Technicalities
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Waxing Desperate with Imagination*
Generative AI isn’t reliable. Like an unreliable narrator in fiction, you have to stay alert; what an LLM tells you only might be true. If you’re writing fiction you might give the reader a hint that your narrator can’t be trusted. You might introduce them as a court jester; a clown. Or you might design… Continue reading
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The great human document
Another idea from Jaron Lanier: large language model software systems are not artificial intelligence. A large language model is one enormous document comprised of contributions from countless people. It’s “something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics.” It “can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between… Continue reading
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Data Dignity and Xanadu
Jaron Lanier is always interesting to listen to or read. Just this week he was a guest on Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Startalk. The discussion turned to AI (in its current form), and Lanier brought up his notion of data dignity. This hasn’t gotten much attention, as far as I can tell. According to Lanier, the… Continue reading
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When you’re paid to undermine yourself
Minas Karamanis has done some thinking about using LLMs. How they can help and, on the other hand, how they can undermine your own abilities and career. This is probably obvious, but it all depends on how you use them. Karamanis is an astrophysicist at Berkeley, but I think what he says applies to any… Continue reading
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All too human
Sam Altman, the public face of OpenAI (ChatGPT vendor) is most of all a fast-talking salesman. He’s really good at that. As such, you can’t really believe anything he ever says; when he says “A”, it’s just a reason to obtain “B”, no matter what it takes. Truth is entirely beside the point. Seems like… Continue reading
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Questions unasked
There was a Cisco AI Summit event yesterday. It was a corporate-captured attempt at a TED conference. They did, to their credit, attract the top names in AI, including Sam Altman (of OpenAI) and Jensen Huang (of Nvidia). The whole point, if there was one beyond real-time hagiography, was to get the tech celebs to… Continue reading
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Connecting the dots
The tech bros snagged government contracts worth billions from the orange baby, and set about constructing new software and databases. Musk’s DOGE punks stole private information about, frankly, everybody known to the US government. Tax records, social security records, and everything else they could purloin. The tech bros’ companies, like Palantir, poured all that data… Continue reading
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Systemic Indecision
Pretentious title, but all I’m talking about is using MacOS versus Linux (Ubuntu, specifically). You can read a sort-of-similar account by Jack Baty, who has as long a history with Macs as I do. Recently I’m feeling disillusioned by Apple’s moves around many things, including MacOS. Unlike Baty, though, I don’t feel any particular urge… Continue reading
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Personal Software
AI coding assistance makes it possible (even relatively easy) to create applications for your own personal use. They can be weird, quirky, and “missing features.” It won’t have all those dozens of menu items, hundreds of icons, and thousands of features that commercial software contains in order to cater to every possible customer. Because there’s… Continue reading
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This explains a lot
I’ve often been baffled by economists, who comport themselves as super-smart academics who have everything figured out, but in practice make claims that are absurd, predictions that are incredibly, obviously stupid and wrong, and analyses built on unreasonable, imagined bases. In today’s post, Paul Krugman (an economist with the distinction of having won the fake… 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!