I’ve been doing a lot of chopping lately. I like to have an apple nearly every day with lunch. My teeth have been bothering me for a couple of months — not enough to schedule an emergency dentist visit — but it’s uncomfortable for me to bite into an apple. So I’ve been cutting the apple into bite-sized pieces. And even though I don’t cook, I’ve gotten great at chopping, and also pretty good at not slicing open a finger.
Last weekend I decided to once again migrate my Mastodon usage to my blog at mitchwagner.com, hosted by Micro.blog, as my only outpost on the Fediverse. Micro.blog seems to work pretty well for me as a Mastodon client, though it has not in the past.
However, I’d still like to be able to see other people’s boosts from Micro.blog — that is a feature that @manton has steadfastly resisted implementing.
Arrcus bets on a smarter network fabric for AI inference. The company’s new Inference Network Fabric aims to solve growing latency and performance challenges for telco, hyperscaler and large enterprise AI networks. My latest on Fierce Network.
I have been a professional writer for more than 40 years and I still can’t figure out affect vs. effect. I have to look them up every single time I use one of those words. It’s affecting my mental health. Or effecting.
“There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism”
Talarico is a Texas state lawmaker studying to be a minister, who criticizes the Republican use of Christianity as a political weapon. Such politicization of Christianity both distorts politics and cheapens faith, he says. The true way to practice Christianity is simple but not easy, he says: it is to love your neighbor. Political positions should grow out of that to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and heal the sick. “[T]here is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” he told Colbert. “It is the worship of power in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”
I was the first one on a Teams meeting this morning and for a few minutes it was just me and three note-taking and transcription AI bots.
Who needs a laptop when you have a folding phone?
Galaxy Z Fold 7 phone + Logitech Keys 2 Go. keyboard = a great mobile workstation, or “Purse Computer,” according to The Verge’s Allison Johnson.
I should use my iPad Air more often. Also, I preordered the Clicks Power Keyboard, a combined battery pack and thumb keyboard for phones. I’m looking forward to trying that out.
So much of the modern world makes you feel like a widget on a conveyor belt, as our fetishization of efficiency has begun to corrode our souls…. When people rage against the machines, this is a lot of what they are frustrated with. That you are a commodity in a network of apps, phone holds, and confusing websites.
— Chris Arnade, Is it Really So Much Better Now?
While a lot of TV actors were trying to mimic the mush-mouthed vocal delivery of big-screen movie stars like Marlon Brando or James Dean, Shatner went in the opposite direction. He enunciated his words carefully and broke his sentences into bite-sized pieces, making each clause a separate unit of delivery. He would speed up his cadence at times, and then bring it to a near halt. Shatner’s unique speaking style has been parodied countless times. Among living actors, probably only Christopher Walken’s line delivery has generated more parodies.
"Neither a robot nor a human but actually an entirely new entity"
What is Claude? Anthropic doesn’t know either
Gideon Lewis-Kraus at The New Yorker goes in depth with researchers at Anthropic attempting to understand how Claude works and finds AI is even more weird and confusing than we think:
The most candid A.I. researchers will own up to the fact that we are doing this because we can. As [Brown computer scientist Ellie Pavlick] wrote, the field originated with the aspiration “to understand intelligence by building it, and to build intelligence by understanding it.” She continued, “What has long made the AI project so special is that it is born out of curiosity and fascination, not technological necessity or practicality. It is, in that way, as much an artistic pursuit as it is a scientific one.” The systems we have created—with the significant proviso that they may regard us with terminal indifference—should inspire not only enthusiasm or despair but also simple awe.
In the eighteenth century, James Watt perfected the steam engine: a special box of fire that turned archaic fern sludge into factories, railroads, and skyscrapers. The Industrial Revolution happened without any theoretical knowledge of the physical principles that drove it. It took more than a century for us to piece together the laws of thermodynamics. This scientific advance led to such debatably beneficial things as the smartphone. But it also helped us explain why time flows forward, galaxies exist, and our universal fate is heat death.
Now we have a special box of electricity that turns Reddit comments and old toaster manuals into cogent conversations about Shakespeare and molecular biology. The sheer competence of language models has already revamped the human quest for self-knowledge.
Askell describes AI is “neither robot nor human but actually something new.” Based on my use of AI and learning about it, that’s a good way to describe it.
Has AI achieved intelligence? Define “intelligence.” In the 2022 book “Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intellience,” James Bridle argues that our definition of intelligence — which limits the phenomenon to humans and maybe some higher animals — is too narrow. Software is intelligent, as are analog computers, as are bonobos, jackdaws, bees and trees. Bridle is not arguing here that plants have “hidden lives,” like 1970s pseudoscientists argued, but that these machines, birds, animals and plants should be considered intelligent just on the basis of their observed behavior.
I’m skeptical that AI has achieved anything resembling human intelligence. It is not alive. But I’m even more skeptical of people who dismiss AI as just a fancy autocomplete.
Pair the New Yorker article with this essay by Matt Shumer, an AI entrepreneur and investor: Something big is happening.. Shumer says that within a year or two, AI will be better than humans at any job that’s now done at a screen. He compares the present moment to February 2020, the weeks before the pandemic hit, when nearly everyone went about their normal lives but a few people knew that the world was about to profoundly change.
Rubio brings Naziism to Munich
Marco Rubio went Nazi on America’s European (former) partners — at the Munich security conference last week, espousing a vision of Western civilization united by whiteness and Christianity.
… officials in the Trump administration and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies.
How can people like Rubio (son of Cuban immigrants), Stephen Miller (Jewish) and Peter Thiel (gay) can embrace an ideology that considers them to be second-class citizens at best and vermin at worst?
Post by @spocko@mastodon.online
@gardengeek here is Obama’s Follow up
I’m old enough to remember when we had an intelligent President who wasn’t an embarrassment every time he opened his mouth.
David Boreanaz will star in a Rockford Files reboot. I am looking forward to this. David Boreanaz is perfect for the role.
But nobody uses answering machines anymore. Text messages wouldn’t be the same.
Changing how I handle blogging and social media (again)
I vibe-coded a thing! I coaxed Google Gemini to modify the template for mitchwagner.com to hide a specific category of posts from the home page. I’ve been wanting to do that for a couple of years but lacked the skills — I was able to do it in less than two hours with Gemini (including a lunch break lol).
The category is Mitchellaneous — it’s where I post memes and other Internet curiosities. I had been running that on a separate blog for a few weeks; now it’s all here. And folks who were signed up for my newsletters will now just receive one newsletter with everything (which is how I did the newsletters until a couple of weeks ago when I made the switch to two blogs and two newsletters).
Over the years, I’ve had a few ideas for how I want to handle blogging and social media, but haven’t had the coding chops to implement those ideas. With the help of AI, maybe I can finally do it.
Next up: Can I change my newsletter template so all the Mitchellaneous posts go at the end? Hold my beer….
ICE is preparing to spend $38 billion this year on a network of concentration camps to incarcerate 100,000 people. This is obscene. They are the American Gestapo. Fuck ICE.
An 88-year-old grandmother flew for the first time, on a plane piloted by her grandson. She also took Dramamine for the first time.