Me from 2019: “What if Fred Rogers was right about how people change?” I think about this often.
With unaccented American English spoken by a Caucasian male tester, Dragon was only 87% accurate the first time we dictated an email — the same email message that Word transcribed nearly perfectly on its first try. Dragon missed words including “on” and “make,” and it wrote “They could advance!” instead of “Thank you in advance.” With accented English, Dragon’s first try produced text entirely different from what our tester spoke.
There is no such thing as “unaccented American English.” There is no such thing as unaccented English. People at the NYT may think that their accent is normative, but even if one were to agree to that — I don’t — it’s still an accent.
Yours sincerely,
Alan from Alabama, currently living in Texas
A fascinating post from my colleague Philip Jenkins on how ancient “gospels” keep being found and lost and found again. “Perhaps amnesia really is an integral part of the popularization of scholarship.”
The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality: — something we’re suckers for because of what the philosopher Donald Davidson once called the “principle of charity,” that is, the assumption that our interlocutors are making sense. I wrote an essay a while back on how the principle of charity governs our responses to chatbots.
The AI business model: suicidal ideation as a revenue stream.
I don’t know which is worse, the belief that if you’re sounding off on social media you’re Doing Something, or the belief that if you’re not sounding off on social media you’re Not Doing Anything.
Convergence!
- Ted Gioia, “The Glorious Future of the Book”
- Austin Kleon, “Why Our House Is a Library”
Georgios Klontzas. What a painting.
I wrote a bit about being a supply officer.
It would be a tragedy if writers stopped using em dashes out of fear of sounding like AI, because em dashes are one of the best tools writers have for not sounding robotic in the first place. Their very potential to be irritating is a sign of what makes them so beautiful: Of all the forms of punctuation, the em dash is the one that most rewards tact, judgment, and taste. It has the closest relationship to the way we experience thinking—rushing forward, suddenly swerving, forking into different branches that eventually come together again. If chatbots copy our use of it, they do so for the same reason we need to protect it. It’s the most human punctuation there is.
I wrote about my irrelevance for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters — and of course for anyone who would like to become one of my Buy Me a Coffee supporters. And also for anyone else.
John Muir, writing in the Pasadena Star, 1909:
It would make a good and useful tattoo: Nothing dollarable is safe.
This “retrospective” on Houellebecq's Submission by John Hardy describes the book as a prophecy, which I don’t think it was. Here’s my review, written when the book appeared.
A brilliant and necessary essay by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy:
Being a legitimate self now requires one to be publicly identifiable, authentic and, increasingly, fully authenticated. What began as a celebration of individual uniqueness that avidly encouraged the production of digital evidence is evolving into an elaborate system of verification that will treat any trace as a potentially suspect record. As fake versions of ourselves start to circulate, we may soon find ourselves caught in endless cycles of proving and defending the reality of our own existence, submitting ourselves more and more to a machinery of institutionalised scepticism that would have repulsed the early internet’s champions of identity play and experimentation.
And:
Individuals equipped with the capacity to search the network and query large language model (LLM) oracles, and in possession of the self-confidence and the means to broadcast their findings, tend to become an authoritative source of opinion. At least that is how it feels to them. We can also understand why knowledge produced in this manner is often so emotionally charged. The more people invest in researching and developing their own understanding, the more their pursuit of knowledge transforms into a form of personal revelation, where everyone is both seeker and interpreter of their own truth. What began as an exercise in independent reasoning becomes a matter of belief, belief defended all the more passionately because it seems to have been self-discovered rather than externally given.
Walked out my door in the pre-dawn and was immediately stung by a bee. Go back to sleep, bee!
The morning sun on this plant seems to have freaked out my iPhone’s camera software.
