My default browser is now Microsoft Edge, thanks in no small part to Ben Thompson. What strange times we live in…

Stephen Wolfram is usually too verbose for my taste, but his style of writing is exactly what was needed to explain ChatGPT and other “large language models”. With excellent Mathematica-generated illustrations, as always.

If you are as ambivalent about AI as I am (and I dare you to say that out loud), you will appreciate David Chapman’s thoughtful case against Artificial Intelligence in e-book form. Here’s hoping for a print version.

(Discovered via Twitter — which seems to still have its uses!)

🎮 Getting into Pentiment now, and I don’t know what I like more: the use of typography in the dialogues, the dialogues themselves, or the fact that I can role-play a late medieval craftsman who studied theology in Flanders and specialized in Latin and the occult.

A Skynet update:

• As of yesterday, GPT-3 (or is it 4?) is part of Bing, for which there is now a waitlist.
• Google is scrambling to keep up, with a press conference scheduled for today and a release “in the coming weeks”.
• Meta is feeling left out.

Popcorn, please.

🕹️ Unavowed was an unexpected surprise: beautiful 16-bit graphics, engaging, mature story, and just the right amount of 4th wall breaking. If only the puzzles were a bit tougher.

People enthralled with Microsoft’s innovation streak must never have used Teams. Like nails on a chalkboard.

After a few months of intermittently kicking the tires on Dave Winer’s FeedLand, I’ve finally had the time to port over a few feeds from my preferred RSS reader. The wonderful thing about FeedLand is that you can easily follow my feed categories and read posts without having an account (which is fortunate, since new signups on Winer’s own server are on hold). The full list of feeds is here. There is even a feed of posts I liked! It’s feeds all the way down.

The Science category has your usual suspects but I had to dig deep for Medicine since many of the blogs I follow haven’t been updated in years and others have turned into HuffPost-level text mills. Fortunately, Substack enabled a resurgence of medical writing, with feeds enabled by default.

Did I mention NetNewsWire is a free, open source RSS reader available on MacOS and iOS, and can sync via iCloud? For the anti-Apple readers, Feedly is there, I guess?

This April will be 10 years since Elsevier aquired Mendeley, up until then the best reference manager around. And it took longer than expected, but it looks like they finally killed it.

To all the Mendeley refugees: Endnote is just as bad, and in many ways worse. Get Zotero.

So let me see if I have this straight:

• OpenAI and Microsoft have a partnership, with Microsoft all-in on integrating aritifical intelligence into its products and developing it further.
• Google/Alphabet has its own AI programs — some of them mind-blowing — which are bound to increase now that ChatGPT is out with potential to destroy the value of the one thing Google still does well: searching the internet.
• Facebook/Meta has only some embarassing failures to show for their efforts, for now, but one can expect some rearrangement of priorities once the company’s shareholders see what being all-in on AI has done to $MSFT.

If artificial general intelligence is possible, ⊕ For an explanation for how AI differs from AGI I recommend this short interview with David Deutsch. odds are that it will emerge in this decade. Determining whether that is good or bad I will leave as an excercise to the reader.

P.S. While getting the links for this post I came upon a WaPo article which came out today and devotes a single paragraph to the potential harms of AI:

Some AI ethicists fear that Big Tech’s rush to market could expose billions of people to potential harms — such as sharing inaccurate information, generating fake photos or giving students the ability to cheat on school tests — before trust and safety experts have been able to study the risks. Others in the field share OpenAI’s philosophy that releasing the tools to the public, often nominally in a “beta” phase after mitigating some predictable risks, is the only way to assess real world harms.

This is true, as things stand now. Wouldn’t it be nice if it stayed that way.