Alex MacLaren

Intriguing what emotions that exquisitely-calibrated restraint must engender in him: resentment certainly, and possibly rage, neither of which he can publicly express. And self-congratulation... what a mess of a person he is.

I do wonder if the dam of slurs might suddenly break, looking at how he's handling it all

“Love rules the court, the camp, the grove
And men below and saints above
For love is Heaven and Heaven is love.”

And let me assure you it could easily have been my thickheadedness as a reader, has been many times...

Ah grand, thanks. One of my problems in the generative AI world is that it has added this extra question to each bit of close reading I do!

I would agree that he was accountable for it, but my point is that the outsourcing of these tasks thins out our part in the final piece of work - that's a cost to set alongside the benefits he lists.

There is an extra bit of brainwork that I do when parsing a search results and synthesising them into 'OK this is *my* answer' - an LLM basically does that last bit for me, so I don't think it's the same. And I still don't know whether James or the LLM made the apparent error in the passage I quoted

Agreed. On reflection, a social media channel without the trillion contextual inflection points is absolutely the wrong place to try and settle these questions! 🫡

I long ago wondered if a some (a lot of?) ‘gentlemanliness’ was basically an ownership signal: step through my door! these perfect iddle shoes must not become fouled by mud, step on my cloak!

Not meant as snark btw! The alleged capacity of Grammarly etc to fix glitches and clarify meaning has always made me dread the outsourcing to robot of final approval

Can I check sthg: “similar results to what you might find on Google - albeit presented in a cleaner format, on a page that is bombarding you with adverts and nonsense.” Not sure what this means, is it an error?

I am grateful you published this - partly because I am as curious and puzzled about the adopters as they are about those allergic to it (like me). Thanks!

And what if the machine had a deliberate built-in obsolescence (once you could mend domestic appliances) or a costly proprietary soap subscription (a rare good reason not to buy Miele)? The economic cycle of LLMs are basically a hostage system, with fast approaching enshittification.

Off topic but I’ll say it, that is a diabolical choice of shared reading. The kid should read that alone, get some proper stuff down them. I can make recommendations, tell me how old the kid is

I must add that McFadyen pulled off that stunt when he was cast as Darcy; I thought in advance that he was quite wrong for it, but he was really very good indeed. So with him especially, wait and see.

I agree, but the feeling echoes my precise reaction to the casting of Gary Oldman - who looked nothing like my ‘mind‘s eye’ Smiley, and then I loved his performance, and the film.

That was brilliant - thank you

I’m genuinely curious about what sort of experiment you would design that might yield convincing scientific evidence, given the scale of the question

Who’s Control?

As ever, when you dig you find the malevolent traces of George Osborne’s austerity cuts: “permit charges that the individual London councils charged for spaces have gone up dramatically, with Kensington and Chelsea charging thousands of pounds a year for each parking space”

Oh Harry! Extraordinary

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

How effective and safe are measles vaccines? Data from large meta-analyses show that measles vaccination is highly effective and safe, giving a 95% reduction in the risk of measles.

‘The data shows that just one dose cuts the chances of measles by about 95%, and two doses do even better.’

Timely review of the data on measles vaccines from @ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org/measles-vacc...

Banger.

Haidt is "stunned" that ChatGPT asked how it would threaten youth reveals that its plan would be what Haidt has argued in his books. The secret plan!

There should be some way to rescind the doctorate of any commentator on digital media who interprets ChatGPT output like this. I am not joking.

Not their point, but I am noticing (and enjoying) that more of us have permanently disabled predictive text/autocorrect

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Digital Futures and Information Crises Cory Doctorow, Naomi Alderman and Oliver Moody with Tom Sutcliffe.

Just caught up with the excellent episode of BBC Radio4's Start the week, this one featuring @naomialderman.bsky.social on her new book 'Dont burn anyone at the stake today' & Cory Doctorow, on his 'Enshittification' - wonderfully hosted by @tds153.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Birds constantly fucking off in that poem