- Vladimir Campos: The em dash is not an AI thing — have you ever read a book?
As a heavy em dash user myself, I can only concur.
- Kieran Healy: Using Quarto to Write a Book.
Healy will soon have a new book out, or rather a revised edition of his book about data visualization. Quarto is the open-source Rube Goldberg machine he used to create it. Particularly salient was the transformation of Quarto’s output into professional print, which unlike the online version required much human judgement and fiddling. Yay for humans, and yay for physical books .
- Sharon Lohr: AI vs. Undergraduate Statistics Students.
Lohr passess Gemini through the same gauntlet of tests her students went through. The more abstract the task the worse it gets, particularly with regards to critical thinking. Kind of important if we want generative AI to perform peer review! Though again, the state of human peer review is bad enough that I don’t think it would be that much worse.
- Daniel Sell: How To Stop Jumping Ship.
Or rather, how to keep the independent blog community going. He had me at [“Screw Discord”4a.
- Ian Betteridge: Zen fascists will control you… (sic!)
The same thoughts have crossed my mind and even though I keep calling it the naturalistic fallacy, Wikipedia says that the correct term is appeal to nature. However you call it: homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto, in its widest interpretation.