Category: Blog

Death of a Fantastic Machine — Read on kottke.org/25/06/death-of-a-fantastic-machine

Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it…

Additionally, our artificial prompts put a large number of important pieces of information right next to each other. This might have made the behavioral possibilities unusually salient to the model. It may also have created a “Chekhov’s gun” effect, where the model may have been naturally inclined to make use of all the information that…

We need 20 year olds to have the freedom to try things, the freedom to explore, the freedom to end up having careers that they couldn’t have imagined at 20. Life requires a certain amount of curiosity and exploration. Life is an open world game. It rewards you for exploring. And capitalism cannot fucking stand…

AI is not only changing language — but what we think. “Even on dating sites, what does it mean to be funny on your profile or in chat anymore where we know that AI can be funny for you?” Naaman asks. The loss of agency starting in our speech and moving into our thinking, in…

We think [social media] is free speech, but it’s not speech. It’s ultra-processed speech. It’s speech in the way that Doritos are food — it’s something that has been designed by people in lab coats to get past the parts of your brain that protect you.” — Read on www.theverge.com/social/687639/its-speech-in-the-way-doritos-are-food

Human brains are wired such that we get rewarded for attending to surprisal. If we turn our attention toward things that surprise us we get excited—and our model of the world changes. It grows more complex. This is easy at first. My one-year-old was in complete rapture today on seeing a hen. But after a while,…

By making effort an optional factor in higher education rather than the whole point of it, LLMs risk producing a generation of students who have simply never experienced the feeling of focused intellectual work. — Read on resobscura.substack.com/p/ai-makes-the-humanities-more-important

Run Your Own AI – AnthonyLewis.com — Read on anthonylewis.com/2025/06/01/run-your-own-ai/

the themes that people consider most important in their lives align with the fictional stories that they say most resonate with them, and the stories they choose to engage with also frequently mirror their identity. Some people easily engage with stories, while others find them meaningless. A lot of it seems to come down to…