bits and pieces

I have continued my practice of walking every day, without music or podcasts. It's great. I'm now going 5 miles/day, and I continue to find I do my best thinking and mental organizing during that hour. I continue to see this is completely separate from exercising. This piece by Astral Codex Ten on using AI to examine election candidates is very good. My intuition lately is that too many people are parroting a "don't use AI in stupid ways, you have to learn advanced prompting/coding techniques," when the best use case for AI might just be "really good Google." Looking up candidate positions and comparing them for a primary/local election is a great use of AI as an efficiency machine for gathering information even if it's not at all representative of cutting edge machine intelligence in the analytic (or sci-fi) sense. President Trump has shown genuinely impressive influence this month in GOP primaries. But conditional on that, the influence has been exaggerated. Endorsing Paxton one…