Chris Chapman

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever.

It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

Buying books and reading books are two extremely enjoyable activities ... but are only partially correlated

I literally had this conversation earlier today (in agreement)

Small bit of good news: Superhuman (Grammarly) says they are pausing the "expert review" misrepresentation feature.

My opt-out request received the attached reply.

A good reminder that we all *can* speak up and achieve change!

These authors wanted to know whether mothers face discrimination in hiring, even when they are equally qualified as other applicants.

So they ran two experiments...

For those keeping score at home:

I informed Grammarly via email precisely what I thought of their appropriation of my name and reputation and received an email from their head of litigation promising a full response by the end of the week.

To be continued...

For the record, I don't know if they have used my name.

I haven't been able to find any way to determine that, and that very difficulty is a sign that they know that they are acting unethically.

In any case, I don't want any product to misrepresent my (or anyone's) name and work in this way.

This appropriation of authors' identities is astonishingly unethical and appalling 🤦

In case it helps others, supposedly so-called Superhuman will remove you if you request it from:

expertoptout@superhuman.com

Feel free to reuse any part of what I sent them:

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

So called "writing software" that uses "AI" disrespects both the craft and art of writing and writers themselves in a way that is entirely without precedent or peer.

The entire premise of this "test" is that writing quality can be captured by a few sentences taken in isolation, devoid of history, context, setting, voice, sequence, characters, or plot.

It is impossible to judge writing in that way ... yet it is exactly the approach AI enshrines and promotes.

Tomorrow’s AI models are learning from today’s polluted research The research ecosystems AI models train on are changing in ways policymakers aren't yet attuned to.

MAHA-aligned research is entering the training data of AI models that millions of people (and increasingly governments) rely on.

And if people DO want to read it ... then that is also a good reason not to use gen AI!

Awesome! Am a fan of @kameronhurley.com

Awesome! 👏

(And a reminder to celebrate bursts of inspiration ... with no need to fret or self-criticize afterward during inevitable lulls.)

How about fiction? I recently blogged some SF recommendations (note: the intended target audience was "quant" readers who may be somewhat new to SF).

The end of that post also lnks to a previous set of recs for literary fiction.

quantuxblog.com/friday-break...

Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages Ecommerce giant says there has been a ‘trend of incidents’ linked to ‘Gen-AI assisted changes’

As suspected, the recent string of Amazon outages is tied to AI code

www.ft.com/content/7cab...

Multiple SWEs tell me their team at Amazon forces them to vibe code *first* and then debug.

Orders to vibe code, backed by layoff threats, is not exactly a recipe for developer pride & quality code 🤷

Networking and social gathering, Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:00 PM | Meetup Our March meetup will be an in-person gathering for local SLC area folks! We will meet at Bruges Belgian Bistro in Sugarhouse to spend time networking, having waffles and/o

If you are a local SLC-area #rstats person, join us this coming Friday afternoon for an IRL networking gathering to chat all things data science! I shall be eating a fancy waffle 🧇

www.meetup.com/slc-rug/even...

This is to say: if you're an attorney who's hesitated to take on habeas cases because you think you lack the knowledge, or you're worried about whether you'll really help, I PROMISE you can make a difference. I'm just a dipshit with a 7-year-old laptop and a bad attitude. If I can do it, so can you.

Thanks for sharing! This is similar to my experience (and I've been thinking to write that up).

My 3 non-open technical books with traditional publishers have sold relatively well *conditional on the narrow field* ... combined royalty of single digit USD $K / year. (Need to compile exact figures)

Job opportunity Assistant Professor, tenure track, qualification agreement at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Jobportal others in Wien

Opening for a tenure track position in statistical computing:

wirtschaftsuniversitaet-wien-portal.rexx-systems.com/Assistant-Pr...

As dept chair, R Core member Kurt Hornik invites applications from people who could make substantial contributions to #RStats, including base R.

Deadline Mar 18!

FWIW, pre-Quarto, I wrote a similar piece about this process using R + bookdown: quantuxblog.com/how-the-quan...

Despite that, I learned a lot more details from @kjhealy.co here 👏

Using Quarto to Write a Book I’ve spent the last couple of months revising my Data Visualization book for a second edition that, ideally, will appear some time in the next twelve months. As with the first edition, I’ve posted a c...

Using Quarto to write (and typeset) a book.

I say this every year, but:

The uni students I'm teaching are thoughtful, intelligent, will make everything they encounter better.

With a new addition for 2026:

They deeply hate AI.

They are right! LLMs make it easier for devs to do work that doesn't matter—it's all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway—in an industry that doesn't care, where the only thing that's measured is some bullshit productivity measure that's completely disconnected from actual outcomes

Every objective study of LLMs have shown that despite people feeling like they are helping, they make work worse and slower vs "But I feel like they are helping"

Also there is compounded random chance.

Let's say "good" performance for a CEO is being 10% above average in a time period. So 40% must be above average for basically random reasons.

Compound that over 5 periods (0.4 ^ 5) and you get the "top 1% of leaders"!

All of whom are there randomly.

100% it is happening everywhere, it seems

The tech world is only the place I know to report it 😞 non-exclusive of so many other places

And in the midst, our country is gamifying this war, a travesty. This a loss of our humanity. At least two things need to happen. We must stand together in nonviolence and call for an end to this war. And our voices calling for peace must be heard, loud and clear. But there is important

This is the warning on the blood pressure monitor my dad just got.

Exceptional work. Anybody know what the fuck it’s supposed to mean?

Last line is especially ominous

And that is why the situation needs additional community pressures, such as:

Communities of discussion
Regulation
External social forces
Investigation and transparency
Satire & even ridicule
And among other things, Unions