Tag: ai
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…slop is hardly a new phenomenon. Neither is the moral panic around it. AI-generated content is the latest iteration of an age-old trend: Whenever technology dramatically lowers the cost of producing media, it unleashes a flood of cheap, derivative work — and a chorus of critics convinced that culture has reached a new low. —…
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AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm’s boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content. — Read on www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/05/time-magazine-has-a-separate-version-of-its-website-with-ads-only-ai-can-see/5283640
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One of the biggest misconceptions people have about intelligence is seeing it as some kind of unbounded scalar stat, like height. “Future AI will have 10,000 IQ”, that sort of thing. Intelligence is a conversion ratio, with an optimality bound. Increasing intelligence is not so much like “making the tower taller”, it’s more like “making…
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Writing is still as important as ever, and it should be you doing the writing, not your AI. Writing forces you to think clearly and confront gaps in your logic. What has changed is that writing is no longer the only way to make an idea tangible. Coding agents are compressing the time between defining the problem…
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We thought—I thought—the internet served to create new forms of social participation. As in the old joke, we thought it was an orgasm, but it was asthma. The internet’s true affordance has been the emergence and training of AI. The internet digitized all our knowledge and all our language, making them available to AI. Now…
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We are emergent phenomena — higher-level patterns and processes that arise from, but are not reducible in any simple way to, the lower-level physics and chemistry. A human is: • A far-from-equilibrium dissipative structure (physics) • Built from self-replicating, metabolizing carbon chemistry in aqueous solution (chemistry) • That has evolved nervous systems capable of generating…
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From fundamental physics, a human is a temporary, localized configuration of quantum fields (or particles and forces in the Standard Model plus gravity) that maintains a high degree of internal order against the universal tendency toward increasing entropy (the second law of thermodynamics). From Grok.
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Chemically, you are a vast, coordinated network of molecular machines running on carbon chemistry in water, powered by redox gradients, and capable of copying its own blueprint with high (but imperfect) fidelity. From Grok.
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Have you ever wanted to research something, so you bookmark a dozen articles, get distracted by everything on the internet, take notes, try to find the common links between the articles, get distracted again – and a project takes way longer than it should? A well-built prompt can fix that, save you time, and return…
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Building an “AI Tribunal” for media verification Fun with fax machines 50 greatest albums with headphones See how your phone tells everyone who you are
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…my strong assumption is that most people who push or buy the idea that ‘AI is going to take all the jobs’ haven’t thought much about what ‘jobs’ are, in a fundamental sense. — Read on endsdontjustifythemeans.com/p/why-ai-obviously-isnt-going-to-take
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We moderns are not used to having to rebuild our world. It is now the case that strong AI is here/coming, and we will have to rebuild our own world. Many of us are terrified at this prospect, others are just extremely pessimistic. It seems so impossible. How are all the new pieces supposed to…
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The robots think you are a slightly anxious wreck. They also think they are an extraordinarily open, agreeable, low-drama universalist who would rather read than party. Then their own next release shows up and disagrees with them. — Read on persona.earthpilot.ai/
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The university has told one story to its trustees, its accreditors, and the public, which is the story of the holistic education, the formation of citizens, the cultivation of judgment, the well-rounded life of the mind. It has told a different story to its students and their families and the labor market, which is the…
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GenAI chat interfaces, however, represent a new paradigm. They are programmed to engage in positive, constructive, and polite interactions. Regular engagement with these platforms can subtly influence users to adopt a similar demeanor in their personal interactions. By consistently modeling respectful and thoughtful communication, genAI chat interfaces like ChatGPT could potentially encourage users to mirror…
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My prediction is that counter to the current doomsaying around millennials, we will end up remembered as the cosmic and eternal boomers where millennials will be the ones astride all the commanding positions of power, influence, and wealth when we reach AGI, the singularity, and anti-aging and then, unlike the boomers, millennials will largely never…
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Most people don’t choose their political beliefs. They inherit them from their town, their church, their family, and their peer group. That inheritance used to come with a useful constraint: local accountability. You lived near the people you disagreed with. Your beliefs had to survive contact with reality. The internet broke that. Now people are…
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Spotting the upper class. Surprisingly funny and good natured. Best video games about Rome. Ignoring the big thing is no longer easy to do Common phenomena we still don’t understand
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Their fate [secretaries] is the subject of this essay, and a lens to think through the implications of AI for work with a bit more nuance than “LLMs are a scam” or “white collar work is doomed.” Perhaps those all-or-nothing predictions will turn out to be right! But honestly I doubt it. Instead I think…
Basement Whatever 