📚 Finished reading: Thinking With Tinderbox by Mark Bernstein, after starting two months ago. It is broader in scope and less Tinderbox-specific than The Tinderbox Way, his first book about, well, Tinderbox, a lovingly crafted “tool for thinking” that I have been using off and on for the last seven years. This is for the best: The Tinderbox Way was meant to convert the technical language from the official code reference into something us muggles can use, which is a job that ChatGPT can do much better and using the latest version of the app. Thinking With Tinderbox is more strategic than tactical, elaborating on why anyone whose primary job is not programming would want to dabble in code in the first place.

Two unrelated articles about AI greeted me from the feed reader this morning:

• Context, Memory, and Voice by Michael Lopp
• Emerson, AI, and The Force by Neal Stephenson

Both are worth reading, and Stephenson’s in particular may lead you down some nice rabbit holes owing to his profuse linking.

Cal Newport’s latest article about common sense in parenting closes with this punchline:

If you’re uncomfortable with the potential impact these devices may have on your kids, you don’t have to wait for the scientific community to reach a conclusion about depression rates in South Korea before you take action.

But does anyone — Georgetown math professors notwithstanding — make decisions this way, neatly compartmentalizing “the science” from their moral intuition? Or is there a mutually reinforcing interaction between the two, with our intuition exposing us to the confirmatory facts?

Apparently, I blinked and missed some extraordinarily good games on iOS that came out in recently in the last few years almost a decade ago. Fortunately my kids were there to educate me, yes, including the 6-year-old:

• Rodeo Stampede, nine years old and with ads but man what fun. Echoes of YMBAB and Crossy Road.
• Geometry Dash, which I could and should just watch my kids play because my reflexes and sense of rhythm aren’t enough for level 1 let alone this sorcery. Both the in-game music and the name reminded me of the first game I ever bought on Steam, which was of course Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.
• Snake.io+, which brought memories of my old Nokia pouring down. But now it is a bit too competitive for my taste and I could only watch in awe as progeny raked up points two orders of magnitude higher than the runner-up.

All this reminded me of a conversation Tyler Cowen had with the YouTuber Any Austin who said that every medium reached its peak — with which I wholeheartedly agreed ⊕ And quite clearly we had reached Peak Movie in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, going downhill ever since Jaws graced the screen. — and that Peak Gaming was Pac-Man and Space Invaders — to which I could only say Huh?!

But then the more I thought about it the more I realized that he was basically correct. Well, in generalities if not in the specifics, as the Peak Single Player Video Game ⊕ Let’s not put in multiplayer games there, as they should be compared to card games, board games and sports was clearly Tetris.

I only half-kid. Show Tetris to a 10-year-old and she will immediately get it, spend a half-dozen hours on it the same day, and then dream about the figures. There are a few other gaming prototypes — and yes, Space Invaders and Pac-Man are both examples — but everything since then could be interpreted as a variation on a theme, adding whiz-bang graphics and sound effects to sugar-coat a basic mechanic. In an alternative universe where I have a PhD in ludology I would have been able to name a few more prototypes and family trees, digging into the core mechanic of each AAA title to get to its Space Invaders nugget; and if there are any blogs where this is actually done please point me to them, I would love to subscribe!

Twelve years ago I made a single $50 payment for continued development of MailMate. This has been one of the best software purchases I have ever made, so I didn’t hesitate for a moment when the developer asked for continued support at $40 per year. I consider it an enshittification avoidance fee.

Microsoft claims their new medical tool is “four times more successful than human doctors at diagnosing complex ailments”. Unsurprisingly, what they meant by “diagnosing a disease” was the thinking-hard part, not the inputs part:

To test its capabilities, “MAI-DxO” was fed 304 studies from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that describe how some of the most complicated cases were solved by doctors. 

This allowed researchers to test if the programme could figure out the correct diagnosis and relay its decision-making process, using a new technique called “chain of debate”, which makes AI reasoning models give a step-by-step account of how they solve problems.

If and when deployed, how likely is it that these algorithms will get a query comparable to a New England Journal of Medicine case study? Most doctors don’t reach those levels of perception and synthesis, let alone the general public.

📚 Finished reading: A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins, having no idea how it ended up in my Kindle library. I am glad to have opened it, as I now have some semblance of a framework for how this thing we call intelligence might work. Note that the newest developments in neuroscience are just a starting point, as most of the book deals with their implications for AI and the future of humanity. If that sounds like overreach, know that by the end of the book it is. Still, these wafer-thin speculations don’t detract from the book’s meatier parts.

Confirmation bias alert: the framework repeats almost word for word the thought I had a while back — and more recently — about AI, that true general intelligence needs to be able to interact with its environment. So I may be blind to some obvious deficiencies in the argument. But then again, great minds, etc.

I will have more to write about this soon (ha!), but until the stars align for an extended writing session here is a good opinion piece from FT’s John Thornhill about why LLMs may not be all that great for lay people dabbling in, for example, medicine:

When the test scenarios were entered directly into the AI models, the chatbots correctly identified the conditions in 94.9 per cent of cases. However, the participants did far worse: they provided incomplete information and the chatbots often misinterpreted their prompts, resulting in the success rate dropping to just 34.5 per cent. The technological capabilities of these models did not change but the human inputs did, leading to very different outputs.

The emphasis is mine, because it is a neat summarization of what I wrote 2 years ago. Humans are unique not because of what’s inside our heads but because of how we interact with the environment. There will be no artificial general intelligence until that problem is solved.

An excellent blog post that is not a rant: Single-function devices in the world of the everything machine, by Christopher Butler.

Limitations expand our experience by engaging our imagination. Unlimited options arrest our imagination by capturing us in the experience of choice. One, I firmly believe, is necessary for creativity, while the other is its opiate. Generally speaking, we don’t need more features. We need more focus.

Indeed.

After four months of waiting, I’ve received a Daylight tablet yesterday. The good: the e-ink display is better than I expected and writing with the pen is as smooth as can be. The bad: at the end of the day it’s Android and needs a Google account for everything. Also, it’s on the heavy side.