, they wouldn’t understand.” –Paul Krugman 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!