Author: robert.adlington

I think once you get into the, “I’m not using this as a utility or for education, it’s not serving me in any way, it’s not a tool, it’s not building community, it’s fraying community, and I’m just doom scrolling,” then you’re outside of the CUE. You need to log off. — Read on kottke.org/25/02/is-social-media-good-for-you-apply-the-cue-test

See, “search” has never just been “search.” Search has always been an epistemic journey. You’re building knowledge, you’re not in and out with one query. You google first with a vague intention, you learn some of the vocabulary. You google more, back and forth, and you pick up the terminology and trade-offs – whether you…

In “generative adversarial” models, two elements combine to learn about some aspect of the world: the “generative” bit aims to predict it as precisely as possible; the “adversary” does its best to decide whether what it is looking at is the real world or the output of the generative model. The generative model constantly ups…

Meaningless boredom occurs when we feel like what we’re doing lacks meaning, Westgate says – for example, when a student says “math is boring” because they can’t understand how calculus relates to their life. Attentional boredom happens when “we can’t do something because it is too hard or too easy for us, so we can’t…

Another factor in the appeal of dystopian fiction, Watkins said, is the process of “cognitive estrangement”, a term used by critic Darko Suvin to describe how science fiction writers create unfamiliarity in an invented world so they can examine a social or cultural change in the present day. — Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/01/i-who-have-never-known-men-lost-dystopia-new-readers-after-buzz-on-tiktok

Basically any resource on a difficult subject—a colleague, Google, a published paper—will be wrong or incomplete in various ways. Usefulness isn’t only a matter of correctness. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/1/daniel-litt/

A professional workflow for translation using LLMs — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/2/workflow-for-translation/

“Going crazy isn’t like being hit by a car,” she said in the middle of our conversation. “People make a small but conscious decision to give up. At some point, it’s easier than living in reality.” — Read on www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/amway-america/681479/

AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/30/antiqua-et-nova/