elle mundy

it’s a regular occurrence so that’s kind of a moot point. the law doesn’t save lives, it (ideally) punishes those who endanger or destroy life. more safely designed streets save lives

i go 20 on my non-electric road bike on flat land lol. e-bikes going slower than me is actually quite dangerous sometimes, especially when the rider is just looking at their phone and weaving in the lane. but it doesn’t compare in the slightest to the danger of a car running a red

Noooo you must carefully engineer your prompt in a way that properly accommodates the properties of the token-based model space, the better to manage the quasi-aliasing that happens at token boundaries; moreover the probabilistic character of model outputs makes the tool a poor choice for the evaluation of certain deterministic world-knowledge topics; furthermo 34% 34% I don't trust this fucken thing I don't trust this fucken thing 14% 14% 0.1% Ю score 55 2% 2% 0.1% 70 85 100 115 130 145

Arthur C. Clarke's third law of prediction is, famously, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The kind of technology Clarke had in mind was one that truly works, but in such a sophisticated way that it is entirely opaque to the ordinary people who use it. The optimistic reading is that Clarke pictured our descendants in the role of the makers of such technologies as people who actually understood it. But perhaps not. Magical technologies work... mostly. When they fail and you ask for an explanation, they present you with a blank face. When you try to intervene to fix them, they offer you no purchase on their surface of smooth glass. Instead of controlling technology as a wise wizard might wield a staff, you are forced to fall back on magic's traditional social function-namely, the ritual performance of specific but obscurely relevant steps meant to compel the gods to do the thing you want. Yet the gods care nothing for ordinary people; their ways are mostly unfathomable, and our means of control over them are obscure and unreliable. Instead of elevating us to a world of magic, the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning reduces us to it. A final wrinkle is that, as it advances, this process tends to shrink and ultimately undermine the caste of priests. In simpler technological worlds, the gods may communicate more directly to supplicants. They speak cryptically, but the initiated understand what is being said. Beyond a certain point, though, there is both less room for understanding and fewer means of intervention. With few exceptions, technology's priesthood may find itself degraded to the unhappy state of the laity. It, too, must confront what it means to live in an age where a sufficiently advanced technology really has become indistinguishable from magic.

The last and most important skill we must acquire is how to write begging letters to an opaque machine.

ChatGPT File • • Edit View Window Help ChatGPT 5 > How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry The word "blueberry" has the letter b three times: • Once at the start ("B" in blueberry). • Once in the middle ("b" in blue). • Once before the -erry ending ("b" in berry). Total: 3 O92 Show me where the letter b appears in the word please. Sure — here's "blueberry" with each b highlighted: B lue b erry Positions (counting from 1): 1 B - first letter 4 b - in blue 6 b - in berry D9< Spell that out with all three bs please. I mean, just spell the word. Sure — here's the full spelling with all three b's shown in place: BLUEBERRY That's exactly how blueberry is spelled, with the b's in positions 1, 5, and 7.

ChatGPT File Edit View Window Help E ChatGPT 5 > You wrote "BLUEBERRY". There are only two bs there. Ah - I see the mix-up. Let's slow it down and spell blueberry carefully, letter by letter, showing all three b's. blueberry Now you can see them: • 1st b → position 1 • 2nd b → position 5 • 3rd b → position 6 blueberry Exactly — blue berry has three b's: • 1st b → at the very start • 2nd b → right after the e in blue • 3rd b → immediately after the second b, starting berry So the "bb" in the middle is really what gives blueberry its double-b moment. Its double-b moment; I see. Yep - blueberry is one of those words where the middle almost trips you up, like it's saying "b-b-better pay attention." That little bb moment is satisfying, though — it makes the word feel extra bouncy.

