I have updated my now page. The last update was in March so let’s call this my Quarterly-ish update.

A version of Poisoning Pigeons in the Park was the first mp3 I downloaded and played — on Winamp, of course — some time in the mid 1990s, spurred by an episode of Chicago Hope of all things. R.I.P. Tom Lehrer.

The cell phone of my childhood, still in operation. If you are in Serbia and need to leave the Matrix there are quite a few of them around.

Flighty does not seem to be as up-to-date traveling internationally as it is on domestic flights. The IST airport departures board had our flight listed as delayed as soon as we got there, yet the app thought everything was fine. Trust no one.

Yesterday I learned about talismanic shirts, and now I know what nerds from 500 years ago did for fun and profit.

Day 2 in Istanbul, finding out that the coffee we had been ordering from Amazon for years started out within walking distance of Hagia Sophia.

In what feels like a troll but is in all likelihood completely serious, some parents are deciding to have their children fully immersed in AI LLMs:

We’re declaring bankruptcy on humans. Bring on the AI. In addition to integrating AI into as many facets of our lives as possible (our health, our work, our entertainment, and our personal lives), we’re designing an AI-integrated childhood for our kids—all while feeling like we’re helping them dodge a major bullet.

Did CS Lewis suspect, when he wrote The Abolition of Man, that the anti-human sentiment would be expressed as freely and overtly as the first sentence of this intellectually bankrupt paragraph? A paragraph that would be horrifying even if the AI it touts was actual intelligence, an AGI, but what these families are actually immersing themselves in is industrial-grade bullshit. As useful as bullshit can be — I hear it makes for great fertilizer! — one should not drink it as one would do Kool-Aid.

Casey Handmer on LLMs:

Every time one of the labs releases an updated model I give it a thorough shakedown on physics, in the style of the oral examination that is still used in Europe and a few other places. Claude, Grok, Gemini, and GPT are all advancing by leaps and bounds on a wide variety of evals, some of which include rather advanced or technical questions in both math and science, including Physics Olympiad-style problems, or grad school qualifying exams.

And yet, none of these models would be able to pass the physicist Turing test. It’s not even a matter of knowledge, I know of reasonably talented middle schoolers with no specialized physics training who could reason and infer on some of these basic questions in a much more fluent and intuitive way.

Alexander the Great had Aristotle, some poor kid will have a brain-dead version of Wheatley.

(Casey’s post is deeper than simple LLM-trashing for he gives the actual 8-step process of reasoning through physics problems, so please do read the whole thing.)