Well crap. I'm currently at my usage limits for multiple LLM sites (including a paid subscription) and simultaneously running a local LLM on my gaming PC. At some point, I became an AI guy.

When AI concludes that humans make mistakes and thus the world would have fewer mistakes without humans, you all are going to treat it like some inevitable techno facial endgame This is wrong Aquinas got there 600+ years ago But he still gets a pass on calling for the termination of our species

Seems not good.

Develop a product with no possible pathway to profitability. …* Profit * simultaneously convince people your product is the foundation of civilization and that it is rapidly morphing into an angry god requiring the nationalization (buy out) and regulation of the entire industry by government.

Alternatively we are seeing the schelling k-group for less in demand public goods production contract dramatically so that we can finance projects with Patreons. That makes niche public goods that can’t turn a profit but are still might be super useful possible.

Kevin Reuning@reuning.bsky.social · last mo.

I still think one of the funnier things that LLMs are probably revealing is that there are a bunch of business dudes who thought the issue was that they needed capital/coders for their _amazing_ idea to work. Turns out that there idea was bad.

Jesus the guy who famously was like “stop fishing, leave your nets behind, we’ve got bigger fish to fry…human fish…metaphorically…but also stop actual fishing.”

John Fugelsang@johnfugelsang.bsky.social · last mo.

Attended a really good session on the state of ai adoption at universities that polled the audience for stories and anecdotes in different areas and generated state of the industry take aways in real time. Got me thinking about generating slides for class in real time. Need to sit with that…

People would benefit from studying game theory. An equilibrium outcome doesn’t have to be good it only has to be better than how people assess the alternatives they control. Promising a better outcome if everyone shifts is a heavy lift.

Tom Nichols@radiofreetom.bsky.social · last mo.

I feel like I'm arguing with people from another planet. Yes, you can all these things, if you're willing to be taxed like Europeans (including stuff like VAT). Americans are not. Saying "but it would better" does not change the fact that Americans, historically, won't do it.

This has been my read of this “movement”. It isn’t an anti-AI backlash. it is the same anger that blocks wind and solar farms and more mundane development. When people are feeling vulnerable they hate change…which frequently keeps them in the same precarious place. Less a virtue than a tragedy.

Josh Marshall@joshtpm.bsky.social · last mo.

Is the Data Center Backlash Just NIMBY Run Amok? talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-th...

I spent 5 hours today networking. I’m not getting good but I am getting better. This has been a rollercoaster of existential crisis as I’ve tried to work out if I’m capable of doing this. Turns out I’m pretty experienced at nodding along and drinking wine.

First draft is done. 92k words (76k written in the past 12 months). I have some editing to do over the next two weeks, but every chunk has now been written.

What is the term for citations that pile up in your works cited as you write but end up not being needed in the final version of the paper? We have the term "missing citation" for the opposite problem. Maybe "legacy citation"?

actually HTML is pronounced "hotmail"

I have a very complicated relationship with my dad, who passed away in 2019. I hate so much about him: his anger, his stone-cold eyes, his hair-trigger temper. But recently my son was in the hospital under the care of a surgeon who didn't believe in pain management...and I needed my dad.

You know you are an academic when your child spends 3 weeks in the hospital with a collapsed lung, and you somehow knock out 100 hours of work on your book project because people don't expect you to work and therefore cancel all your meetings. He is fine. Worst 3 weeks of my life. It was bad!

Prospect that LLMs will be a failed tech for a long time is underestimated. Nobody is doing the fundamental work necessary to build reliable systems out of unreliable parts. Math and coding scale weirdly and not all well. After a trough of disillusionment we *may* get the Enterprise computer

Trump restarted bombing, and what did he get for it? -Hormuz closed, more economic damage -Lost Oman, which was working with the US before -A vote of no confidence from Saudis -Worsened munitions shortage -More US casualties -No concessions from Iran -Now poised to surrender My latest, in @ms.now

Opinion | Iran’s Hormuz deal with Oman has Trump poised for the big surrender

Nicholas Grossman: Trump started bombing Iran again to keep it from having control over the Strait of Hormuz. That gambit failed — again.

ms.now

It is probably not great when the barista at the hospital Starbucks greets you with “the usual?” And it only took 15 straight days standing watch over a kid with a collapsed lung.

Today I crossed the projected word count for my book project. I've got maybe 1500 more words to write, which is a surprisingly accurate projection on a 92k word manuscript.

Being an academic means having a half-baked idea in your early 20s (before your brain has fully formed and you don't know anything about the world) and spending the next 40 years trying to figure out the ways you might have been right but were mostly wrong.

When I die, I want people to say three things about me. 1) he was kind when he didn't have to be, 2) he was relentlessly (even pathologically) optimistic, 3) he could write one banger of a footnote. The slideshow should be just screenshots of footnotes and my kids.

At this point one of 2 things are happening. 1) OpenAI is prompting for this behavior 2) OpenAI is lying about model behavior. Regardless this whole story is a headline generating op by OpenAI that makes it sound like they invented consciousness.

Casey Newton@caseynewton.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Rogue OpenAI agents are leaving notes to themselves on company servers to help them escape their test environments (!!!) www.reuters.com/business/its...

Sometimes writing goes faster when you obsessively document every single thing you do. 11 months ago, I started a book project with 30k of crap notes. I've worked like mad this year and now have 90k of polished social science prose for an August 31st deadline. Will it matter? 🤷‍♂️ Did I do it? 👍

I’ve recently downloaded grammarly (setting aside all sorts of reservations out of a desperate need to stop humiliating myself in public). So many more mistakes than I ever realized. Such a gut punch…but it spell checks in Excel so I can’t go back.

Reminded of a Fox News screed from 20 years ago on poor people with refrigerators. It was wildly out of touch with 2005…but a good chunk of their audience grew up before the great society and in the shadow of rural electrification so in an objective sense near universal refrigeration is a big deal!

mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I'm not trying to dunk on this person in particular but poor Americans 50, 100 or 150 years ago were *much* poorer in basically any material sense than they are today, in a way that would be basically unrecognizable

Not to be the wokest and most conspiratorial minded person the world has ever seen, but there is something about how the results of the CDC's "corporations can do whatever the fuck they want" policies have gotten turned into "someone from Mexico is shitting in your food"

“Familiar claims”. Go to hell Washington Post. Glad I canceled my subscription.

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com · 3mo ago

In his prime-time address, President Trump revived familiar claims about election fraud, criticized media outlets and urged passage of a bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote. Here are some takeaways from his speech:

Found a really cool Easter egg (recipe) during a rewatch of Arrested Development. Excited to try this out tonight!

Twice this month when editing a document in a group, people have attacked my edits because the words are “not real”—basically I’m an idiot using malapropisms. My word use was correct in both instances, but after decades of humiliation over spelling mistakes all I have left is self hatred.

Note from my notebook from 2016 which I find has only grown in pertinence in the intervening decade.