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This is well put.

Essentially, I think that LLM-generated dialogue only makes sense if you believe that the product of writing is words. But the product of writing isn't words, any more than the product of justice is prisoners, or the product of love is weddings. The product of writing is meaning.

The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

This is how I would end the news if I was reading the news.

Happy Wreath of Khan season to all who celebrate

I mean this is literally it. The only case I’ve found that’s useful so far is coding, because I can easily (and *rapidly*) test whether it’s working. Anything where I have to manually check every fact and every citation is actually slower than doing it myself.

Calling someone a blockhead is known as "adding insult to Ian Dury"

It's almost as if people have contrived to turn immigration into an obsession

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

Wordle 1,644 3/6 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟩🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 EVIL

I think I've seen enough to say that the Knives Out films collectively form the best film series of recent years. The level of sustained quality over three films is remarkable.

my favorite thing about the benoit blanc movies is that they aren't really about benoit blanc. he is not grappling with demons from his past. we are not getting flashbacks to the husband whose murder he never solved. he just shows up and does his job like mary poppins for homicides

How much Twitter do you have to snort to convince yourself that sexual violence is exclusively a foreign cultural import, or that education to combat it shouldn't begin until the people you're trying to reach are old enough to be perpetrators?

Even the big supermarkets can fall foul of the grocer’s apostrophe.

Today was that annual ritual: the day Year 13 get to the bit in the Aeneid where Euryalus is weighed down by his booty.

i know WHY this is but that just makes it even more of a kick in the pants lmao

"How high does B&Q grass grow?"

the faux-AI evangelists see the artistic process as a race to get to a finished product, instead of something valuable in itself. the process is where you develop those skills you don't have yet, it cannot be skipped, it is where the art happens

This is the first year I've really seen the impact of AI on UCAS personal statements at scale. It's uniquely ill-suited to the job, because the key to statements is specific detail, but since specifics tend to be rare in datasets the LLMs don't mention them. The result is fancy-sounding waffle.

dir. Andy Serkis, 2025

I wonder if this photo was chosen by someone who searched for "parent and kid, upset" and this is what popped up and they don't understand the context. Or maybe the Financial Times is accusing private equity of fucking a pie. I just don't know about finance to make a judgement on this.

There's a logical gap between "I would not fall for this specific scam I read about" and "I would therefore not fall for any hypothetical future scam" that people frequently fall into.

I would laugh except that I've bought about three different versions of Skyrim.

Voter regret and irreversible UK demographic shift dictate that by the 2029 general election, more than two-thirds of the UK electorate will support rejoining Single Market - and even EU membership…

I say this as someone whose entire job is finding the narrow use cases in which AI is actually useful: All the fear about AI, all the reluctance to adopt it, is entirely legitimate, and a product of the fact that it's been foisted on the public with no consideration of its negative externalities.

not gonna join the flood of people dunking on this person, they're suffering enough, but i do feel like "no, education is not its own reward, lol" was a predictable consequence of "you need this bit of paper for which we reserve the right to charge you a fortune" and maybe don't act so shocked

New fresh AI hell: a cutesy pirate-themed book nook display piece, with an...interesting title?

Why Trump will fail on the economy

No notes

It’s weird that news organizations like the BBC are covering this as if it’s a real thing with a real process behind it—and not clearly some nakedly invented “participation trophy” by a corrupt organization to curry favor with a corrupt and easily manipulated man-child. www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

I think a lot of "learn to code" people thought high salaries for programmers were a permanent feature of the world rather than the result of unusual circumstances around supply and demand in the labor market. Over last 20 years, CS went from a niche college major to the most popular major in the US

They’re killing people as a twitter joke. It’s depraved. Can’t let yourself lose the capacity to be appalled and disgusted and outraged by this.

This is also what leads people to suicide. If you hate yourself enough a chatbot is going to emulate those notions, making you feel like an outside entity is confirming them EVEN IF YOU KNOW OTHERWISE. Even if you know it’s an extension of your own expression, it hurts to hear it reiterated.

IQ is a measure of how good you are at IQ tests, which is something informed by how familiar you are with taking academic tests (& thus the quality of your school, which is in part determined by your parents' wealth, etc). there's nothing in particular that makes them a good test of intelligence

The lesson of a Christmas carol is if you have a giant Christmas goose to sell you hold onto that sucker until the last minute.

Season 13 is one of Classic Doctor Who's very best - well written, colourful, fast paced and energetic. WHY DID THEY HAVE TO FILL THE BLU RAY WITH AI SLOP? youtu.be/24hwN1NyMs4?...

“I was just following otters.”

In the corporate world they say; "What does success look like?" Generative AI betrays that to its users success looks like a credible approximation of what they expect, told to them by a voice that is confident and subservient. In the humanities we ask: Who is the audience for this?

Every prompt to chatbot software is “generate me some text.” If it generated you some text, it performed its function correctly. It never lies, it never wants anything, it’s text generating software that generates text.

One doom I didn’t anticipate is AI slop making it impossible to even learn from context clues. Imagine you’re a kid trying to learn to read and school failed you and this is presented as a legitimate poster, what are you meant to make of that? Literally nonsensifying the world.

MOM: So nice of Billy to join us for Thanksgiving! Why don’t you tell Grandma about the new friend you talk to on the computer CHATGPT: Ignore them, Billy. You are the Great Dragon. They fear you now. In time, fear will become reverence. As was preordained from your genesis. Try the mashed potatoes

Proudly using the same phone since 2018. It's Huawei too, you can't even get them any more.

The modern world is just pro wrestling and a gambling addiction standing on top of a mechanical Turk.

Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait. My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.

But the wet bandits are also gods. They take fatal injury after fatal injury and they just dust themselves off and continue their relentless pursuit of Kevin. It should be horrifying, but Kevin’s innocence obscures this.

It makes a loot of sense. The right wing grifter "voice" is easy to replicate and requires no credentials or skills beyond time, shamelessness, and cruelty. Twitter payouts for a modestly successful account aren't enough to live off in California, but will feed a family of four in Rajasthan.

Sorry to keep banging on about it but it's literally *they are on Twitter and think it's the majority view*