We Taught It to Lie
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…
Provenance Tracer: an LLM skill for (maybe) not getting played
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…
Slopful Things
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…
Balance Comes to Force Multiplication
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…
It's Here (sort of)
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…
Advice on advice
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…
Big in Japan
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…
Being Human
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…
Revisiting The Walking Dead
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…
Headlines don't crash economies
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…
4/4: A beat you can dance to
Spend any time immersed in music discussions and you'll see people ask why 4/4 is so popular. The short and most precise answer to all questions of music and music theory is: centuries of changin…
What's your imponderable?
I like trivia. Some influences: * Imponderables - The word imponderable itself is, according to Merriam-Webster, from 1794, but the series ran from 1986-2006. It asked the kind of questions I ask a…