NateA

Maxim for teachers in troubled times: “It is the duty of a good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times and of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven may be able to work it” -Machiavelli, Discourse on Livy

“Trying to fix the proper meaning in our minds is like coaxing the gull to settle in the rigging, with the rule that the gull must be alive when it settles: one must not shoot it and tie it there" Collingwood, Principles of Art, 2/2

“"the proper meaning of a word … is never something upon which the word sits perched like a gull on a stone; it is something over which the word hovers like a gull over a ship's stern…” 1/2

if you teach any subject other than AI and you want students to do their own work, then the solution to the challenge posed by generative AI is neither to embrace generative AI in the classroom nor to spend class time exploring the limits of generative AI in the classroom

it is to teach the subject

Opinion | Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death

"If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation... Musk’s sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character — a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty, and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he’s seen for the rest of his public life."

So do search engines. So does social media.

The point being: the problem here is capitalism, not any individual technology. Pretending there is *any* benign tech under capitalism, which won’t be used as a tool of control, is where we go wrong.

The 👏 problem 👏 is 👏 capitalism 👏

Here we go again.

Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi went to a consulate in Istanbul to get a document he needed to get married. Instead, he was murdered and dismembered on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now a close pal of Donald Trump.

AI use damages professional reputation, study suggests New Duke study says workers judge others for AI use—and hide its use, fearing stigma.

Employees who use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini at work face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from colleagues and managers, according to a new study.

As Klarna flips from AI-first to hiring people again, a new landmark survey reveals most AI projects fail to deliver Just 1 in 4 AI investments bring in the ROI they promise—but CEOs just can’t resist the technology.

Sure, AI may be an environmental disaster and produce mid outcomes in cases where it doesn't straight up lie, but at least it's extremely unprofitable.

LOL

Pope John Paul II wrote his dissertation on Scheler and was deeply influenced by phenomenology.

AI in education is the answer to a critical question: how do we provide bullshit education that will prepare students for the bullshit jobs they will do when they graduate?

And nobody laments the loss of thinking. It's just on me to invent ever more creative ways to trick them into critical thinking to evade using the machine.

Justice Department investigating 2022 Abrego Garcia traffic stop: Sources DOJ has been investigating a 2022 Tennessee traffic stop involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, ABC News has learned.

We should understand this for what it is: an effort to build public consent for the president to ignore the Supreme Court. abcnews.go.com/Politics/jus...

A list of bad-news headlines wrapped up with an Atlantic article headlined “Why are young people everywhere so unhappy?”

I don’t know man, what could it possibly be?

Ear Window, Tar Wars

Two former Wells Fargo executives were fined $8.5M by the Biden administration for covering up the bank's infamous fake account scandal.

Trump just slashed those fines to a paltry $150,000 after Wells Fargo gave $1M to his inauguration.

See how this works?

'We're citizens!': Oklahoma City family traumatized after ICE raids home, but they weren't suspects A woman says her family’s fresh start in Oklahoma turned into a nightmare after federal immigration agents raided their home, taking their phones, laptops, and life savings – even though they were …

20 ARMED men bust into your home. They claim they’ve got a search warrant.

They make you stand in the rain w/your 3 daughters in their underwear.

They seize your phones, laptops, your cash life savings.

The suspects listed on the warrant? They don’t live there anymore.

kfor.com/news/local/w...

But LLMs (assuming that’s what we are talking about), don’t relate to the world. They are algorithms producing strings of text based on training data which allows them to find statistical correlations in word patterns and make next token predictions. There is no entity there to have an experience.

Animals with a similar range of sensory capacities are likely to share a roughly similar set of sensory experiences. Animals like bats that have sensory capabilities we lack are likely to have very different experiences—but there is no good reason to think they don’t experience. 2/3 (need one more!)

How can I be sure there is something it is like to be you? I can’t, but from analogy with my own experience, from a similarity in our physiology and our capacity to communicate, I can be reasonably sure that you also encounter a world roughly like mine. From there I extend the analogy to animals 1/2

I don’t think that’s what Nagel’s article says. Rather: we CAN be reasonably confident there is something it is like to be a bat, but what we can’t know is what that is like. In the case of AI chatbots we have absolutely no reason to assume there is anything it is like to be them.

There is only one thing we can say. We may be living in exciting times, and it may seem that this is not “sterile excitement” (although excitement is in no way necessarily the same thing as genuine passion); in such times, large numbers of politicians of personal conviction may suddenly start running around claiming, “The world is ignorant and evil, I’m not;

All this holds little interest for me personally, and certainly doesn’t move me. What does move me, immensely, is when a mature human being—whether old or young in years—takes real responsibility, with his whole soul, for the consequences of his actions and, following an ethics of responsibility, stops at some point and says: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”64 That is something authentically human and genuinely moving. Because every one of us, if we are not dead inside, may find ourselves in such a situation at some point. To that extent, the ethics of personal conviction and the ethics of responsibility are not absolutely opposed: they complement each other, and only in conjunction do they define the true human being who is capable of doing the true “work of politics.”

Max Weber on “living in interesting times” — and what those times demand from political leaders. From “The Politician’s Vocation”.

“You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
― Octavia E. Butler

#WritingSky

Movie you’ve watched more than six times using gifs.
(“Hard mode”…)

No degenerate art

I’ve always assumed it’s a reference to Oedipus.

The $10M steered to Hope Florida by the state was Medicaid money, document shows A draft agreement of a $67 million settlement between the DeSantis administration and a Medicaid contractor that had overbilled the state sheds new light on how $10 million of that amount was diverted...

I'm sorry I know there's a lot going on but how are we not screaming about Ron DeSantis stealing $10 million from Medicaid and the money ending up with pro-DeSantis superPACs, funneled through a charity run by his wife?

HOW IS THIS NOT NATIONAL NEWS?
www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...