Tag: Computing
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The hard part: A quote from Jason Gorman
The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking — with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions — into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a…
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Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package. Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship. Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without…
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Consciousness May Require a New Kind of Computation – Neuroscience News
So, if we want something like synthetic consciousness, the problem may not be, “What algorithm should we run?” The problem may be, “What kind of physical system must exist for that algorithm to be inseparable from its own dynamics?” What are the necessary features—hybrid event–field interactions, multi-scale coupling without clean interfaces, energetic constraints that shape inference…
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How LLMs give semantic meaning to a prompt| ngrok blog
In summary, embeddings are points in n-dimensional space that you can think of as the semantic meaning of the text they represent. During training, each token gets moved within this space to be close to other, similar tokens. The more dimensions, the more complex and nuanced the LLM’s representation of each token can be. —…
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Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025)
In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a…
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DOC • To grow, we must forget… but now AI remembers everything
What begins as personalization can quietly become entrapment, not through control, but through familiarity. And in that familiarity, we begin to lose something essential: not just variety, but the very conditions that make change possible. Research in cognitive and developmental psychology shows that stepping outside one’s comfort zone is essential for growth, resilience, and adaptation.…
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Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document
Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/2/claude-soul-document/
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Generating an Infographic with Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview
I’m starting a detailed infographic about the Datasette project. I plan to use Google Search to gather specific information about its core processes, which I will then visualize in a multi-panel diagram. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/20/nano-banana-pro/
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Chatbot as Digital Coworker
The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker. To be very clear, Gemini 3 isn’t perfect, and it still needs a manager who can guide and check it. But it suggests that “human in the loop” is evolving from “human who fixes AI mistakes” to “human who directs AI…
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En abandonnant l’écriture à l’IA, nous risquons de nous empêcher de réfléchir
si écrire, c’est penser, un texte écrit avec l’assistance de ChatGPT ne matérialise-t-il pas les pensées du générateur de texte, plutôt que les nôtres ? Du contenu soi-disant neuf Et à quoi pense donc ChatGPT ? Heureusement, à rien : on l’a dit, le programme se contente de régurgiter les textes figurant dans son corpus d’entraînement, en en…