Viewing profile — NoFunPedant

If you enjoy doing your work, AI is like being told "Here is a robot that will make love to your spouse for you."

"Rewthe" is ruth, an old word for mercy, which today only survives in the negative form "ruthless."

If you don't have the writing skills to express your thoughts in your own language, how can you have the reading skills to be certain the LLM is expressing your thoughts correctly?…

Claude doesn't know when it's lying or when it's telling the truth. It doesn't know anything. It's a computer program. It manipulates symbols according to mathematical rules. It do…

I don't know how you imagine longtermism is relevant to this discussion -- the crisis is happening right now in front of all of us and the need for action is right now. The threat …

Addressing the problem at the source would be a broad-based political movement that demanded enforcement of the First Amendment and a restoration of constitutional norms. That kind…

Here's another obvious-seeming question: Why should would-be censors be granted power over libraries? Instead of concocting expensive schemes to get around attempts at censorship, …

1. The states never had the right to secede. U.S. Constitution, Article VI: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof ... shall…

I'd like to believe that there is no such thing as free will, but I just can't decide.

Yes, the Canon Cat had a built-in manual, and I checked the manual quite thoroughly. I learned to use the Cat after a fashion, but even when I understood the Cat a little bit, it s…

When I was in my late teens, right about the time this article came out, I was an ignorant, naive, first-time computer user. My college had some Canon Cats in the computer lab. I d…

"Market the hype till the market is ripe"?

Car magazines publish environmental stories all the time. I love tech and I love cars, but we can't ignore social costs.

OK, how qualified do you have to be to criticize tech companies and tech leaders? Mainstream journalists write for the general public, which means that ideally, journalists write t…

For a second I got excited, because I thought Mangione was being charged with actual dueling, à la Burr and Hamilton. Then I read the article and realized it was talking about conf…

The BBC miniseries was called "Private Schultz": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081919/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

I think you misunderstand the nature of art. You say that creation is merely reworking past ideas. That might be true if art were mere decoration or a formal game of manipulating s…

As a former journalist and current PR professional, I'll say this is a brilliant way to destroy your clients' credibility in one fell swoop. If I were a journalist and I received a…

Some people actually have values, and some people actually believe, genuinely and deeply, in the value of art. I know that some cynical people don't understand why any of these thi…

Step 5 there seems like a tremendous leap that I'm not sure would occur to someone not already thinking about traditional religion.