Again, another not really tech driven post (although given how some of our tech overlords seem invested in the idea of anti-Wokeness, maybe it is), but something that has been irritating me for a while. All my life there has been some version of anti-wokeness — worrying about political correctness, or cancel culture, or some…

Two stories caught my eye today, and while they aren’t in the tech wheelhouse of this newsletter, they do highlight how it is systems that matter, not intentions. In one story, convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh was denied a new trial. In a less famous case, a convicted murderer has the locla DA asking for his…

I recently read a published screenwriter who commented on the ubiquity of the “where do you get your ideas” question and it reminded me of AI enthusiasts. The truth is ideas are easy, because there are very few original ideas. Imitative AI hype people don’t seem to recognize that simple truth, and as a result,…

A Harvard research group recently got caught committing a form of fraud. In their cancer research papers, they manipulated images in such a way as to make the images better support the conclusions of the paper. While Harvard itself says the investigation is ongoing, there are 37 affected papers. Seems a lot for honest mistakes.…

I promise this newsletter is not going to turn into a “what weird thing did a Substacker say now” dispatch, despite doing that two days running. However, sometimes there are items that speak to a deeper pathology in our society and need, in my opinion, some refuting. The Elysian, which is supposed to be a…

I saw this the other week and was reluctant to bring it up. I do not especially like tit-for-tat kind of articles, but this newsletter is more of the techno-utopianism that strikes me as at the heart of a significant portion of what is wrong with this country. The post itself is broadly over the…

NY Magazine has a heartbreaking story about a woman, her son, and her sister who died after the woman became convinced that the world was about to end. To protect her family, she took them “off the grid” based on incomplete understanding of what that entailed. They died, starving and frozen, that winter. The focus…

There is a question mark on the title because I am genuinely unsure how much of what I am about to discuss is deliberate on Amazon’s part, and how much is just benign neglect. Wired has a piece on what appears to be a flood of AI generated summaries of non-fiction works using the same…

The Verge has two stories about supposed AI systems (I will get to the supposed AI nature of them as we go) that seem pretty representative of the paths that AI based automation can take. On eis s story of a hype, one is a story of real success. First the hype. A company called…

OpenAI has informed the world that it is impossible to train large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT without copyrighted material. Thus, the taking of copyrighted material without recompense to its creators should be allowed. Because the most important thing is that the owners of OpenAI be allowed to be rich. They try and fancy the…