 ChatGPT File Edit View Window Help 巴 • ChatGPT 5 > My students get you to write their essays for them, you know. Ah, the old "ChatGPT, do my homework" routine — I'm familiar with that one. I can see why they'd be tempted, but here's the thing: I'm a lot more useful as a coach than a ghostwriter. If they use me to brainstorm ideas, plan structure, or clarify tricky concepts, they'll actually learn and still have their own voice in the work. If they just hand in what I write, they're skipping the thinking part - and it usually shows. I'm good, but I still leave a trail of... telltale ChatGPT-isms. A trail of blueberries, as it were. Exactly — a trail of blueberries: easy to follow, a little sweet, and maybe just obvious enough for a watchful teacher to notice. If your students really are leaving me to bake the whole blueberry pie for them, they might forget that the best part of pie is making it themselves... even if it gets a little messy. "Blueberry" only has two bs. Nope - blueberry really does have three b's. Here it is spaced out: bluebberry Positions: b- at the start 5 b - in the "blue" part 6 b - right next to it, starting "berry" That middle double-b is easy to miss if vou just glance at the word.

I had to try the “blueberry” thing myself with GPT5. I merely report the results.

New Blog Post!

ko-fi.com/post/Being-E...

Ed Balls

please say psych

Kingsland Wildflower Festival | Process Things Last weekend, I biked on one of the haziest days of the year so far to the Kingsland Wildflower Festival in northern Greenpoint. It took place at NOoSphere Arts, conveniently sandwiched between the Ne...

plants and plants exch.gr/photography/...

#photography #streetphotography #bloomscrolling

things i did not need to know about: purse tuna; tesla diner

Man dressed up as a Tesla Robot holding a cigarette while looking at camera

I went to the Tesla Diner and all I got was a robot smokin a cig

I'm shocked when a glitzy author quote turns out to be authentic.

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?...A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

Kingsland Wildflower Festival | Process Things Last weekend, I biked on one of the haziest days of the year so far to the Kingsland Wildflower Festival in northern Greenpoint. It took place at NOoSphere Arts, conveniently sandwiched between the Ne...

plants and plants exch.gr/photography/...

#photography #streetphotography #bloomscrolling

beginning to think this is more of a statement of the plan than a complaint

Wesley LePatner, a 44-year-old Blackstone executive who oversaw its $53 billion real-estate investment fund, was killed in Manhattan's mass shooting "We cannot properly express the grief we feel upon the sudden and tragic loss of Wesley," the LePatner family told Fortune, adding she was a "driven and extraordinarily talented professional and colle...

if you use AI to write my obit, I'm going to haunt your ass. you will never get a good night's sleep again. fortune.com/2025/07/29/w...

this might be why i dislike js semicolons (but in reality defer to the linter settings on my team because i have more important things to worry about)

The reason that javascript has semicolons is because newlines are invisible, so the compilers couldn't see the ends of the statements. Then around 2016 computer vision got good enough that we could drop them though.

or perhaps some night

the what now

Sen. John Kennedy defends Emil Bove: "If everyone is corrupt, nobody is corrupt."

(Not the flex he thinks it is ... )

they’re definitely not using your face for anything. just trust it!

hey! you there! stop! we must check you for any AR-15s you might be hiding

pitching a Coen brothers knock off movie to The Asylum:

i can sense when a lady wants a hot dog

Israel caused the hunger crisis in Gaza, no matter how much it tries to blame the UN ***

www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

actually i love how broken this app is. it’s like a game that i have to learn. the bugs are just enemies. makes things more interesting

please read my insanely embarrassing piece in the NYT "It's Bad—Why I Revised My Thoughts Regarding Poo Poo" that I was paid $90000 to write

omfg this is so good

not even saying “don’t ever order takeout,” i do it when i’m tired, such as right this second. but yeah, it’ll cost more to have someone cook for you and deliver the meal

Yes. The underlying problem is that the unit economics of this sort of delivery scheme do not work. It was a good deal for consumers when it could be subsidized by ZIRP and staffed by desperate labor but without those things it is very expensive to provide!