I recommend AI: How/Why I Use It in its entirety here are just a couple of my favorite passages:
“As any musician knows intimately, the most interesting part of a new musical technology is its glitches: the inventors of the synthesizer hoped to position it as a replacement for strings or horns, but what we loved is the weird blorps; the amplifier was invented just to make a guitar more audible, but we loved distortion; Autotune et al. were invented to correct bad notes, but we loved crazy space-laser voices.”
“Every day the AIs “improve” their ability to make images (actually, I use one of my go-to AIs because it is hilariously bad). I believe that eventually the uncanniness will be refined away, and AIs will evolve from fascinatingly odd to comprehensively mediocre.”
“Expertise will not be sufficient to make a living…Hacks are in trouble. If somebody is making work that is uninspired, and unindividual, then they can indeed be replaced by a machine that just spits up boring chunks of mid-ness.”
The intention of this graph is to help those studying for the BJCP Written Exam in prioritizing which styles to focus on for the compare/contrast portion.
Generative AI and LLMs continue to provide the least controversial answer to any question I ask them. For my purposes, this makes them little more than a calculator for words, a generator of historical fiction short stories.
As I mentioned two years ago, this doesn’t make LLMs useless, but it does greatly shrink their usefulness – to those places where you want a general idea of the consensus…whether or not it’s correct, accurate, or legal. Just an average doesn’t necessarily represent any individual datapoint.
For, the more training data the generative AI providers shovel into their models, the greater the drift from credibility toward absurdity the generated consensus.
It’s one thing to train the models on all the scientific research. It’s another to train on all the books ever published (copyright issues aside for the moment). It’s quite another to train it on Reddit and Twitter. It’s yet another thing all together to treat all data equal independent of parody, satire, or propaganda.
Again, there are use cases for this (e.g. getting familiar with the basics of a topic in record time), but the moment you expect quality, credibility, or specifics…it collapses like a toy giraffe.
A toy giraffe that, when a person engages with it, can only – collapse.
As a metaphor for new technologies, this toy giraffe’s message is worth considering, “we break when any pressure is applied.”
General purpose LLMs will only get worse the more data they digest. Special purpose LLMs only trained on a specific context, a specific vertical, a rigidly curated & edited set of sources may achieve the level of expert these applications are hyped up to be.
But we may never know they exist because the most valuable use cases – national defense, cybersecurity, fraud detection – will never need (or desire) the visibility the general purpose LLMs require.
There was a time when the internet was mostly silly technology experiments. Where that it worked at all was the win. All the projects were primarily for delight of the creator and delight for others. There was no advertising. No polish. Simply a neopunk aesthetic of “let’s just do it, it’ll be fun.” As the internet has matured and my own children have occasionally referred to me as ‘Mr Business Business’. I’ve longed for a more unstable time, a more optimistic time, a more experimental time.
I thank the creators of the projects below for showing me the we can have internet silliness in 2024.
Heard of ShotSpotter? Microphones are installed across cities in the United States by police to detect gunshots, purported to not be very accurate. This is that, but for music. This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it’s not about catching criminals. It’s about catching vibes.
I loaded a substantial sample my writing into Google’s Notebook LM and pressed the button to make a short podcast between to AI bots.
Yes, it’s absolutely bizarre to hear bots discuss how amazing kubb is (among other things).
Along the way, I also asked the Notebook what the three most controversial themes of my writing were:
The Ethics of Data Collection and Privacy in a Technology-Driven World
The Pitfalls of Growth as the Sole Metric of Success, Especially for Small Businesses
The Importance of Disconnecting from Technology and Embracing Offline Experiences
as well as what I’m missing:
Limited Discussion of Specific Technologies: This absence suggests that while van Buren recognizes the importance of technology in his work, he doesn't view it as the primary driver of innovation or success. His focus remains on human-centered aspects of work and life, suggesting a conscious effort to maintain a balanced relationship with technology rather than solely pursuing the latest advancements.
“We estimate raising Dogger Bank would cost £97.5bn, but would bring present value benefits of £622bn. Under the government’s standard method of cost-benefit analysis, this project would get a go-ahead, with a cost-benefit ratio of 6.2.”
Humans, hunter-gathering Neanderthals, lived in Doggerland 10,000BC – 7,500BC.
Geological surveys have suggested Doggerland stretched from what is now the east coast of Great Britain to what are now the Netherlands, the western coast of Germany and the peninsula of Jutland.[2] It was probably a rich habitat with human habitation in the Mesolithic period.
The archaeological potential of the area was first identified in the early 20th century, and interest intensified in 1931 when a fishing trawler operating east of the Wash dragged up a barbed antler point that was subsequently dated to a time when the area was tundra.
UK Archeaologists from Europes Lost Frontiers project are using seabed mapping (originally created by oil and gas companies) to create 3D renderings of 17,000 square miles of Doggerland. Including rivers, lakes systems. Extracting core samples via survey ships to hopefully capture DNA from the plants and animals that lived there – including wooly rhinoceroses in addition to the wooly mammoths and hunter-gathering Neanderthals.
Vessels have since dragged up remains of mammoths, lions and other animals, and a few prehistoric tools and spearpoints, arrowheads,
Evidence gathered allows study of past environments, ecological change, and human transition from hunter-gatherer to farming communities
It was flooded by rising sea levels around 6500–6200 BCE.
What caused the sea level to rise 180feet? (6 feet every 100 years for 3,000yrs)
The three Storegga Slides are amongst the largest known submarine landslides.
They occurred at the edge of Norway’s continental shelf in the Norwegian Sea, approximately 6225–6170 BCE.
The collapse involved an estimated 180 mi length of coastal shelf, with a total volume of 840 cu mi of debris, which caused a tsunami in the North Atlantic Ocean.
The flooding immediately turned Doggerland into an island, then, eventually the sea swallowed the island.
Right now, I’m working on a series, called ‘For Starters – The important stuff early-stage entrepreneurs too often leave until it’s too late’ it’s over at Substack, cuz I want to better understand the benefits of their distribution model.
