John Siracusa: “The recent Apple Intelligence fiasco has revealed that the company is further away from properly prioritizing software reliability than it has ever been. Apple was seemingly willing to sacrifice everything, including its own reputation, to ensure that it had enough new AI features to announce at WWDC. If we want a different result, it seems like we need different leaders.”
Magnolia season
Half-listening to the NBA game and when someone said “Julius Randle” I heard “Jewish Rambo” and now I want to see that movie.
If you ask any of the LLMs to summarize a book or article, they do so with some accuracy. If you ask them to provide relevant quotations from the text along with the summary, they make the quotations up.
The current energized narratives around AGI and Superintelligence seem to be fueled by a convergence of three factors: (1) the fact that scaling laws did apply for the first few generations of language models, making it easy and logical to imagine them continuing to apply up the exponential curve of capabilities in the years ahead; (2) demos of models tuned to do well on specific written tests, which we tend to intuitively associate with intelligence; and (3) tech leaders pounding furiously on the drums of sensationalism, knowing they’re rarely held to account on their predictions.
While media attention remains focused, as always, on elite universities, this story is a sobering reminder of the reality at less selective and less famous schools.
I think about this post by Adam Roberts at least once a week:
When I was a kid I memorised — don’t laugh — the Bene Gesserit ‘Litany Against Fear’, and used to repeat it quietly to myself when I was in a place of terror. I was eleven or twelve, and my family had moved to Canterbury in Kent, from London SE23. Where we lived was about a mile’s walk into town, and the only way was down the narrow pavement alongside the Dover Road, on which enormous lorries and trucks would hurtle at incredible, terrifying speeds, on their ways to and from the port at Dover and London town — nowadays the city has built a ring-road to relieve its city centre of this burden of traffic, but that postdates me. Walking along this road as these T.I.R’s roared and howled inches from me was scary. Repeating the litany helped me cope with that fear.
I mean, sure: by all means laugh at me if you like … I was a massive SF nerd, not skilled at making friends, quite inward and withdrawn. I can see this little story has its ridiculous side. Then again, if I’m honest, when I look back at my younger self I find something touching and even, in its miniscule way, heroic about it, actually. I made it into town. I went to the Albion bookshop and spent my pocket-money on yet another pulp SF book. I got home again without being swallowed or consumed by my fear, although the fear, which perhaps looks trivial to you, was, inside me, vast and pressing and lupine, and was given prodigious materiality by the howling hundred-ton trucks speeding inches past me and whipping their trailing winds about me. I wasn’t really scared of the lorries; the lorries only gave temporary physical shape to something more pervasively in me and my relationship to life. I was a much and deeply frightened kid, as, in many ways, I still am, as an adult. Stories for kids should be beautiful and moving, but they should also furnish kids with the psychological wherewithal to understand and navigate the world and their own feelings about it.
To be able to be an ordered and logical and discerning thinker is more important in this current era than it has been in at other points in my lifetime. The ability to understand the arguments that other people are making, the ability to understand how to rebut those arguments, the ability to discern between good research and bad research and good points and bad points and what studies have been verified and what studies are double blind — understanding a fire hose of information and also having the historical context to understand that information. I think that colleges can and should still be a place to produce those kinds of abilities, which are hard skills — skills that can and should be taught.
Right? I mean: This isn’t debatable, so let’s act accordingly.
Kathleen Guthrie, Flowers with Fish
Crystal Palace’s Chris Richards: “I think growing up, I never watched the FA Cup. I’m from Alabama, so we definitely didn’t have that on TV.” Same. ⚽️
Despite Montaigne’s concerns, we cannot help but comment upon one another. We are irrepressible commenters. (In the essayist’s case, he simply turned to making learned comments about himself.) The trouble now is not that we make so many comments; it’s that we’ve lost the conversation partners — the IRL kind — implied in Bakhtin’s public scenarios. We make our comments while sitting alone at our tiny command centers, and increasingly the machines are the only ones attending.
I wrote about Pandaemonium, a unique book, brilliantly compiled by the documentary film director Humphrey Jennings. First of two (or maybe three) posts at the Hog Blog.
Jamie Smith on what to expect from an Augustinian pope:
Already in his first “Urbi et Orbi” address, for example, one could hear Pope Leo’s vision for faith on the move. “So let us move forward, without fear,” he encouraged the flock, “together, hand in hand with God and with one another.” When Pope Leo described himself as “a son of Saint Augustine,” he pictured faith as a pilgrimage: “So may we all walk together towards that homeland that God has prepared for us.” Faith as “walking,” discipleship as a journey, the Christian life as a long pilgrimage—these are deeply Augustinian metaphors.
Finished reading: Fantasy: A Short History by Adam Roberts. An outstanding survey. I’m amazed first of all by how many fantasy novels Adam has read, especially among the hyper-prolific and hyper-expansive post-Tolkienian set. Hundreds of thousands of pages, I imagine. The chapter on “Children’s Fantasy” is a particular highlight for me, but Adam is also notably brilliant on
- fantasy as a kind of displaced vision of Catholicism as seen by a Protestant culture
- similarly, Walter Scott’s medievalism as a predecessor and template for fantasy
- William Morris
- Michael Moorcock
- Jack Vance
- Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
- John Crowley’s Little, Big
I just wish he could have gone on longer about some of this stuff, but that’s what his various blogs are for. 📚
An interesting exercise: Ask several chatbots to do this: “Please summarize, with comparisons, the ethical concerns about each of the major AI platforms.” The responses are quite similar.
Google’s search results have become so bad that I recently subscribed to Kagi, and so far it’s been great. And because the subscription includes access to fairly high-level versions of all the major chatbots, I’ve been trying them out. So far my favorite is Anthropic’s Claude. A sample of the kinds of questions I ask:
- Is there consensus on when Terry Pratchett’s fiction began to decline in quality?
- What state parks in the USA compare in beauty and interest to the National Parks?
- Please provide, with quotations rather than summaries, some of Pope Francis’s statements about Catholic traditionalists.
- I like the Leica Q3 because of the high resolution and the fixed lens. Are there comparable cameras that cost less?
Claude gives clear, detailed answers with a list of sources at the end. I’m using it every day now.
Angus loves his crate.
