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The great human document
Another idea from Jaron Lanier: large language model software systems are not artificial intelligence. A large language model is one enormous document comprised of contributions from countless people. It’s “something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics.” It “can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between… Continue reading
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Data Dignity and Xanadu
Jaron Lanier is always interesting to listen to or read. Just this week he was a guest on Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Startalk. The discussion turned to AI (in its current form), and Lanier brought up his notion of data dignity. This hasn’t gotten much attention, as far as I can tell. According to Lanier, the… Continue reading
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Weaponization?
The orange baby and its henchpuppets are planning to pay the January 6 traitors on the basis of having been prosecuted by a “weaponized” department of justice at the direction of Joe Biden. But hang on a second. Let’s look at an actual example, the “QAnon Shaman.” You remember, that shirtless oddball who stood out… Continue reading
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Oh spare us. No, really, I mean it.
I just found Dario Amodei’s apologia The Adolescence of Technology, from back in January. It’s quite long; Claude must have used tons of tokens writing it for him. Amodei can, of course, afford it. His essay is chock full of hand waving dismissals of reservations reasonable people might have about large language models (and the… Continue reading
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Ring in the web
Pylimitics.net just joined the Wordy Webring. You can see this just below the dynamic “recent posts” list: A webring is an old idea (“old” in internet time at least); the idea is that the site creator has connected with other sites that you might also like. It turns out that web rings are still active,… Continue reading
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Underground (The)
May 17 2026 A lot of systems, institutions, and norms are breaking down. Some are vast and global. Others are small and local. And maybe my impression of this is hopelessly mired in my own local context, and like a large language model, I’m inexplicably hallucinating. I read a lot, though, and I’m not the… Continue reading
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weekend reading
“the old is dying and the new cannot be born” –Antonio Gramsci “We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit.” –Paul Feyerabend “How do LLMs affect productivity and quality? (Much like leaded petrol. There’s some potential benefit for individual users with literally decades of expertise,… Continue reading
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Well that was a surprise
I was kicked to the curb by my suddenly-previous employer. Along with a large chunk of my suddenly-previous department. This is not uncommon in the technology industry where I’ve worked for decades, and it’s not the first time for me. It’s always annoying, though, and for some it can be devastating. It’s always life-changing in… Continue reading
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Everything learns
I don’t think it’s true that the orange baby isn’t rational. The problem it has is what it has experienced its whole life and career: getting away with everything it tried, no matter what. In some way you could look at it (the o.b.) as simply a statistical outlier, like an astonishingly lengthy string of… Continue reading
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Time to do better
The US is not going back to the way we were. And good riddance, in my view. Without meaning to, American society and business practices have become a means of enriching and aggrandizing despicable people. This is not entirely new, but it seems to me that it’s more common and systemic now. There is not… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
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