Author: robert.adlington

To the extent this is an analogy to AI, large language models are intelligent, but they do not have goals or values or drive. They are tools to be used by, well, anyone who is willing and able to take the initiative to use them. — Read on stratechery.com/2024/mkbhds-for-everything/

Life-Ruining Mistakes? — Read on kottke.org/24/04/life-ruining-mistakes

Tess Owen on X: “my therapist just told me that the NYT word games app is becoming a problem for many of her patients, including me” / X — Read on twitter.com/misstessowen/status/1780608134026817918

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Most people would have given up, but Saunders was not most people. “Anyone can do it,” he was fond of saying to sceptics. “It’s really quite simple.” https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/jan/23/nicholas-saunders-forgotten-genius-changed-british-food

Though written in 2007, the arguments still stack up: So, it looks as if there are two possibilities. Perhaps our science over-estimates the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space-ships…

https://kottke.org/24/04/feathers-are-one-of-evolutions-best-inventions

I read his Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea in grad school and when I came back to reading about the mind, I started by rereading CE and then went on to his latest, From Bacteria to Bach and Back He is, without doubt the biggest influence on my thought. I find his reductive, materialist,…