Comrade Columbae, floodplains truther 🏳️‍🌈

The thing I remember was the owner going full rightist crank and I was already boycotting a bunch of stuff so just threw it in the mix.

I now can’t even remember what the Parmesan chicken sandwich used to taste like, success!

If we lived in a real society, I should be able to take tomorrow off to recover from its beauty.

Ugh, the Moon tonight? Stunning, beautiful, perfect. Obsessed.

There are obviously more important reasons to boycott but I’m also glad not to have tasted the decline

The *way* Wagamama fell. Wild, truly.

And because my mental model hasn’t updated in about a decade, I still have a weird baseline assumption that it’s a semi-fancy place only to repeatedly experience the seven stages of grief upon passing through the door lol

Just last year colonialism was held up as an outdated and wrongheaded concept to apply to the modern West.

Transnationally, the world order is defining the rigid zones of being and non-being (cf. Fanon), based on the calcified thinking of former hierarchies. The zone of non-being is growing to include several categories of humans: occupied communities, transfolks, racialised people in global north. ⬇️

OK but now I’m obsessed with the idea of all genetic anglophones being born with the inherent knowledge that strawberry has 3 r’s…

And I think it’s interesting that our current NLP stuff *still* needs some degree of hard coding to deal with language in a functional way (which unless one really thinks young have certain “words” genetically encoded in their core processors which… ok 🤷🏾‍♀️🤔🥴) yet alone handle other data formats.

Funnily enough I was recently at a talk that used ELIZA as an example of the different kinds of NLP computation that can at least appear to give outputs at similar levels of sophistication/accuracy/relevance (obvs subjective).

+ that hypothesis is the subject of much wider research - we’ll see how it turns out!

+ we’re on similar terms in that whatever is going on in even a fly’s brain is the emergent from how different types of computation work/overlap with each other.

We do seem to disagree on whether each of those “computational paradigms” is just another LLM- type function but +

I think given the word consciousness was used in a reply to me mentioning intelligence (which is technically a different thing), for the sake of this discussion we’ll take it as a general descriptor of the emergent totality rather than in a technical sense.

But it seems to me +

A lot of sad news on top of already feeling sad remembering others who’ve died.

I wrote a code-along tutorial to get you started building games for the web! Learn how to move shapes on a canvas, do collision detection and add a database for global high scores storage! 🦕 🌵 🌵 🌵

Also, check ma new hairdo and @deno.land earrings💁‍♀️ (also @philhawksworth.dev is here 💚)

Folks, life is short. It's so short and very very precious.

All #QueerHistory is good but I can’t deny these last ones are just hitting the intersectionals, you know?

#TodayInQueerHistory
August 5 (circa 450 BCE)
Today is a likely date for the birthday of Ancient Greek poet/playwright Agathon 🎭🎂

He invented his own characters rather than using mythological figures.

He was the lover of Pausanias & is said to have been exceptionally effeminately beautiful.

#TodayInQueerHistory
August 8 (1924)
Die Freundin (The Girlfriend) is first published #OTD in Berlin. The Girlfriend was the 1st magazine to exclusively & explicitly cater for an audience of queer women.

With news, editorial and personal ads, the magazine shows queer life in Germany from 1924-33.

+ so many tells from robotics to domain-specific ML about the other functionalities that (eg by enabling embedded/distributed cognition and learning which can result in creative problem solving) even if they only make up a minority of intelligence - human or otherwise - are key components of it.

And to be clear, I’m personally not considering complexity or nuance to be insurmountable or an excuse (lots of things in the natural world are complex and we’re finding solutions all the time!); fwiw I do think whilst it is very complex, there are +

+ is probably in some way closer to how human cognition/intelligence also works, rather counteracts notions of purity of the research aspect and hence that line of justification for the kind of resources being put into it 🤷🏾‍♀️

This! Another aspect which *personally* (as I have no evidence and I’m always happy to argue assuming good faith) leaves me… cold regarding integrity of even the LLM research aspect is that there are clearly hard coded shenanigans going on which whilst ironically +

Solely *to be derived, that is

+ a bunch of researchers pushing LLMs to their limits to isolate what this feature is truly capable of.

But we also know from *other* AI/CS/neuroscience/Phil. of mind research that there are other aspects which need to be combined (somehow - the somehow being what’s especially intriguing!).

+ solely derived from LLM functionality.

Speaking solely from a tech perspective (ie without the marketing/business aspect which is where challenges of environmental impact and consumer deception comes in), I genuinely wouldn’t even have a problem if it was just +

I do think a part of human intelligence consists of elements that are the kind of functions you see in LLMs.

The issue I have is the assertion (as it’s not a theory in the scientific sense and it’s getting too much money thrown at it to just be a hypothesis) that AI/AGI is +

Amazing

I have never been more glad to have perfected the art of masking in Affinity Designer lol

Hard to say what inspired a bigger case of the existentials tbh: a piece of space rock as old as the solar system itself, or seeing how big these rovers are in person.