Author: robert.adlington

It’s impressive how quickly LLM-powered features are going from being part of the top tier premium plans to almost an expected part of most per-seat software. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/May/13/end-of-ai-upsells/

When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the…

As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn’t run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women…

The Three Types of Specialists Needed for Any Revolution – Geniuses, thought leaders, and communicators — Read on kottke.org/13/05/the-three-types-of-specialist

Even then, I’m skeptical because every time the AI community has tried to cross the chasm from the digital world to the real world, they’ve run into 10,000 problems that they thought were paper cuts but, in sum, add up to you losing all the blood in your body. I think we’ve seen this with…

What happens when norms break down? When individualism gradually erodes the ties that bind us? What happens when thousands of people collectively cross the line? Nothing, of course. The line simply moves. The crowd, emboldened and empowered, sizes up its next meal. At the temple of mass consumerism, the customer is always right. And in…

I suspect that the opaque feeling in my head can also be traced to a craven instinct: it’s easier to retreat from the concept of reality than to acknowledge that the things in the news are real. — Read on www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/my-brain-finally-broke

The Messi comparisons don’t really go anywhere at this stage. But they have two obvious things in common. First, the relationship with the ball, the ability to make it come alive and do weirdly personalised things. I was there in Munich last July when he decided to just stop in the middle of the most…

Low levels of openness to experience and high levels of conscientiousness, coupled with an insecure and threatening environment, lead people to chronically view the world as a dangerous and threatening place. When we think that the world is unstable and unsafe, we search for ways to regain control. Unfortunately for our democratic institutions, placing trust…

What’s particularly notable is that the AI’s response is actually more coherent than Trump’s — it maintains a more consistent narrative structure while hitting the same rhetorical points. This suggests that Trump’s responses are even less constrained by reality than a typical LLM’s output. This brings us to a curious disconnect: While the media obsesses…