This genre of "I used AI incorrectly, deploying zero human judgment, and it didn't go great" story really gets to me. The world needs more profiles of people who fixed a smudge on their glasses with a hammer while wearing them, clearly.

Name a film you've seen 7 or more times

New paper: "The Faithful Machine: Trust, Delegation, and Algorithm Aversion in Financial Advice." I wrote it in two weeks with heavy AI assistance for the UCLA Anderson Human x AI Finance exercise/conference. It was pretty strange, here are some thoughts on what that was like. 🧵

My Boy Scout troop did the Lincoln Pilgrimage from New Salem to his tomb in Springfield every year. 20 miles of walking, but fascinating and you got a fancy medal for your uniform at the end.

Perhaps the only things Wittgenstein got right was that bit about the lion (If a lion could talk...). The fact that LLMs so readily converse with us is the best proof that they are not conscious agents (that, or that they have very low standards).

Academia is part knowledge production, part knowledge transfer, and part Glass Bead Game. “Quality” is judged on the prestige bead game stuff plus some genuinely useful knowledge production. What happens as LLMs become reliably good Glass Bead Game players?

We should stop accepting vendors' framing of "reasoning" and "chain of thought," @vcarchidi.bsky.social argues in this provocative and well-argued essay. I really have nothing to add. We should remind ourselves that AI models are machines, not hunt for imaginary evidence that they're persons.

One of the best things about the AI discourse is that it's reminding people about Frank Herbert.

The persona that AI users interact with is *not* the model itself. That distinction keeps getting lost. I appreciate this explainer on persona selection that Anthropic has published.

When the weather sucks, we make Abuelita.

New paper out today in Public Health! 🎉 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... AI's lackluster impact on pop health is not a technical issue - it's a design one. It has been given the wrong function, is being built on unsuitable infrastructure, & is too often too distant from patients/practitioners

I struggle with this. I've seen LLMs go from useless to very effective at editing. I use them daily for professional, non-academic writing. But for academic work, I feel like it would not be "my" writing to use them beyond grammar check and thesaurus stuff. Unsure if/where to push the envelope.

Fantastic thread on what to cover in a Philosophy of LLMs course.

Overheard while boarding: “Nothing like a transcontinental red-eye!” Meanwhile, my spouse via text:

Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports once again proves it is indispensable for surviving airports.

I know I’m old, because I’m anxiously checking the Warby Parker app to see when my new glasses ship. Everything is blurry.

Let’s do this for Helen, folks!

Me, reading philosophy: I love this. It's such a blessing that I get to do this. Me, writing philosophy: I have made terrible life choices.

Is there a meta-literature on how philosophical arguments are adopted and used in empirical disciplines, especially medicine or technology? It's crazy how quickly bad philosophical arguments get picked up and cited in the lit on robots in healthcare. #philsky

If anything, since moving to a place that specializes in applied philosophy, my tolerance for this has gotten even worse (hence an interaction that caused this complaining). I don't think I should have to constantly contort myself to fit some vision you have in your head of what real philosophy is

“You took electronics in the 1990s? But that was before the iPhone!” - Our teenager, to my (youthful) wife.

Bracketing moral questions as @tedunderwood.com does here seems necessary. An aesthetic reading of our reactions has an important virtue: they reflect a pre-moral process of collective questioning. We don't know quite what AI agents are or could be.

This absolute goober is enjoying the sunshine.

Bookmarking. From a quick skim, I think the shift from ethics to aesthetics makes sense.

Our 6 yo is in her Ravens best, rooting for the Seahawks. Don’t question it.

Best soundtrack ever. #nowspinning

I just shipped an internal software tool to our team that would have taken me a month before Claude Code. I spent maybe half my spare time over the last week on it. Wild stuff.

A general thought, as I work on revisions to a paper: I do think this holds up, and it's not that Gemini/etc. isn't good at doing exactly what it's trained to do. It's that, at least in part, Gemini has nothing to say. It makes no arguments, no claims, nothing that gives food for thought.

That is to say, it’s a tricky problem but not more difficult than other things they do. And I think this falls squarely on the companies providing these services to make sure their tools are good at this

Short interview about my dissertation on Michel Serres and its applications to sport ethics: www.eur.nl/en/esphil/ne...

Can we care for AI companions in any meaningful sense? Interesting new manuscript responding to Lott and Hasselberger (who answered this question "no" last year). #aiethics

Really good post from Tim on why state fuel agents are different from the underlying LLMs. As an aside, the language of cybernetics feels really useful here. No metaphors about consciousness, souls or morality. Just information processing systems.

This is a good take on Moltbook: a low stakes safety experiment we can learn from. Funny that a bunch of high-powered ELIZAs reacting to each other is freaking some people out. Chatbots are machines that are really good at mimicking human speech and thought patterns.

Not to make light of this, there are areas of software development where this will matter a lot. But my minority(?) opinion is that Claude Code feels like a basic jump in level of abstraction. The development of abstract compiled languages also degraded programmers’ understanding of assembly.

I really appreciate Claude for assuming that my note about aliens landing near Greece in droves was a "creative story idea" instead of my actual, unhinged beliefs about extraterrestrial infiltration.

How to build an autonomous agent, and what @village11.bsky.social learned in the process. I've been reading this slowly since yesterday and processing it. Informing an agent that it needs to balance tensions as opposed to commanding compliance with rules work best--fascinating insight.

Coding is many processes. AI-driven development still requires the parts of “coding” I like, without endlessly scrolling, grepping, checking StackExchange, toggling between terminal windows, etc.

My favorite acronym is YBH: Yes, But How? I ask that question a lot about AI hype. For that reason, I'm really enjoying Justin Norris's very practical blog, especially this post on Claude Code for knowledge workers. Anthropic already filled in the gaps discussed in this post with Claude Cowork.

It’s still technically Christmas(tide) till Candlemas, so we are watching the best Christmas movie.

Claude Code may transform non-coding knowledge work jobs faster than "agents" and "chatting to solve a problem" can automate them away. Because it'll transform us all into software developers. As in, it's transforming (a segment of) my CFO job that way right this minute.

I finally figured out that the AI-enabled coding environment that I needed was GitHub Codespaces + Claude Code command line. Portable across work/home laptops and looks like I can use it on an iPhone with some work. I was promised a rocket-fueled future but this is all very clunky!

I learn something and think challenging thoughts every time I read one of Eli's papers on trust. Highly recommended based on that alone! #philsky

Can wait to dig into this data. It is already practically difficult to hold sellers/curators of genAI technology accountable for their behavior, this suggests it’s also psychologically difficult for users to do so. #aiethics

This paragraph is a doozy. Software, wiser than humans since 2026?

Really interesting thread, lots of adds to the reading list.

Our normally sweet 6 yo daughter making good on her promise to “give the Rams a bad report.” (She is a Ravens fan, no idea where the animus comes from except she decided to root for the Panthers.)

Every rational being needs emotion. We won't meet emotionless aliens, because *something* beyond reason needs to determine what reason pays attention to. Just a footnote, but it might be my favorite part of Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity. Implications for "intelligence" in AI, too. #aiethics

I tried to get up on my grandmother’s organ bench when I was little and instead pulled it down on my face, breaking my nose and giving myself two black eyes the day before Easter.

28 years ago, but that is still really stressful to contemplate. This entire list is the soundtrack of my high school years.