James Tinged Words

Writers should internalize Lao Tzu's lesson about how the emptiness at the center of a wheel is what makes it useful, and how a pot is valuable because of where the clay *isn't*. Corporate geek culture has warped us into thinking that negative spaces are flaws that need to be fixed.

amongst current misunderstanding and simplistic understanding of AI, the popular narrative of "bias in, bias out" continues to frustrate me the most. this thread covers some of the reason

YouTube video by Charalanahzard The Censorship "Hit Squad" attacking Video Games.

Here’s my feature on Collective Shout, and their attempts to take down Steam and itch.io. I found a conversation where they spoke about exactly how they did it, and detailed their plans going forward, which sounds… very unrelenting.

youtu.be/rKD4fYc8xV4

Accidental exploitation film title

"That's a good change." 🙏❤️

a grim reaper is holding a cat in his hand Alt: The Discworld Death pets a kitten

Nice fellow

I feel very sad for this person. What are the chances of any accountability for the businesses that led him there?

Tech Bromism

With improvement, he was able to report that he had recently noticed new-onset facial acne and cherry angiomas, fatigue, insomnia, subtle ataxia, and polydipsia, further suggesting bromism. He also shared that, after reading about the negative effects that sodium chloride, or table salt, has on one's health, he was surprised that he could only find literature related to reducing sodium from one's diet. Inspired by his history of studying nutrition in college, he decided to conduct a personal experiment to eliminate chloride from his diet. For 3 months, he had replaced sodium chloride with sodium bromide obtained from the internet after consultation with ChatGPT, in which he had read that chloride can be swapped with bromide, though likely for other purposes, such as cleaning. Gradually, over the course of a 3-week admission, his chloride and anion gap normalized and psychotic symptoms improved. He was tapered off risperidone before discharge and remained stable off medication at a check-in 2 weeks after discharge. His bromide level ultimately was 1700 mg/L (21 mmol/L; reference range, 0.9 to 7.3 mg/L).

Wild case of ChatGPT almost killing a guy by telling him to substitute sodium bromine for table salt (sodium chloride) #medsky www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/...

Deepfakes and style mimicking – Should New Zealand adopt a right of publicity? | Hudson Gavin Martin

Short answer is “no” or maybe “not yet” as the estimable Prof Geddis was suggesting.

Not sure if it’s the same concept or doctrinally related, but the term I’ve seen on this is “right of publicity”. Aspects of privacy/integrity, aspects of intellectual property / control of commercial use.

I feel like every single day I need to post a reminder: if you ask an LLM about itself it DOES NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ITS INNER WORKINGS and WILL NOT TELL YOU ANYTHING ACTUALLY ABOUT ITSELF. It just (as it always does) will make up some plausible sounding answer.

This is a very interesting paper (HT @older.bsky.social & @philippmarkolin.bsky.social). I need to sit on some of these thoughts a little longer, but here's a first approximation 🧵 of reactions — in no particular order and without much filtering.

And because they are optimising for contact time rather than patient experience? You’re going to wait and be moved around where and when the (usually skilled and caring) people are ready.

You don’t get served at your convenience.

Amazing.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”, but with the actual Wizard of Oz.

a cartoon drawing of a bus with a cat on top Alt: Nekobasu / catbus from the totoro film races across the landscape

Next stop, Totorohanga!

Indeed. Back in December 2022 I wrote this, in a piece for the Boston Globe. I think we're still getting it backwards: We keep trying to solve the problem of how to use AI rather than asking what problems using AI might solve. And the problem isn't writing more student papers faster.

I think maybe the big problem here is treating exams as measuring people rather than performance and gating lifetime opportunities behind them??

Acing exams didn’t make me “good” and bombing others didn’t make me “bad” even if it felt that way at the time.

In theory, the pure life of the mind sounds wonderful!

In practice, the mind lives in a body that needs lunch money.

My drive was to engage with students and share a passion for learning from each other.

Assessment to guide learning is one thing. Assessment to rack up imaginary merit points redeemable for powerups in a corporate MMO vision of life is different (though understandable given realities for students).

Having tutored critical thinking in the biggest course at our biggest uni, some mode of assessing where students are at and what they understand is pretty important!

A huge problem I encountered was an institutional desire to save $$ and squeeze out time from expert people to do that work.

The Internet is designed for decentralisation, but it makes decentralisation possible, not inevitable. If you want the democratic benefits of a decentralised digital society, you'll have to fight for them, because autocracy and economics are powerful centralising forces.

Agentic AI: the movie

One of our deep problems is the collapse of a distinction between fundamental rights which are essential foundations to the whole system of government and policy disputes which are properly within the bounds of competitive electoral politics.

“You can’t get over something if you don’t even know what happened”

Jurors ruled that yes, Meta "eavesdropped and that yes, users could have reasonably expected that their sensitive menstrual information was not being shared. Finally, the jurors ruled that no, Meta did not have consent for its actions."

Gold for Best Adventure – Short Form goes to The Dream Shrine, Brad Kerr

orange cat lying on floor with square lights reflected on his flank that resembles lit windows

live action catbus looking pretty sweet

One study in particular showed that student evaluations are good predictors of learning. But there’s a twist. The correlation between student evaluations and quality of learning is negative. The higher the instructor’s score in the student evaluations, the worse the learning; and the lower the evaluation score, the better the learning. (Feel free to read that again. There is no typo.)

Indeed, there is evidence from randomized controlled trials of large introductory classes, that student course evaluations are negatively correlated with how well students learned the material.

maa.org/math-values/...