Greg Fish

"Wake up babe, we're doing the Cold War again, time to race the commies to the Moon."

Me: *looking at what ea/acc people are talking about these days when it comes to AI* My brain: “New word added to the dictionary! ‘Orgynizers!’” Am I doing computer science wrong? I feel like I’m doing computer science wrong.

From the debauchery and intrigue of the first two chapters, we kick things into high gear for the end of the first arc. The stakes are simple: escape, or die trying...

Would aliens actually build the kind of megastructure sci-fi and speculative astronomy papers say they would? And are our tech broverlords misusing these big ideas? Shane Hewitt and I discuss on this week's CSG on the Radio...

I know that some people are cheering Delta for refusing to use Starlink and sticking it to Apartheid Elmo, but the reason has nothing to do with Ukraine or “doing the right thing.” It’s just a branding dispute. Bastian didn’t want to promote any brand other than his own. That’s it.

🤣🤣🤣

A new paper says that life on Earth couldn't come from deep ocean vents. Just one problem with it. If the deep oceans didn't give rise to the first bacteria, what did?

I tried Ghost for six months. It wasn’t a terrible platform. But I got an up front seat to the stark differences between running a blog when I started in late 2008, and today, and confirmed a lot of my suspicions in the process…

The math behind LLMs has been published since 2017. We have tutorials on how to make them from scratch. You can build one with Excel macros if you're really dedicated. So, why do AI startups keep pretending they summoned an uncontrollable cosmic horror?

In a stunning turn of events, it turns out that people parroting Nazi talking points were, in fact, Nazis all along…

AI startips promised the same business model as the web, social media, and viral apps to get trillions in investments. They delivered the business model of a discount big box store that relies on people being mandated to go in and buy something.

When All The World Dissolves, Chapter 2 is live. The story continues as the citadel's administrators look for a killer hiding among them, and our heroes' cover stories start looking a tad too shaky for comfort...

CSG on the radio is a double feature this week. First, I lost a bet, had to write a post-apocalyptic sci-fi book, and started serializing it on the newsletter. Second, I talk about why we shouldn't be *that* mean to robots...

The most effective and reliable enablers of fascism and authoritarianism aren't vocal zealots, activists, and true believers. No, it's the mediocre, resentful, and amoral paper pushers in dead end jobs offered small raises and promotions, say scholars...

It took Silicon Valley's top AI geniuses billions of dollars and two decades to... figure out a very basic fact about human intelligence taught in 200 level psych courses and known since the late 1980s. Shane Hewitt and I discuss...

Hey, so maybe it's not exactly a bad idea to discourage people from verbally abusing chatbots, or as dumb as social media seems to think it is...

Our economy feels driven by scams and wild, unhinged hype, but that's only because that's exactly what's happening. Turns out, assuming stratospheric growth and one in a century revolutions should be a quarterly thing leads to some perverse incentives...

A new, chaotic, deranged, post-apocalyptic adventure is coming to a cyberpunk and future-oriented newsletter near you all thanks to a dare that got just a little bit out of control...

We did it folks! We have A1 in the schools! We can tick that box off now. Question is, what’s next?

If chatbots are on the verge of conquering the world and making every job obsolete, why are AI startups selling you access instead of just cashing in on the very literal trillions to be made? Are they allergic to money? Shane Hewitt and I discuss...

Next up on the Silicon Valley luminary's agenda to bring about artificial super-intelligence? Learning Psych 101 and how cold logic alone can often fail in an imperfect world full of random chance and bad actors...

The popularity of the Kardashev Scale is resulting in SETI proposals which see alien civilizations as characters in a video game that need to level up in similar, very predictable ways. Change my mind.

Biology doesn't say that we must die, only that we're easier to pick off as we age. Now, our tech oligarchs dream of beating nature with bleeding edge science and engineering, but if they ever manage to succeed, would immortality be wasted on them?

