I’ve had many memorable conversations in pubs, and about pubs, and one particular such exchange from a few years back still stands out. I’d been arguing the case that JD Wetherspoon was a social asset because its low prices helped bring all types of people together. The other party – whoever they were, but certainly…

Geoff Mann, London Review of Books: The dubious achievement of prediction markets is to have found a new way to exacerbate and exploit the simultaneously frantic and passive experience of the world that is a defining aspect of our age. Like any kind of gambling, they are enervating. We put our money down and then (unless we are using a hairdryer on an airport thermometer) fidget anxiously till it’s over. The world happens to us. This passivity is characteristic of the politics of those who…

Robert Rooney, McSweeny’s: I understand the concerns. After all, I am attempting to assemble a living human being from dead human tissue and bring it to life with electricity, which isn’t generally considered something a person does after carefully considering the possible consequences. But what am I supposed to do—stop? I mean, I want to stop. I should stop. And yet… ~ Link: Won’t Someone Please Stop Me, Dr. Frankenstein, From Building the Creature?, by Robert Rooney, McSweeny’s

I probably will revise this post in the next 24-36 hours. But hopefully not too much. After a good sleep I suspect I’ll have some edits. Ten years ago I articulated my understanding of “indie web.” I’m cutting and pasting those 2016 words verbatim because they are still what I believe. And it’s still why I consider myself indie web. And I still participate in IndieWeb events. A repost I’m still a believer in the web. The “indie web” some call it now. I’ve had a personal website in one form or…

AllSides puts three opinion pieces side by side: one from the right, one from the left, and one they call center. All three are about whether hooking up is bad for people. Here's how it reads to me. From the Right: Emily JashinskyHer point is that hookup culture is a sweet deal for guys and a raw deal for a lot of women. Plenty of women are still hoping a fling turns into something real, and the guys know it. She puts some of the blame on Alex Cooper of the Call Her Daddy podcast, for telling…

Massey College, at the University of Toronto, is an important example of Canadian efforts to emulate the ‘OxBridge’ educational and college system at Oxford and Cambridge. I was pleased to join Massey as a junior fellow when I began my PhD in 2012, and found the college to be an indispensable social hub amid U of T’s general coldness. I was a resident during term time over three years but, for the rest of my PhD, still visited routinely to read, have lunch, or just see who was around. It used…

I ordered this book from our local bookshop a while ago but have only just found time to finish reading it. It’s an analysis of the decline of the neoliberal model of the university accompanied by the rise of commercialisation, managerialism and authoritarian models of governance. At 165 pages, not counting the notes and references, it’s a concise and compelling polemic, full of controlled anger and sprinkled with sardonic wit. The problem I have in reviewing it is that almost every page…

We need to incurage people to better balance personal coping with collective power to challenge the #DeathCult as we are living through a time when the world is becoming harder to live in, yet the dominant message is that we must learn to cope better as individuals. #Climatechaos accelerates, inequality deepens, and the #nastyfew accumulate wealth and power while communities struggle to meet basic needs. Democracy is hollowed out, public services are weakened, and the institutions that should…

I once asked a specialist in a particularly obscure mathematical subdiscipline how many people in the world could understand her work. “Maybe 20 or 30,” she said. I thought it sounded lonely not to ever be able to explain to your closest friends and family what you did all day. And yet, within that small group math is a highly social discipline full of collaboration, even if the rest of the world doesn’t see it. This is the opposite of OpenAI’s October 6 announcement that it had released a blob…

Daniel Tilles at Notes From Poland: A sign installed to warn the public about damage caused by beavers has been destroyed by the beavers themselves, according to the Polish foresters who erected it. The incident was reported in a post on social media by the forestry district of Lubliniec in southern Poland, which shared photos of the sign, which read “Warning! Damage caused by beavers”. The wooden post it was displayed on had been destroyed in an apparent beaver attack. The hubris of the sign…

There are 89,603 registered dogs in New York City. Dog owners are required to obtain a license for their pets, registering details including the dog's name, breed and birth year, along with the owner's ZIP code.Every Dog in New York is an interactive map that puts this canine census on the map, revealing which breeds dominate individual neighborhoods, where particular dog names are most popular, and how the city's dog population has changed over time.Using the map you can search for a breed, a…

There’s a weird and depressing continuation of folks moving back to X, formerly Twitter, currently still a cesspool. The weirdness and my depression started when Federico Viticci and John Voorhees of MacStories fame headed back to stuffing Elon Musk’s back pocket. They’ve recently been followed by others in the tech-o-sphere, lured primarily because that’s apparently where the action is when it comes to talking about AI. Or talking to bots. I’m nor sure it matters. I expect them to all start…

I am someone who enjoys a wide variety of art. Whether it’s music, movies, writing, comics, architecture, podcasts, video games, websites, I love to consume the gift of creation and creativity. Over the last few years I have increasingly found myself conflicted about my enjoyment of art made by certain individuals who years after the creation (and my enjoyment) either put themselves forward for something truly heinous (Zionism) or are pulled up for something truly awful (grooming and preying on…

My recent book AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview is free online today and tomorrow (through Oct 19, presumably UK time). I don't think the hard copy is available yet. Get it while it's free! Here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/ai-and-consciousness/E77C92088DA3C9F89E7FE7C75CBB1896

