Do chatbots like GPT and Bing have minds? No. Are they intelligent? Not really. But they are tools to access the zeitgeist -- how humans, collectively, think. That is unprecedented. (from 2020, but leaving it pinned while chatbots in the news) https://t.co/q9IMtRNspU

when your candidate wins a plurality by 1.5% and you pretend you have a thunderous mandate to remake the social order to meet your personal preferences... there will be a reckoning at the next election

Aliens are 3x more likely to exist than the Cowboys chances of winning the Super Bowl this year

Found this in the "Mystery" section of my local Barnes & Noble

interesting how the partisan polarity of online mobbing reversed since Musk bought platform Twitter used to be full of low-info pile-ons against supposed racists later revealed mostly innocent. Now the same epistemic pathology targets migrants and other rightwing bogeys

I saw this hesitantly as a former longtime New Yorker... is it maybe time to move the UN to a place where actual diplomacy is possible? Like, say, Toronto?

when karma has a very odd sense of humor

(this tweet makes me more ancient than reciting Tennyson)

cout << "Hello world!";

and now we are way past that. Just pure grump signal

The essay thing is especially interesting for how fast it happened. When I started college 25 years ago, some profs still required hand-written essays. That had ended by the time I was in grad school. Now I'm only in middle age and we're already out the other side of the cycle.

Doctorow's 'enshittification' isn't quite what I'm going for. That refers to when a tech is intentionally made worse for profit, though not so much worse that people have to revert to earlier tech. This phenomenon is more severe and not intentional.

Has someone coined a term for when a tech makes some experience much better and then forces reversion to the worse original state? Ex: Computers made school essays faster write, grade, return feedback. Then computers made ChatGPT. Now we have to go back to old hand written tech.

he got bored

four headlines on the NYT right now. Important demonstration of how the reliability of testimony is a function of the incentives of the testimonial environment

The answer is: No, it's not. But by the frantic logic of recent years, it should count - it's social pressure aimed at getting people to avoid using certain words. Which shows that 'cancel culture' grew to an amorphous blob of a concept

is this a cancel culture attack on free speech?

interesting that Trump concedes his attack on mail-in voting is motivated by the same nakedly partisan goal as gerrymandering. Normally people at least pretend there is a principle to it

I hate how everything now is political-coded in some way, even if it has nothing to do with politics. A few years ago we'd all mock the Cracker Barrell rebrand as just being dumb minimalism but now it's been folded into the culture wars Social media has totally corrupted society

i will not pull it, sam-i-am. i will not choose who dies by tram

of every model I’ve ever used, I find gpt-5 to be the single most annoying. it’s like if my table saw were trying to hit on me.

among Trump's many sins is teaching a generation of politicians to believe there is no such thing as bad attention