Joe Uchill

Director D - Academic Affairs University Overview The University of Pennsylvania, the largest private employer in Philadelphia, is a world-renowned leader in education, research, and innovation. This historic, Ivy League school co...

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Caesar seizes on seizure seizure.

Just another normal morning where the President of the United States shares completely false claims from a conspiracy theory site. I’ve confirmed with election officials in Maricopa County that this is 100% BS.

There's no consistent definition of consciousness - it's a problem that predates modern LLMs - so any argument that AI can or cannot have consciousness is, in some ways, just arguing about whether you want AI to be able to have consciousness.

But I don't think capability is necessarily all art is.

me paying $30 in gas to buy imported things that have been hit with tariffs bc joe rogan is learning about politics at age 58

It is true that Proton is located in Switzerland and responded to a legal request from the Swiss authorities. But it is also true that most people do not know what an MLAT is and there is a widespread misunderstanding that using Proton will protect your account from US govt requests.

Manipulating AI Summarization Features - Schneier on Security Microsoft is reporting: Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL…

Manipulating AI Summarization Features www.schneier.com/blog/archive...

Just a thought experiment: Would as many people enjoy going to see THE ROOM if it came out that it was the product of three studio executives trying to make a bad movie because there was an untapped market for bad movies?

I will say, even though I'm very much a death of the author person, it genuinely affects my enjoyment of a movie to find out that Woody Allen is who Woody Allen is. I need to know Woody Allen feels the same set of emotions as me for me to accept fictional characters do.

I'm pretty much on the opposite end of death of the author. But market forces that predate AI clearly show that things like historicity and some abstract concept of authenticity matter to people. It's the premise of conceptual art. Hell, it was the premise of NFTs.

I think something similar to all of this happens with art - people genuinely want a human connection with an unliving work. More than wanting work that evokes various emotions, a lot of people want to believe that an author was cognizant of those emotions.

Duchamp didn't change the value of the urinal. Warhol didn't change the value of the soup.

The same thing is true with the intentionality of a work. If you look at the economy that has grown around fan theories about popular movies, people view an author's non-textual comments about a work as more important than MatPat's non-textual comments

The entire conceptual art movement is based on the ability for an artist to say of several identical sets of lines which one is the real art.

A sufficient 3D printer could make a more accurate version of the statue David. We could make a bunch of them at scale. In fact, we do this all the time. Your doctor's office has a Monet print.

And yet, people care more about the originals.

There's no consistent definition of consciousness - it's a problem that predates modern LLMs - so any argument that AI can or cannot have consciousness is, in some ways, just arguing about whether you want AI to be able to have consciousness.

But I don't think capability is necessarily all art is.

it turns out this kid is a huge metalhead who knows a _lot_ about the history of filesharing

BSKY CONVERSATION 17 DAYS AGO m.r.sauter (@oddletters.bsky.social): Last class a student came up after lecture and said he had transferred over from CS and asked if the point of the class was to hate computers Joe Uchill (@joeuchill.bsky.social): [Photoshop of the IBM "A computer can never be held accountable" image to read "A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE/THEREFORE THE POINT OF THE CLASS IS TO MAKE YOU HATE COMPUTERS]

People seem to be picking up on my part of this conversation today, but it's better in context.

Anyway, here's one of my favorite interactions on this site (special guest star @oddletters.bsky.social)

That’s a really lovely graphic that pegs creation at 4004 bc.

Battle Creek power fingers percussion massager. $99.99 Looks like a grey plastic suitcase with a Batman cowl

Meanwhile, on Etsy, this massager is also Batman.

Never lost to Batman!

Caitlin KALINOWSKI over X I resigned from OpenAl. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn't an easy call. Al has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I'm proud of what we built together.

OpenAI head of robotics just resigned over company deal with the Pentagon saying…

“Surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got”

Battle Creek power fingers percussion massager. $99.99 Looks like a grey plastic suitcase with a Batman cowl

Meanwhile, on Etsy, this massager is also Batman.

It’s hard to be the penguin.

I don’t even know where you’d buy a monocle.

I‘m not going to treat anyone posting to social media as a strategic liar both because someone pursuing optimal strategy *by posting to bluesky* is not pursuing optimal strategy and because, having lived through 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2024, it’s fair to say some people will follow through on threats.

That said, so much as we think the word consciousness means anything useful, I don’t llms meet the definition

Fruits are a thing. Vegetables aren‘t. They are roots and leaves and stems.

There’s nothing that says vegetables aren’t conscious, because there’s no definition of vegetables or consciousness

It’s not impossible to come up with a definition of consciousness that includes literally anything because consciousness isn’t formally defined.

But the same thing is true about vegetables.

Feel free!

Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal Gunnar Ridderström/Pexels As a hospital librarian, Jessica Waite is typically successful at tracking down elusive articles for clinicians at Royal Hallamshire Hospital in England. So when a colleag…

It's genuinely shocking how quickly (some) scientists have flipped to using ai to do their literature reviews. We KNOW it's a disaster - this fairly extreme example is one of many. I'm not shocked that the journals let this stuff slip thru tho - they care only about💲

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