Benjamin Riley

Hehe I meant Teddy might find your thread interesting, but good to know you are reading her reporting!

@teddyrosenbluth.bsky.social thread may be of interest

How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis' Mental health experts say identifying when someone is in need of help is the first step — and approaching them with careful compassion is the hardest, most essential part that follows.

What do you say to someone who believes their chatbot has unlocked the keys to the universe? I talked to mental health experts who are following the 'AI psychosis' issue closely to find out: www.404media.co/ai-psychosis...

I mean it’s clearly not working, democracy that is.

Billionaires Are Swaying Elections in All Corners of America

Story: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/u...

The extraordinary spending in Montana is part of a new era of political power for the rapidly growing number of billionaires minted over the past eight years. The Times analysis found that 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated more than $3 billion — 19 percent of all contributions — in federal elections in 2024, either directly or through political action committees.

If we can survive the current moment of American fascism, the hijacking of the political process by billionaires must be smashed to smithereens. I don't know if the Democratic party can break free of "the donor class." If it does not, the American left will need a new party.

Teachers dream of a-ha moments The story of Helen Keller's cognition is the story of humanity

Sometimes something—more accurately, someone—forces one to think, really *think*. Anne Sullivan played this role with Helen Keller, and last week, teacher and podcast host @dankearney.bsky.social did the same with me. Ngl (as the kids say), I’m proud of this one. Hope you’ll read & listen.

This is the most creepy European children’s illustration I’ve ever seen. I love it.

YouTube video by Michael Prince - Topic Finesse (feat. Koncept P, willnosleep & avonosleep)

It’s a small but wondrous mercy that the Mike, the homeless handyman who lives in a tent in the empty lot that’s kitty-corner to my house in Austin, Texas, and who also plays music at loud volume at all hours of the day and night, has extraordinary taste.

Current bop: youtu.be/Gz_HEtzYT1o?...

@adonovan.bsky.social I misread your original comment to mean you were so familiar with skijoring that you knew of its unique international variants, the differences between say, Swedish skijoring (lutefisk rules) and Finnish skijoring (ruisleipä variant).

Devastated to learn otherwise.

Well we disagree! I think they are tools, full stop — but I’ll forego “mere” for your sake.

A pic of the truly insane “sport” of skijoring; a horse races down the main street of Leadville Colorado, ridden by the Marlboro Man, and pulling someone who must consider the X-Games “lightweight” as they are jumping off a berm of snowplowed snow while on skis and wondering if life could get any better. Marring the otherwise perfect scene is an advertising banner for some unknown product on the berm, something creek — surely a whiskey because only drunkards would do anything this crazy? Madness. Skijoring.

I would like to know how many of you are familiar with skijoring?

"What if we did water skiing but like, on snow, and instead of boats we shall pull participants using...horses? And do this on the cramped mainstreets of small towns throughout the west?"

(Obsessed, @dylanpkane.bsky.social)

I might delete and repost this with a better pic of skijoring in action, and also fix “ski joring” — amateur hour around here.

And with that, an instant follow! Do you skijore? Are you a skijorer?

Please do! Will read with great interest.

Well @eryk.bsky.social might chime in but as a Close Salvaggio Reader, I can say Eryk rhetorically approaches LLMs from a slightly different perspective than you. He gets the technical bits, but he's just as interested in using art and a sense of the poetic to contrast tool from human.

Are you going to write about this? Or have you already? I've been meaning to write something about the developments you're describing here -- please save me by doing that work for me?

Ben Riley: We Should Be Skeptical of AI

Falls flat to you, I think you meant to type. ;) If you'll forgive the self promotion, in this recently recoded podcast I go into the question of consciousness by examining the self-reported experiences of Helen Keller. Starts around 18 min. Think you might find it interesting.

Nice! Where did you argue this? I'd like to read/listen!

Modeling Language with Plaster 💡Nerd Rating 3.75/5: This post is about a late-19th-century debate in academic mathematics, but it's plainly written and relevant to LLMs. What is a model, anyway? Doing math used to involve touch....

I remain in awe of @eryk.bsky.social’s range of intellect. “The LLM, arguably, is not a model of language so much as it is a machine for turning language into more language…always needing to be called up and used. It transforms the user's language more so than it genuinely produces it.”

I only wish my mother was still alive so I could tell her, “soap is a surfactant which makes it like ice” and provide no further context. Thanks for the brief education!

Is that true for soap?

Why do you choose violence? (kidding)

I would recommend reading Helen Keller’s autobiography, if you haven’t already. She speaks of consciousness, and the lack thereof, from a perspective worth considering and ruminating upon.

I recently found the baby book my mother meticulously kept for the first years of my life, starting in 1976. Apparently, this was me at age three: "I've noticed ice is slippery like soap. Why is that?"

My question still stands.

Is this like when we destroyed Iran’s nuclear weapons program irreparably and yet Iran was also two weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon?

Asking for a citizen of Oceania who’s unsure if we are always at war with Eurasia or what.

Burst out laughing at “Air-es-stot-lay” — this is terrific! What a proud dad you must be!

!!!!! Please do!

One brave soul wrote me, asking why I was taking issue with a "decontextualised" image. I am not sure more how contextualized it could be, as the image -- accurately! -- portrays how data on parent-child interactions would likely be collected, if any parent was insane enough to want to do this.

If it makes you feel slightly better, I posted this to a listserv associated with the organization that created it, asking -- and I am genuinely curious -- whether anyone in the group is excited by the vision set forth here.

Thus far, crickets!