Ask a language model to multiply two large numbers and it will often get it wrong. Not approximately wrong — embarrassingly wrong, in a way that feels incongruous coming from a system that can explain…
They didn't wander. That's the first thing to understand. The popular image of the hunter-gatherer is someone moving through an indifferent landscape, taking what they find. It's not wron…
The chatbot says it doesn't discriminate. It's probably telling the truth. It's also probably wrong. The older version of the bias conversation was tractable. A model trained on historica…
A claim travels from its original source to your feed through several hands, and at each step it gains distribution and loses epistemic status. Hedges get stripped. Speculation gets reframed as report…
Most AI tool failures aren't caused by bad intent or bad luck. They're caused by someone who couldn't see the whole board — who didn't model what their tool would do when it met an adv…
A few years back I wrote a post about learning to code. The short version: most people shouldn't, the gold rush is ending, "programmer" is becoming a regular job and losing its shine as…
I uploaded 50 worldbuilding infographics to NotebookLM, Google's LLM-driven notebook tool, last week and gave it a job to do: * Resolve contradictions between sources * Elevate meaningful diffe…
This started as a comment on Hacker News. I need a browser extension to capture comments on forums and social media as blog drafts. Here is one of a small number of things I consider indisputable: It…
This guy I met in the lounge at a hotel had interesting stories about a long career traveling around Japan, but he made the storyteller's fatal mistake when he broke suspension of disbelief by not…
I spent a long time thinking Being Human and Humans were the same show with a rename in the middle of its run, like Seaquest received in its time. It turns out Humans, at least the US version I watche…
Circumstances aligned recently to allow me to catch up on The Walking Dead. I started with spinoffs: Dead City and Daryl Dixon. I had already watched most of Fear The Walking Dead and the first season…
Many years ago I asked on one social media site or another what the next big crash would come from after 2008. Subprime auto loans were the top suggestion. HN Search powered by AlgoliaHacker News Sea…