As someone who’s been paying attention to AI since the 1970s, I’ve noticed the same pattern over and over: People will say, “It takes real intelligence to do X (win at chess, say), so doing that successfully will mean we’ve got AI.” Then someone will do that, and people will look at how it’s done and say, “Well, but it’s just using Y (deep lookup tables and lots of fast board evaluations, say). That’s not really AI.”
For the first time (somewhat later than I expected), I just heard someone doing the same thing with large language models. “It’s just predicting the next word based on frequencies in its training data. That’s not really AI.”
This guy has an app for bulk unsubscribing (and text in Section 230 that perhaps protects it).
Personally, I’d like the opposite of what this app is described as doing: I want a plugin to purge my feed of everything except posts by people I follow. (All the rest of that stuff is “objectionable material” as far as I’m concerned.) That would make Facebook usable again, maybe.
… focused on a part of Section 230 that spells out protection for blocking objectionable material online.
Copper River sockeye salmon cooked in coconut oil with a soy-ginger-mustard-maple glaze. Cahokia brown rice. Sautéed red onions and red peppers. Delicious!
Jackie almost always gets up before me and makes the coffee. But every few weeks I’ll wake up first and then I’ll be the one to make the coffee. And when I do, I bring Jackie a cup of bed coffee.
Ashley routinely stays in bed until the second person gets up. #dogsofmastodon 🐕
I have written very little in a long time. But today I started working on something new, and I have a plan to get another (related) thing that I wrote a while ago ready to submit.
The older thing is a bit of steampunk-esque whimsy that I started as an experiment in voice, and found I rather liked. As it grew, I realized that it was longer than a short story, and a market I was interested in was about to open to novella submissions, so I thought I’d just let it grow.
One thing I do when I’m writing is to just drop bits in that seem cool, as possible set-ups for later bits. This often works out very well. Sometimes, though, those bits of set-up imply stuff that doesn’t get written. That happened this time, and I made a list of bits that either needed the follow-up stuff written, or else be deleted.
Since I was aiming at novella length (and I wasn’t there yet), I figured that I could just write those bits out. But several didn’t end up working out. So now my plan is to make another pass through the planned novella, delete the bits that didn’t go anywhere, turn it into a novelette, and get it submitted somewhere.
But that is all work for another day. Today I’ve started on something new: a sequel to that story. I remain delighted by the characters, by the steampunky world, and by the voice I used to write the story. And yesterday I came up with part of a new idea.
Just now I jotted down a few sentences, which I very much hope to get back to later today.
This picture has nothing to do with this post. I just wanted the post to have a picture, and this is the picture I took this morning.
As one of many pleasant outings during our visit, Steven took us to the New England Botanic Garden. It was a good choice for the group, providing opportunities for walks of all different lengths for people who wanted to walk further or less far.
There were, of course, lots of plants to see (f you’re a fan of diverse hostas, you’d be in heaven), but I found myself drawn to the art, and particularly enjoyed the sculptures. Although not religious myself, I don’t mind religious art, but I do find the endless Christian iconography one tends to find especially in the Midwest to be tedious. So I always enjoy anything different.
The New England Botanic Garden had a lot of western classical art, one sort I particularly enjoy. (I always like allegorical personifications (like Liberty and Justice, but lots of others as well), and I saw figures for Summer and Autumn (although I failed to get pictures of those). I also like classical western architecture—especially faux architecture, such as follies, which they had one of, along with a Temple of Peace. And I did manage to capture a photo of the statue of Pan.
Well worth visiting, if you’re in the area, and like botany or classical western art.
It’s almost as if our response to Covid wasn’t all Trump’s fault after all.
“Most American dairy farms are not regularly testing for H5N1… seeing the possible stigma of admitting they have H5N1-infected cows as a greater risk than the virus itself.”
I wish candidates (and others) would put legit links in their email, because then I could look at them and be reasonably confident they were legit.
I want to make a donation to a candidate, but I want to make it in the most efficient way possible—without some intermediary siphoning off a bunch of the money. I especially don’t want some rival tricking me with a bogus solicitation.
The email looks legit, but the link to click.actionnetwork.org followed by several hundred random characters does not fill me with confidence. (Some research makes me think it is legit.)
