Additional notes from the future
I was peripherally aware that large language models have crossed a chasm in the last year or so, but I haven’t realized how large of a jump it was until I compared ChatGPT’s answer to my standard question: “How many lymphocytes are there in the human body?”.
Back in February of last year it took some effort to produce an over-inflated estimate. Today, I was served a well-reasoned and beautifuly formatted response after a single prompt. Sure, I have gotten better at writing prompts but the difference there is marginal. Not so marginal is the leap in usefulness and trustworthiness of the model, which went from being an overeager high school freshman to an all-star college senior.
And that is just the reasoning. Creating quick Word documents with tables and columns just the way I want them has become routine, even when/especially if I want to recreate a document from a badly scanned printout. My office document formatting skills are getting rusty and I couldn’t be happier for it.
In his Kefahuchi Tractt trilogy, M. John Harrison conjures up alien algorithms floating around the human environment, mostly helpful, sometimes not, motives unknown. Back in the early 2000s when the first novel came out I was wondering what on earth he was talking about but for better or worse we are now headed towards that world. Whether we are inching or hurling, that depends entirely on your point of view.
(↬Tyler Cowen)
Mozi is a splendid idea for making serendipitous encounters happen. On the other hand, can you truly call these encounters serendipitous if they needed an app? (ᔥMatthew Haughey)
Woke up feeling like a steamroller ran me over and wondered “is this what middle age is like?” but no, Apple Watch soon notified me that my sleeping heart rate and respiratory rate both were higher than usual, so I am probably coming down with some virus or another. To which I say, bring it on.
Day one of Apple Intelligence. Trying out writing tools first and apparently the professional version of the sentence “This is a text about something, nothing in particular.” is — drumroll, please — “This text is a general discussion about various topics without a specific focus or subject matter.”
So “make professional” is code for “bullshittify”. How delightful.
I wanted the world to stop, and I wouldn’t stop until it did.
File this one under “sentences of note”. The entire essay is almost too good of a cautionary tale to be true, but who cares if it’s “true” as long as it’s good.
I tried watching a Tinderbox journaling tutorial on Youtube, and it was just way too much overhead for me. But the beauty of Tinderbox is that you can have as much or as little structure as fits my needs, and my needs are modest… for now.
Matthew Gasda for the Wisdom of Crowds:
If, in 1450, someone had gone around Florence saying, “No, no, no, we don’t live in a renaissance, culture is in decay,” I think it would have been possible to throw open the doors of the workshops, cathedrals, churches, and wealthy residences, and say, “Well, you know, I think you might be wrong about that. Take a look at this.” But in 2024, what do optimists see when you throw open the doors? Mr. Beast? Addison Rae? BAP? Talk Tuah?
I don’t know what three of those four are, but I’d show Teenage Engineering, Panic Software and this.
Food for thought, conservative and modern
From The End of the Modern World by Fr. Stephen Freemen:
Modernity is a rhetorical device. The modern world does not produce wonders or even Apple Phones. Those are the work of technology, something with roots in the ancient world (cf. the Antikythera Mechanism). Modernity is simply the place where the myth was invented — not technology.
And from a 2018 blog post comment (↬John Naughton):
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes (sic) but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
Today’s LLMs are a litmus test of whether or not the writing job at hand is BS. Can you use the unadulterated LLM output without fear? Then yes.
A few links, to be filed in the “What a time to be alive” folder: