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, ⊕ [Note: 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.

A lengthy overview of the implications of ML/AI to biology and drug discovery came out yesterday, and while I appreciate its enthusiasm and breadth, the answer to the question posed in the summary — What if this time is different? — is, sadly, no, probably not.

From my inbox, regarding enterprise software with enterprise price:

The Zoom link is now in the meeting workspace and you will need to copy and paste it into your web browser. Company name redacted is working on a hyperlink but that functionality is not yet available.

!?!

The great/scary thing about the internet is that for any fleeting thought I have, there is somone who has ruminated on the matter long and hard and made their ruminations available online. Gwern comes to mind, but also Gellman on statistics, and many others. Time for a blogroll?

I am sure that Sofa is a fine, artisanal app, lovingly crafted by the best designers and software engineers, and I would never ever fault anyone for using it…

…but I get an allergic reaction when someone suggests I “organize my downtime”, and a strong urge to say Organize this!

Finding an article about AI in a major news publication that sticks to facts and makes sense has become an event worth celebrating, so here is a recent one by Tatum Hunter of the Washington Post.

Unmodified ChatGPT output, if it were produced by a human, would precisely fit the definition of bullshit [Note: BS ] from Harry Frankfurt’s essay — words meant to persuade without regard for truth. We can debate whether an algorithm can have intent or not, [Note: I’d say not, so on its own the output would not qualify as BS ] but it definitely has no regard for truth because predictive AIs don’t have a concept of anything other than the probability of one word coming after the other.

So, if people are worried about ChatGPT or any other predictive AI replacing them, or passing the Turing test, that is only to the extant that their work was BS anyway and that, as Frankfurt predicted, we are awash with BS and have become desensitized to it, almost expecting it.

With that in mind, I find it amusing that reporting on ChatGPT — some of which I commented on — misses the BS-ness of predictive AIs while itself being BS. Well, amusing and terrifying at the same time.

This is in response to a question.

Feeling sad for Twitter app developers and, considering there will be some delay between the fit hitting the shan and it spreading all around, even sadder for the inevitable hardship of anyone who depended on a Twitter audience for their livelihood. Castles out of sand…