Baldur Bjarnason: “Believing the myth of Artificial General Intelligence makes you incapable of understanding what language models today are and how they work.”
Currently listening 🎵
Richard Gibson: “Current debates about writing machines are not as fresh as they seem. As the footnotes of scientific papers quietly admit, much of the intellectual infrastructure of today’s advances was laid decades ago. Already in the 1940s, the mathematician Claude Shannon demonstrated that language use could be both described by statistics and imitated with statistics, whether those statistics were in human heads or a machine’s memory. As word got out about Shannon’s work, engineers and then artists tinkered with his ideas, wrote essays in which they mulled a future in which machines would write alongside us, and built the first (stuttering) generation of natural language generators. These were the first residents of the headspace into which so many of us have recently wandered.”
Currently reading: The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken. Another re-read. Very excited to return to this one. 📚
I want to move to the desert just to escape the leaf blowers.
Finished reading: Clockwork, Or, All Wound Up by Philip Pullman. A perfect little fable, ideal for children of all ages. 📚
Mary Harrington: “We need to re-imagine marriage as the enabling condition for radical solidarity between the sexes, and as the smallest possible unit of resistance to overwhelming economic, cultural, and political pressure to be lone atoms in a market. Households formed on this model can work together both economically and socially on the common business of living, whether that’s agricultural, artisanal, knowledge-based, or a mix of all these. This is an essential precondition for the sustainable survival of human societies. Our biggest obstacle is an obsolete mindset that deprecates all duties beyond personal fulfilment, and views intimate relationships in instrumental terms, as means for self-development or ego gratification, rather than enabling conditions for solidarity.”
I (a) announced that I was shutting down my Buy Me A Coffee page, (b) heard from some readers telling me not to do that, (c) announced that I won’t be shutting it down after all. A bit embarrassing … but it’s very kind of people to want to support me.