I write science for my job and fiction for fun. The mental processes are not that different between a murder mystery and a theoretical physics paper. In both cases, you’ve got a tangle of pieces floating in abstract space, be they preconditions for a theorem or clues to whodunit, and you have to instantiate them somehow, picking a linear order of text to lock down the loose assemblage. You’re trying to cast a shadow of this damn strange thing made of parts that stick together or split apart depending on how you turn the whole.

Dan Dumont recently did what any responsible engineering director would do: He asked his favorite artificial-intelligence assistant whether his children, ages 2 and 1, should follow in his footsteps.

Christ, what an asshole.

She works in Washington state as an applied AI lead at a large tech company and has become an unofficial counselor to the many parents in her social circle who want inside advice.

“Jobs that require just logical thinking are on the chopping block, to put it bluntly,” she says.

Spicy autocomplete is not logical thinking, you sniveling turdweasel!

“No kink-shaming!”

“But I’m talking about Rationalists.”

“… OK, one kink-shaming.”

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entropy, cliche, and meaninglessness poured all over everything like shit over ice cream

“… the HPMORstocrats!”

If someone asked me to write a metafictional short story, I would simply not.

I consider this a valuable lesson from my college education.

I thought of a phrase whilst riding the subway and couldn’t remember if I had read it somewhere. Anybody recall it?

Rationalists will never use one word when fourteen will do.

“Democracy of ghosts” is from Nabokov’s Pnin.

He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.

Rubber dick debugging

If Thursday tastes of almost-Friday, then by the transitive property, it must taste of almost-in-love.

… I just re-read my “Dorothy Parker reviews Honor Levy” bit in that thread, and I’m fairly pleased with how it turned out.

It’s giving organ-meat eater, Byronic emo, haplogroup HH420.

Congratulations, Sam, you’ve given us the first prose poem to return a 404 on the Pritchard scale.

She lost him on a Thursday.

She never could get the hang of Thursdays.

The Columbia Journalism Review does a study and finds the following:

• Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
• Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
• Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
• Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
• Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.

Just in case you needed to induce vomiting:

The Universal AI University has implemented a novel admissions process, leveraging the Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. This system integrates optimization algorithms, crowd-generating tools, and visual enhancement technologies within the Metaverse, offering a unique and technologically advanced admissions experience for students.

Let’s see, it cites Scott Computers, a random “AI Safety Fundamentals” website, McKinsey (four times!), a random arXiv post…

Bose–Einstein condensate

From how they’re labeled, I think they cycle every day?

None of my acquaintances who have Wikipedian insider experience have much familiarity with the “Did you know” box. It seems like a niche within a niche that operates without serious input from people who care about the rest of the project.

“In The News” is apparently also an editor clique with its own weird dynamics, but it doesn’t elevate as many weird tiny articles to the Main Page because the topics there have to be, you know, in the news.