Elmo

vor 10-15 Jahren erfand ich "Englisches Wort mit Lateinischem Ursprung deutsch aussprechen um klug zu wirken", mit dem Beispiel "Importanz", und jetzt sind sie hier, die Buchtitel mit "Komputation"...

you know the funny thing about 'thought-terminating cliche', is it's become a bit of a... well, you get it

got an email that my Xfinity bill is becoming "simpler"... it went from $23 to $40.

apple carvings by tomoko sato

crashing out at the advice that thing "shouldn't be too hot"... how hot is that??! Nothing should ever be "too hot", that's just what the word "too" means!!

"AI can draft an essay for you, especially if you give it a high quality prompt." Really? This is what MIT thinks high schoolers should learn? MIT's "Day of AI" dayofai.org provides materials for K-12 teachers and claims to have reached over 5,000,000 students to date. 1/2

they should let me present this meme as a poster at a conference

my logic slides for week 10 from a year ago mysteriously include this slide, I don't even know how that came up, but it's an all-time Elmo classic:

haven't seen the movie but actually the concept of a documentary does include that the people who are making it are trying to communicate true information, hope that helps

I'm very happy that this paper has just been published in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences! It's an improved version, thanks to the feedback of the anonymous reviewers! Available in open access here: doi.org/10.1007/s406...

["I hate queer halloween what do you mean you're the dripped-out Serbian voter carrying his dog" etc.]

wouldn't be surprised if this is on purpose...

'No library should, in her professional opinion, feel obliged to retain "low-use items."' WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THE POINT OF A RESEARCH LIBRARY IS

"are you ready to argue about nature vs nurture?" "pfft, I was *born* ready"

It's really important to pay attention to the fact that Lula beat the fascist candidate not by compromising and trying to meet fascist voters in the middle, but by sticking to his guns, promising prosecutions for election interference, and mobilising his own voters to turn out in greater numbers.

"consciousness science", or as we used to call it back in the day, "three-card monte"

Saying that a theory is 'among our best theories of X' does NOT entail that the theory is a good theory of X, btw...

If you assign a [non-zero] probability to "LLMs are conscious", I think there's something wrong not just with how you think about LLMs, but also with how you think about probability.

if doing crimes is part of your business strategy, you're a criminal organization, btw

this ones in the permastim rotation

more AI is just straightforwardly going to make most science worse, since it makes it even easier to process your data without understanding what's actually going on.

Outta my sight, scrub

So far, everything that LLMs can give roughly human-equivalent output on are just things we should stop doing anyway. Those emails? That peer review? The cover letters? To the flames. Oh, but what about the 1,000 new B2B SaaS apps every year? Buddy, I have news for you...

Listening to Wagner like "some of this reminds me a lot of Star Wars movie soundtracks!"

The (Peer Re)View from Nowhere

authorship

🚨 Today (Fri 23rd) is the last chance to download the full 109 page BBS collection on 'conscious AI and biological naturalism', including target article, 50 commentaries, and my author response. Don't miss out (& do click 'save pdf')! doi.org/10.1017/S014...

it's like my unconscious is dreaming up postdocs now

What does it mean to say the organism is a SYSTEM? Can we make this concept precise and useful? Paul Weiss showed us how a century ago! In my new paper I recover his neglected systems view & use it to undermine four entrenched theses in biology: reductionism, genocentrism, determinism, & mechanicism

The quality journalism only the BBC can provide

I wrote a new paper. It reconstructs the argument behind Marx’s discussion of the value form in the first chapter of Capital. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Cleansing The Field

The Consecration Of The Dying

This is the first good post I've seen on substack

Someone mentioned David Brooks and I didn't know who he is, but this is honestly so funny. If you wrote a story about how the capitalists send their most powerful ideologue to debate an undergrad, that would seem silly:

I did look it up and it looks like it's the communist theory that social democrats collaborate with fascists, which was developed AFTER the social democrats in Germany let right-wing militias murder communist leaders, so... are we surprised that's the conclusion they drew? what's the point here?

The invincible airplane

[tapping the sign:] No formal demonstration can ever provide a degree of certainty about the real world that exceeds the degree of empirically demonstrated representational adequacy of the formal model.

example 9,142,295 of conservatives being 10x worse about the things they accuse progressives of, in this case thought policing, cancel culture, and being fragile snowflakes...