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Thoughtfulness about fake thought
Quinn Norton wrote an insightful piece about large language models and evolved human behavior at EmptyWheel. I thought this observation was particularly on point: “They don’t even have to be engineered to charm us, and they aren’t. We’ve been engineered by evolution to be charmed.” Continue reading
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Drink plenty of liquids
There are quite a few people sick right now. Some of them probably have “the flu” — and it occurred to me, doesn’t it seem like “the flu” is a strange name for a disease? The real story is even stranger than you might think. “Flu” is short for “influenza,” which is the full name… Continue reading
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“Hawkweed?”
When you’re in the process of using some words — or even sometimes just when you’re looking at them — they look misspelled even though they’re not. There’s something about those words that’s just awkward. One good example is “awkward” — a “K” in between two “W”s?? That combination is certainly unusual, apparently there’s only… Continue reading
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Walked to school in the snow uphill both ways
A “complaint” is a form of the word “complain”, which comes from the Old French word “complaindre”, meaning “to lament”. The word’s roots go all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. Evidently people have been complaining for quite a while. One of the things they complain about, at least once they reach a certain age, is… Continue reading
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Circumstance and pomp
A “collocation” is two words joined by “and” or “or.” They’re quite common; you’ll immediately recognize “ladies and gentlemen,” for example. There’s also “night and day,” “bed and breakfast,” “bread and butter,” “salt and pepper,” and so on. These are all in their common order; you seldom hear “gentlemen and ladies,” and I’m pretty sure… Continue reading
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Not the first
Elon Musk is not the first tech billionaire asshat to bend governments to his self interest. About twenty years ago, Bill Gates was the world’s leading asshat. He’s worked for years to launder his image, but my take is that he’s still nothing more than the greedy, narcissistic, lying, egotistical bully he’s been his whole… Continue reading
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The early days
The early days of personal computing were not that long ago. Part of those days was a tidal wave of innovation and creativity. There were whole categories of applications that I’m not sure even exist any more. For one thing, there were viable alternatives to the Excel spreadsheet de-facto monopoly, and at least several incorporated… Continue reading
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Oh good
Google, the company that originally instituted, then removed, the motto “don’t be evil,” also made a pledge about its artificial intelligence projects. Because they’re Google, a titanic pile of cash and (still in some areas) technical talent, their AI projects are world-class. They pledged that their AI applications would never involve “(1) weapons, (2) surveillance,… Continue reading
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The dark side
As some people (including you) know, “adroit,” which means adept and agile, is etymologically derived from the French phrase “á droit” (to the right). For some reason the French (I suspect they weren’t alone in this) used to think that being right-handed meant that you were capable of being adept, agile, graceful, and coordinated, and… Continue reading
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Usualing
“Usualing” is a new coinage by Seth Godin, and IMHO deserves to be…um…commonized? Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
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