Viewing profile — katabasis

You're assuming that we're going to see a transition to a new administration with different priorities in the near future.

It's capitalism – the true "artificial intelligence" that has been organizing human life for the last ~200 years or so.

I think Vue.js has done a great job of avoiding a lot of the churn while staying competitive with other projects in terms of features and performance. The core library of React see…

Yeah pretty much this. One can argue that it’s idiotic to treat chatbots like they are alive, but if a bit of misplaced empathy for machines helps to discourage antisocial behavior…

LLMs are not people, but I can imagine how extensive interactions with AI personas might alter the expectations that humans have when communicating with other humans. Real people w…

The modern internet is filled with content designed to track, mislead, and manipulate users (especially young users who don't have a full set of critical thinking skills). I think …

I'd love to see something like this that is marketed to parents or schools who want to give kids a way to access the good parts of the internet (Wikipedia, e-books, etc) without th…

Are you confusing Nussbaum with someone else? Her writing is way more straightforward than your typical fancy philosopher, and she is definitely a proponent of liberal/progressive …

Interesting. I'm not sure I'd use the term "Platonic" here, because that tends to have implications of mathematical perfection / timelessness / etc. But I do think that the corpuse…

I am not a neuroscientist, but I think it's likely that LLMs (with 10s/100s of billions of parameters) and the human brain (with 1-2 orders of magnitude more neural connections[1])…

Many philosophical traditions which incorporate a meditation practice emphasize that your consciousness is distinct from the contents of your thoughts. Meditation (even practiced c…

I'm a fan of Carlo Rovelli's popular science books. "The Order of Time" in particular left a big impression on me. He is a philosopher as well as a scientist, and he has a gift for…

Agreed – I enjoyed this article, but the conclusion (that philosophers or intellectuals may need to come to terms with self-censorship or obscurantism to avoid drawing the ire of t…

I live in Portland and I 100% agree with this. I say this as someone who voted for Measure 110 and now regrets that vote. At this point I would support a straight-up repeal. At lea…

I don’t know what your particular interests are, but my suggestion would be to try to find some in-person group activities that align with something you are interested in. Take an …

1. You are potentially giving a shield of deniability to people who create or distribute real CSAM because now they could claim that the images are just AI generated and therefore …

I also immediately thought of Nano Emacs when I saw this article. There is a short talk (6min) from EmacsConf 2021 where the creator of Nano Emacs talks about his reasons for desig…

This is a great first-contact novel, probably my favorite example of this genre. The book concludes with some ideas about the nature of consciousness that I found to be legitimatel…

I run a small D&D group with a couple of friends. I don't know that I'd want to play in a campaign helmed by an AI dungeon master, but the idea of having some help generating plot,…

Private shared photo albums in Apple Photos are great for this. I have a small child and my wife and I live far from our extended families. Sharing photos and videos of our daughte…

There is something very immediate about just picking up a notebook and jotting down your thoughts. Same goes for reading and annotating a printed document. It's a reflex, encoded i…

If you compare the features and specs of the Remarkable 2 with something like an iPad, it's easy to come to the conclusion that it is an over-priced niche product. But having owned…

My take on the Fermi paradox is: * Life may not be rare in the universe but it is likely short-lived; intelligence even more so (now the possible extinction events are not limited …