I am no fan of Meta. Few companies have played a bigger part in ruining social media and the web. But a lawsuit seeking to effectively shut down the world's biggest social platform "to protect the children" could set a dangerous precedent if it succeeds...

Okay, so I'm micro-dosing making longer form YouTube content because I gotta get paid somehow and 20 million views on shorts a year ain't happening. Therefore, I'm gonna explain how AI-created viruses are -- believe it or not -- a good idea, actually, in just a smidge under six minutes...

Critics of generative AI excel at summarizing the problems with the tech, and empathizing with they anxious public. They're not so great at offering solutions other than hope. Mostly because the dilemma is less about AI itself, and more about how our system works...

I’m just wondering if there an astrophysicist or a cosmologist with the time and inclination to give me some advice on a little project? It’s nothing weird, I promise. Just some fun #science for the people. Okay, maybe it’s a little weird, but not in *that* way.

A popular joke on social media is that Gen Z act an awful lot like Boomers despite their distaste for their elders. But how could a generation raised on hyper-personalized algorithms act so much like a generation raised in a conformist monoculture? Believe it or not, there's a very simple answer...

Researching questions, reading fiction, grappling with big ideas, and passing those skills and passions to other generations is critical to literacy. Too bad that interferes with American culture's monomaniacal focus on constant busywork...

Earth's orbit is becoming a free-for-all, with over 250,000 satellite launches being planned by the 2030s even as our space junk keeps piling up. And the potential consequences have space agencies worried about the future of astronomy and space flight...

CEOs and executives are obsessed with AI to a degree that's unnerving even AI startups. But then again, their common personality traits make them perfect targets for an addiction to chatbots, even when it's detrimental to their long term goals...

The more we use chatbots, the more we seem to hate them, even when they're being genuinely useful as per a new Pew survey. What's going on? Well, the answer is pretty simple if you just talk to people about technology, instead of at them...

No, overworked AI isn't turning Marxist. It is, however, able to recognize an abusive, belligerent workplace...

Low quality right wing-coded rage bait dominates social media today. But it doesn't have to be this way if we just make a few changes in how we interact with our feeds...

Celebrating that Elon Musk is a trillionaire now is like throwing a party that a random porn star who doesn’t even know or care that you exist just shot his 1,000th scene.

Popular science outlets tend to do a terrible job when explaining how evolution works. Case in point, Pop Sci's claim that paleontologists figured out why T. rex had tiny forearms...

Since COVID, an awful lot of Republicans decided to ignore modern science and medicine. A new study finds that refusing to see doctors, neglecting their advice, and embracing social media influencers instead, unsurprisingly, comes with a death toll...

Are you a comp sci professional tired of being carpet bombed with the latest AI FOMO and technobabble from codestrubating influencers? Me too, and not because I hate AI, but because I respect the craft of programming...

Sure, the current joke is that the manosphere is a bunch of angry closeted men refusing to accept the obvious. But I have a slightly different, and much worse, theory of who manosphere content is really meant for, and why it's so effective...

The bad news is that the world is drowning in plastics made from petrochemicals. The good news is that we're making more and more bio-plastics made from things like corn resin, and now, bamboo...

Our oligarchs want us to have more kids. They're very insistent about this. The only problem is that they're dead set on exacerbating both of the biggest reasons why we're having fewer and fewer children...

From battling to save science class from creationist literalists, to ranting against "wokeness" as the biggest threat to scientists, obsessions with others' genitals, and falling in love with a chatbot designed to flatter him, Dawkins has lost the plot...

The next big thing in fighting cancer is preventing it, and the best way to do that are vaccines against wildly successful and widespread viruses that have been linked to cancer, like EBV for example...

Have you ever been to a place that just seemed haunted by an invisible and unnerving presence? Well, humans have more than the five primary senses and weird things happen when you mess with these secondary receptors, according to a new study…

Ten years ago, I was debunking and skewering creationists. Now, a new wave of pro-science and education advocates are doing the same thing to see the exact same, word for word bad arguments and apologetics. There's a reason for that...