Link: Why We’re Banning AI, by Nathan J. Robinson in Current AffairsThe headline here is a bit of a misnomer. Current Affairs stresses that it’s not against technical innovation, but:“[…] we need, first, to ensure that technologies are a tool used by workers to help them, rather than a tool used to replace workers. And, second, we need to make sure that readers aren’t being fed things that look like people’s genuine thoughts and creative expression but are in fact the product of disembodied…

It is already not easy to be a human. Now add AI. Fernando Borretti: Humans are social animals who can only flourish in the society of other humans. We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left? Nathan Gardels, Noema: The challenge is not just about “disarming” the capacity of AI agents to act on their own, as the Pope has called for, but also about “arming” the integral conception of the human within the…

Elena Rossini: W Social is a European social media company that launched in Davos earlier this year, during the World Economic Forum. I have written a series of articles about them; […] […] I wonder: are W Social verified users aware that their personal details (first name, last name, nationality and approx. birthday) are being shared OUTSIDE of W Social and published as a permanent record on the web, in plain text? This has to be in violation of European privacy laws, right? No way would…

I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture. This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital…

Lately some prominent guys in the tech universe have been loudly proclaiming they’re returning to X, after leaving the platform in semi-protest following the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter. Their explanations range from: I can’t make my indie business work without it. All of the AI conversations are there. X is cheerful and inclusive, and has no politics anymore. (!?!?) These are definitely…reasons? Let’s be clear: X is bad and that has not changed. But I’m not here to argue with people making…

I'm somebody who's written rather extensively on generative AI ethics, and I feel there is a lot that is unethical about the current corporate climate and culture surrounding the technology. And when I write about LLMs and chatbots, I'm careful not to make judgments about the people using the end products—I don't think you're a bad person if you use ChatGPT or Claude, or whatever. What I'm discussing today is different. There is no room for debate or argument, here—only hard, absolute lines in…

In Japan, it’s not unusual to see people treating cherished objects with a surprising degree of reverence. Dolls receive memorial services, broken sewing needles are honored in annual ceremonies, and even discarded electronics are occasionally given ritual farewells. Now, the country’s long tradition of animistic belief has found perhaps its most adorable expression yet: Japan’s […] Related posts: A Zoo in Japan is Using Stuffed Animal Capybaras to Maintain Social Distancing Mythical Creatures…

If global large-scale human communication continues to be concentrated within large social media platforms and content providers like YouTube, human languages may become sort of irrelevant in that space. Sometimes I Google for something and see a Reddit result in Finnish. I live in Finland, so it makes sense when the search engine prioritizes such results, but most of the time the actual Reddit thread is not in Finnish at all. Reddit can translate any thread with a simple URL param e.g. ?tl=...

Country names aren’t always unique in the world. Look on a world map and you’ll see 2 Koreas, 2 Congos, and a full 4 Guineas. But there are some examples that are more hidden. Specifically, there are many combinations of countries whose names might look different in English, but ultimately come from the same meaning. Let’s look at some international etymology buddies and see what we can find. Many country names have multiple candidate meanings, so we can’t be certain which meaning is the most…

Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers”1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with ideas into its incubation program. Hacker News is one of the most popular forums for discussing technology online today – perhaps the biggest.HN also has a pronounced political bias, which is…

Photo: © Stan B.Do we have to see and hear? Witness and endure? 30,573 lies in his first term alone- a record he's easily surpassed midway through his second term untethered by the constraints of a semi-rational admin. But how much more can any of us endure? Vandals wrecking the reflecting pool; Iran purposely killing their own school children; Ukraine starting the current war with Russia; personally ending eight wars; vowing not to touch "a single brick of the East Wing;" claiming Renee Good…

A society grows great when good people plant trees under whose shade they will never sit. ~Hyacinthe Loyson / Greek Proverb 🌰🌱🌳🪾

From the desk of Benji Welner in Stanford, CA. I do not believe that software engineering is undergoing a tectonic shift due to large language models. I have, at this point, seen a large enough sample of code produced by the frontier of so-called artificial intelligence: it is often impressive but always incomplete. The nature of a computer program is that it does exactly what you tell it to do. Any programmer would tell you that bugs are almost never an error on the computer’s side of things,…

From the Daily Mail‘s “US Science & Technology Editor”, last month: High in the mountains of Turkey sits a mysterious boat-shaped formation that some researchers believe could be the remains of Noah’s Ark. …Now, an international team examining the Durupınar Formation near Mount Ararat claims it has ‘100 percent confirmed’ that the mound is not a natural geological feature but a ‘man-made object.’ …Independent researcher Andrew Jones, the founder of Noah’s Ark Scans who has investigated the area…

I was listening to a podcast yesterday on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine, how Trump has completely sold out Ukraine again and that it’s all for trying to unfuck his dumpster fire of endlessly poor decisions that have led him to scramble about trying to pretend like he gives a shit about his country before the midterms, but at the same time there’s endless backroom deals going on this-and-that oil companies, some billionaires from here, some from there, all these fucking people just…

Women ‘more likely to be told autoimmune conditions are psychological’“Among men, the most frequently reported time to diagnosis was less than three months. Among women, it was one to two years.”Cool, cool.