Mitch's Blog

The Oatmeal’s comic/essay about AI art starts as yet another AI rant, but then goes in an interesting direction that more or less aligns with how I think about using AI for writing. I use it for what the Oatmeal calls administrative drudgery — dragging cans of paint up the stairs to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I do not use it to write.

New Paper Finds That When You Reward AI for Success on Social Media, It Becomes Increasingly Sociopathic. “… when [AIs] were rewarded for success at tasks like boosting likes and other online engagement metrics, the bots increasingly engaged in unethical behavior like lying and spreading hateful messages or misinformation.” Fortunately, this is not a problem when people use social media.

Scott Alexander reviews Julian Jaynes’s alternative-science masterpiece, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” and argues Jaynes is half-right:

Julian Jaynes' The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote.

Alexander argues that what Jaynes discovered is not the breakdown of the bicameral mind — left-brain and right-brain merging into an integrated whole. Jaynes discovered the origin of theory of mind.

Until the Bronze Age, people operated without theory of mind, and they hallucinated gods to compensate. When theory of mind emerged, it spread like a virus.

Turn on what Terry Pratchett called “first sight and second thoughts” and try to look at the Bronze Age with fresh eyes. It was really weird. People would center their city around a giant ziggurat, the “House of God”, with a giant idol within. They would treat this idol exactly like a living human – feeding it daily, washing it daily, sometimes even marching it through the streets on sedan chairs carried by teams of slaves so it could go on a “connubial visit” to the temple of an idol of the opposite sex! When the king died, hundreds of thousands of men would labor to build him a giant tomb, and then they would kill a bunch of people to serve him in the afterlife. Then every so often it would all fall apart and everyone would slink away into the hills, trying to pretend they didn’t spend the last twenty years buliding a jeweled obelisk so some guy named Ningal-Iddida could boast about how many slaves he had.

If the Bronze Age seems kind of hive-mind-y, Julian Jaynes argues this is because its inhabitants weren’t quite individuals, at least not the way we think of individuality.

The Trump government is like those episodes of MASH where Henry Blake leaves the camp and Frank Burns is in charge.

Bobby Brainworms says babies live inside women’s placentas, which is not how women’s bodies work, and that he’s going to assign someone to prove that acetaminophen causes autism, which is not how science works.

… when people say, “How come you were never mad at the last guy?” I say, “Because I wasn’t paying attention.” … I thought the last guy was pretty smart, and he seemed good at his job, and I’m lazy by nature. … So I don’t check up on people when they seem okay at their job. You may think that’s an ignorant answer, but it’s not, it’s a great answer. If you left your baby with your mother tonight, you’re not going to race home and check the nanny cam. But if you leave your baby with Gary Busey…

— John Mulaney, “There’s a horse in the hospital."

I was today years old when I heard John Mulaney’s “Horse in the Hospital” routine, and it’s brilliant. “If you left your baby with your mother tonight, you’re not going to race home and check the nanny cam. But if you leave your baby with Gary Busey… "

I am a heavy user of dictation on the iPhone — I probably dictate as much or more than I type — but don’t use it on the Mac or iPad. If I have a full-size keyboard available, it’s easier for me to type.

The online conversation community seems to gravitate toward corporate-owned silos rather than commons, and seems to like its arbitrary 300-character limits. These two trends are frustrating to me.

When I turned 50, I decided to get a tattoo, but I did not follow through because it seemed like too much of a commitment.

When I get dressed in the morning, I don’t like putting on T-shirts with messages on them because I may not agree with the message in the afternoon.

I used “harrumph” in a work chat this morning. I’m at an age now where I can “harrumph,” and I plan to take full advantage of this privilege.

The Best Apples to Eat Right Now, According to an Apple Reviewer

I love apples. I literally eat an apple a day. My go-to apple is now Cosmic Crisp.

For a few years, I loved Honeycrisps, but I now find them barely edible. I think Honeycrisps are different now.

Reviewer Brian Frange ranks SweeTango as number one. I’ve never had one but I’ll watch for it.

Trump says Illinois governor, Chicago mayor should be jailed

Stephen Miller Cited ‘Plenary Authority,’ Then Paused. Conspiracies Started Flying.

I work on a core team of eight people, five of them women, including the manager. We use ❤️ to acknowledge messages on Teams. But lately, I have been uncomfortable with the ❤️ and I am using a 👍 instead. On the other hand, I don’t want to send a message to my colleagues that I don’t like them — I’m just not comfortable with the ❤️.

Unrelated: I’ve been told I overthink things.

For me, the answers are:

1. Facebook. Sigh.
2. Reddit, but 90% of my activity is reading and the occasional comment
3. Tumblr
4. Mastodon
5. Bluesky is a distant fifth

I don’t like Discord, so I decided to drop all the Discords I participate in. If those communities go to a proper community platform, I’ll gladly rejoin.

I do LinkedIn for professional reasons.

I don’t do Instagram and Threads now, but I might go back.

Here’s where you can follow me elsewhere.

C Spire overcomes AI ‘stigma’ — C Spire accelerated trustworthy AI adoption via a CEO-backed Center of Excellence, a customer-first strategy, and early tooling wins that saved time and blocked threats. My latest on Fierce Network.

Congratulations to Cory Doctorow on the publication of his new book, “Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it,” and his blockbuster profile in The New York Times.

Times writer Joseph Bernstein met with Cory over “an avocado malted and poached eggs at a Lower Manhattan diner:”

Doctorow had arrived to the diner with custom-printed poop emoji stickers, a design that appears on the cover of the new book. He’d won favor with the owners on an earlier visit by explaining that their seltzer maker could be modified to fit a large carbon dioxide tank, rather than frequently replacing smaller, proprietary canisters.

Across Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction is a central theme: That technology can be used either as a tool of human empowerment and creativity, or repression and control by the state or big corporations. In this vision, tinkering, customization, and individuality are good. Conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption are bad – even if it’s about something as seemingly small as seltzer.

“I am simultaneously extremely excited and hopeful and energized about the possibilities of what technology can do for us as people trying to thrive,” Doctorow said, “and terrified of how bad technology will be for that project if we get it wrong.”

Cory’s theory of enshittification in a nutshell:

First, a platform is good to its users. That may look like Facebook connecting you to all of your friends, or Amazon providing a giant, reliable marketplace for goods.

Then, when enough people have joined a platform that there aren’t any alternatives, the platforms start exploiting their own users to entice businesses. That may look like Facebook providing personal data about its customers to advertisers, or Google prioritizing paid ads over organic search.

Then, when those business customers are also stuck on one dominant platform, the platform puts the screws to them, too: Ad rates skyrocketing on Facebook amid reports of ad fraud, or Amazon sellers having to pay Amazon to be featured on Prime, just to appear high up in search results.

In the end, according to Doctorow, no one is happy except the shareholders of the big platforms.

“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow writes in the book. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”

Minnie does zoomies.

This is Tina and Ray’s dog Walter. Tina had about a dozen people over to her house this morning, and Walter greeted every one of them at the front door with a rope-toy in his mouth. Walter excels at tug-of-war.