Random train of thought - ironically (or appropriately) enough derived from bouncing some philosophy around with ChatGPT:

I've long realized that the Turing Test makes humanity biased towards systems that can communicate in human text. If a new intelligence comes to us that can't communicate in English (which for better or worse is the modern "lingua franca") many folks won't be able to recognize it as intelligent.

But this reflects an assumption that basic intelligence would precede the ability to speak. You see this in Asimov's story "Robbie": the nanny robot is a delightful companion, physically graceful, emotionally expressive, but mute... and the new fangled talking robot has so much machinery to deal with the language that it sits immobile, taking up a whole room.

But here's the thing: human language isn't just the test for LLM - it's the power source! There is so much intelligence imbued in the training corpus; I hold to the idea that what's most important is the relations and interactions and thus the context things make for each other, and the (shifting) mathematical landscapes that an LLM chat traverses is so rich with those that it powers the novel problem solving abilities we see.

So language isn't just the measure of smarts, it's the cognitive structure the smarts are built out of. Interesting watching language evolve in our lifetimes.

One example is "blog"... the old shortening of "weblog". For me, that's always referred to the entire site, so I might talk about "a piece on my blog". Over time a second usage has become more common where "a blog" refers to a single article, e.g. "I just wrote a blog, tell me what you think".

I'm a descriptivist and understand that language evolves for reasons that aren't always clear or logical to me, but I dislike how blog's change is generating ambiguity. I guess you can always say "blog site" for the whole collection and "blog article" or "blog piece" for a single thing, but it's frustrating.

Compare that with "compute" as a noun, as in "all this AI is taking a hell of a lot of compute". At first I disliked the usage, but I came around to seeing it as more concise than "computational power" (and as a buzzword is more inclusive of some more techie details)

Finally, some Gen-Z/Alpha usage watch: the word "nonchalant" is gaining some new shades of meaning. To Gen-X and older, nonchalance is almost always a positive thing (actually now that I see that written... that might reflect something about Gen-X's infamous checked-out-edness)

But I'd say historically nonchalance has is more often than not an admirable thing - calm, controlled, relaxed, approachable.

Now there's a newer shade of it that sometimes (but not always) points to it as performative, a front people put on so as to seem less engaged / concerned than they are. (There is also a fun backformation of "chalant" as the opposite.)

Like for both nonchalant and chalant, there's the idea that sincerity is probably better. If you're actually relaxed, that still can be a good form of nonchalant, and if you're buzzing with excitement, let your chalant flag fly. But I find it interesting that the younguns have added a layer to what was formerly an unalloyed good (old folks would have to mark someone as being "deceptively nonchalant" or similar.) I'm reading Ortega y Gasset's "Meditations on Quixote". I'm struck by how good a reading companion ChatGPT can be.

Anti-AI purists - even when they accept my counterexamples that something beyond "glorified autocomplete" is happening, that the training corpus is fueling some interesting and novel permutations I find of value - they might argue "sure, but wouldn't it be better, be working on more levels, if you were in dialog with a real person, a real human you can interact with in so many more modalities than a textbox on a screen?"

And that's a hard point to fully refute, except... it's hard to find that person on the regular, to match my reading schedule, and if I found them I assume I would be constantly testing their patience.

Nor is it "either-or"; I think my dialog with ChatGPT encourages me to sharpen my own writing when it seems right to bring it to my blog and social media - workshopping it a bit.

Sure, I have to be wary of becoming like one of those techie bros who gets convinced ChatGPT is helping them unlock a new undiscovered truth of quantum physics or whatever.

It's a little like Luke going into the dark tree on Dagobah, that what you see there is in part what you take with you. But by encouraging ChatGPT to push back, you can get something beyond "fancy mirror" or "robot teacher" - akin to running into Darth Vader's helmet full of Luke's face, to run a metaphor into the swamp.

Maher's comments and Wikipedia's philosophy challenge the authoritative and fascistic model of truthtelling preferred by Musk and his army of right wing and "Libertarian" followers. To an authoritarian, truth is a matter of prescription. Truth descends from authority and its perspective on objectivity. Authoritarians demand that there is a single truth and that there is a single source of truth: themselves. Maher's insightful commentary on truth challenges this idea, as do her later comments that Wikipedia's model encourages shared power, that Wikipedia editors have to "let go of power... you have to trust in their ability to manage the areas of their own expertise and interests." For the American right, this represents a grave threat to their worldview, a worldview dependent on the manufacture of controversy, enemies, and the convenient truths necessary to sustain their authority.

Mythos comes from ancient Greek. At its most basic, µῦθος meant "word" or "story." Specifically the kind of story that carries meaning beyond the literal. Not a lie. Not a fable. Not history. A mythos was an account that explained how things are by narrating how they came to be. The origins of fire. The birth of the gods. The founding of cities.

The Greeks set mythos against logos. Reasoned argument, evidence, systematic explanation. The two were not opposites so much as complements. Logos tells you how something works. Mythos tells you why it matters. Researching this, I realized I have been doing that combination for most of my career. The journalist's logos, the blogger's mythos. Unintentionally, but there it is.

The crucial distinction is epistemological. Logos makes claims that can be interrogated. Mythos makes claims that are received. You do not verify a mythos. You inhabit it. The community that holds it says it is true, and that is sufficient, because the story explains things that need explaining and provides a framework that holds the world together.

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I remember finding the July 1994 cover of Heavy Metal (with the armored sci0fi goons "Tom" and "Jerry") pretty evocative.

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minimalist animal tattoos i should remember this if I need inspiratin for Wren doodles

worseonpurpose interesting website tracking famous brands that haven't kept up their standards... epecially relevant for cookware, outdoor gear, and bedding.

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Man, Trump really is a hope for Western Democracy... I mean Putin can score 5-8 hockey goals against NHL players, and Kim Jong-il could shoot 5-11 holes-in-one on his first time out, (depending on who you asked) but at least our guy can golf, shooting 10 below his age (For comparison, Arnold Palmer was just barely able to pull that off at 71)

I know I'll sleep more soundly at night.

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