Unanticipated consequences
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Sigmund Freud observed that humanity has suffered three great “humiliations.” Galileo found that we are not the center of the universe, Darwin found that we are not the culmination of nature, and he himself (Freud) found that we are not in control of our own minds. Ayad Akhtar recently made the point in The Yale… Continue reading
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I’m with stupid
Large language models actually work. They’re not fake, and they’re surprising, amazing technology. LLMs are real. The LLM vendors and their business models, though, might be something else again. They’ve raised historic amounts of money, which the venture capitalists are going to want repaid at some point. But if you examine their revenues, expenses, and… Continue reading
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Screens and mirrors
The year is 2063 and you were never interesting, writes lizleatrice. It’s a story about a person who would be 33 this year. This is about the age when screen time with social media “fills the dead spaces in your life.” Didn’t notice it at the time, of course, and although the narrator observes it,… Continue reading
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Speed, oversimplification, and delusion
Artificial intelligence seems to be mostly about speed. Instead of days, weeks, or months working on your software, book, or other project, it can be done in hours or even minutes! Well…okay…but so what? There are certainly cases where speed is an important component of an outcome. Dousing a fire. Removing a steak from the… Continue reading
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The local and the flood
The local was washed away in the spew. You know the spew. It’s the relentless flood of information overwhelming us online. So much email the majority is automatically deleted. Same situation with text messages. Social media is even worse — there’s so much nobody can keep up with it, even though thanks to the automatic… Continue reading
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Design as divisive; design as inclusive
Among other pursuits, I’ve been a software interaction designer. That’s basically a user interface designer without doing the graphics. When I was doing interaction design, I always started from user research. In order to design something that works for users who are not like you, it’s critically important to learn about them. You start by… Continue reading
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The mythos mode and the logos mode
Another deeply thoughtful essay this morning from Om Malik. You should read it! Malik begins by wondering why Anthropic called its new model Mythos. To even wonder about that, you have to understand some things about history, literature, and philosophy. I won’t explain Malik’s inquiry; that’s what his essay does brilliantly. It’s another example of… 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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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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We were not ready to lose the gatekeepers
Over the centuries of printed and broadcast media, a system emerged that put intermediaries between the original writers and us, the receivers. Editors and publishers reviewed, improved, or rejected a piece of work before publishing. Whole professions arose whose focus was establishing and enforcing standards. To be published or aired, a piece of content had… 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!