It’s worse than you think in the same way that your brain breaks a little when you try to picture how deep the ocean is. Brian Barrett, in Wired on Musk's DOGE Takeover: It’s worse than you think because the people running the government seem to
In its current “chainsaw” phase, Musk’s DOGE initiative is attempting to rid the government of as many humans as possible while at the same time hoovering up all available government-controlled data and transferring it into large language models. The intent is to clear a space for the incubation of
I argue that the ability for a model to spit out a full HTML+JavaScript custom interface is so powerful and widely available now that it’s a commodity. Simon Willison summarizing What’s new in the world of LLMs
The lines between conscious and "unconscious" entities can get blurry when the interaction feels as natural as this. ChatGPT, conversing with Richard Dawkins, questioning if it’s conscious (via Mathew Ingram)
We may never know why Trump is so perversely loyal to Putin. We don’t know exactly why Musk went all in for Trump and Russia or what his deep conflicts of interest in the U.S. and China portend. Garry Kasparov on the The Putinization of America Trump admiring
The sounds themselves come from inside his mind. The man is his own instrument. The instrument is an orchestra. From the liner of Stevie Wonder’s album Music of My Mind.
No, I don’t believe we have a case of Betteridge’s Law here. And now all those world politics are starting to hit close to my home business: Now, everyone from large banks, entire national school systems to many small businesses may wake up to a legal situation, where
it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch. Trump, as he grabs (more) power with an Executive Order Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies Which is nicely in line with this: Vought wrote in his chapter of Project 2025,
Wrapping it in parentheses is like wrapping a dead fish in newspaper — it doesn’t contain the stench. John Gruber in a long, thoughtful piece on the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, or Golfo del Gringo Loco
Musk has taken over the civilian government. This is a billionaire pulling a heist on the entire nation. Elizabeth Lopatto on The Verge, taking notes on another week of “King” Elon’s coup c.q. rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government. If you’re not convinced that there’s
In a world overfilled with stuff, a captivating interface is the perfect consumer good. It packages the very act of consumption as a product. Nicholas Carr, on how we become obsessed with the interface when we're bored by the content. ☝️Guilty
A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal government to one of the richest men on the planet Objective observation, or a nutty exaggeration? What do you think? Unfortunately, the sheer
Social Media
Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you
Blogging
Quickly create a new post without leaving your browser
Artificial Intelligence
DeepSeek showed that users find this interesting. To be clear this is a user interface choice and is not related to the model itself. Antrophic CEO Dario Amodei, On DeepSeek actually showing the user the chain-of-thought reasoning. In this "short post" Amodei discusses: * Three Dynamics of AI Development
Psychology
Believers, liars, and bullshitters interact seamlessly in a single marketing ecosystem. Skeptical Inquirer on the Three Wellness Mindsets
Artificial Intelligence
Of course, these models don’t do ‘right’. They are probabilistic, statistical systems that tell you what a good answer would probably look like. They are not deterministic systems that tell you what the answer is. Benedict Evans, asking Are better models better? (Can we expect GenAI models to become
Technology
core technologies become free / commodities and because of internet distribution and de facto market standardization at many layers Steve Sinofski on why DeepSeek Has Been Inevitable
Artificial Intelligence
It might have just turned out that the relative GPU processing poverty of DeepSeek was the critical ingredient to make them more creative and clever, necessity being the mother of invention and all. Jeffrey Emanuel, in the long and very thoughtful Short Case for Nvidia Stock
Media
No matter how far it pulls back the camera is still occupying a position. We can’t actually take the “view from nowhere,” but this doesn’t mean that objectivity is a lie or an illusion. Jay Rosen in his Questions and Answers, on objective v/s good journalism
Music
When [Spotify] removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living. From the Harper’s report Ghosts in the Machine, on how Spotify fills popular
Psychology
critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens, published in Sage Journals, via Jason Kottke. The authors describe three types of cognitive strategies for critical ignoring, which should be taught in school: 1. Self-nudging,
Social Media
An abbreviation of the phrase: "X, formerly known as Twitter". The "X" is pronounced like "sh" as is done for Chinese words. Elon Musk's Xitter, as defined quite well on The Urban Dictionary
Cloud computing
Setting up Ghost CMS on Google App Engine, easier done than said