April 19, 2025

A(G)I and slop

Tyler Cowen on ChatGPT’s o3 model being Artificial General Intelligence:

I don’t mind if you don’t want to call it AGI. And no it doesn’t get everything right, and there are some ways to trick it, typically with quite simple (for humans) questions. But let’s not fool ourselves about what is going on here. On a vast array of topics and methods, it wipes the floor with the humans. It is time to just fess up and admit that.

Jacob Silverman on internet slop:

The influx of hallucinating chatbots is just the latest sign of the wider internet’s descent into hostility. The internet is now optimised for metrics that have nothing to do with human enjoyment, or convenience, or the profits of anyone except the platform overseers. And it’s only getting worse, as our dependence on these flawed tools grows daily.

Cowen is interested in peak performance, and good for him. He showed the same trait in his conversation with Jonathan Haidt, where all he cared about was that the really smart young people can do wonders with social media, externalities be damned.

Meanwhile, the median Internet user is exposed to reams of crap made by humans and AIs alike (Silverman’s article goes into more detail on the burgeoning field of paranoid schizophrenics boosting their own X posts for no particular purpose and the paragraph describing it is the closest I have seen real life come to an M. John Harrison novel which, if you know his prose, is somewhat concerning… and this is not the first time Harrison came to mind).

Note that for all the stories of the Internet’s demise it is still fairly easy to find good things. Look at micro.blog. Look at indieblog.page. Heck, look at reddit. You may have a website or two you visit out of habit — one you likely acquired before 2016 — which have since become chumbox-laden garbage. Delete those bookmarks: people who thought having clickbait adds was a good idea will have other ideas just as good.

April 16, 2025

“Through mutual understanding and good will the policy set forth by Richard Rush and Charles Bagot in this treaty has resulted in an unfortified boundary between Canada and the United States”

At Old Fort Niagara, with Toronto in the distance.

A large stone plaque overlooking Lake Ontario under a cloudy sky.

April 11, 2025

A few links for what will be a rainy weekend:

April 10, 2025

After getting an unexpected upgrade to United’s first class on a red-eye trip from San Diego to DC, I can report that a 4-and-a-half-hour flight is too short to get any meaningful rest no matter where you sit. The only bonus was the blanket.

April 9, 2025

☕️ If there were Michelin stars for coffee shops, San Diego’s Bird Rock would deserve all three: worth booking the hotel away from the venue just to be close to it for your first morning cup. Outstanding.

Two bags of coffee beans, one labeled "Bombe Natural" from Bird Rock Coffee Roasters and the other labeled "Monkey Bite."

April 8, 2025

🏀 The Denver Nuggets have fired coach Michael Malone and GM Calvin Booth. I guess they wanted to avoid the inevitable.

April 7, 2025

📚Finished reading: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.

I have tons of free time, as is evidenced by (a) that I’m spending a half hour writing this blog post and (b) that I spent a couple hours earlier this week reading Atlas’s book, for no other reason than I felt like it. And this wasn’t even the only pleasure book I read over the Thanksgiving weekend. But I’m also in a continual time debt, a veritable treadmill of time commitments. I’m in the middle of writing 5 books and a few dozen research articles, and I keep taking on new projects. No way I can do all of these! But, as with Atlas and his finances, somehow I keep going.

Andrew Gelman describes my life, basically.

April 6, 2025

🏀 Alex Ovechkin has just broken Wayne Gretzki’s career goal record and looking at his career trajectory made me realize Nikola Jokić was becoming the Ovechkin of basketball:

Which is great!

April 5, 2025

Richard Feynman popularized the term “cargo-cult science” as actions of research who follow the form but not showing much if any care for the substance of science. Andrew Gelman has second thoughts about the metaphor and proposes “ritual science” instead, and for good reason: cargo-cult implies a technological gap that may be impossible to bridge, while he uses ritual here to mean mindless repetition.

The maneuver does throw rituals under the bus, as proper rituals are far from mindless. Still, this is indeed how the word “ritual” is used colloquially so Gelman is on the right track. “Mindless science” would also cover the phenomena though is too broad: science — or rather, scientists — can be mindless in other ways. (ᔥAndrew Gelman)