Adam Riggio

Really, even longer. As nice as my old college teaching job was in our daily work & paychecks, my more dedicated colleagues & I were fighting uphill battles to improve our program outcomes in a sector-wide attitude of predominantly not giving much of a crap.

I got some good professional news recently that I'll be able to share with my admittedly small audience later this week. Can't be specific right now, but it's nice to feel forward momentum in my career for the first time in a couple of years.

Hype, Hope, and Hazard My Best Perspective on AI Technology After Two Decades of Work and Study

My latest newsletter lays out my perspectives on the hype & controversies surrounding LLM technology. I'm also giving some of the intellectual background in my career as a researcher that qualifies my opinion beyond being just some guy.

for-all-our-futures.beehiiv.com/p/hype-hope-...

The quotes through the whole thread are the key to understanding how public health care systems that are free for patients are central to maintaining democracy, not only morally, but institutionally.

What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms | Eric Reinhart A dangerous faith in AI is sweeping American healthcare – with consequences for the basis of society itself

“The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.”

It's not about brain cooking. He knows that he can get millions of people to believe that this is exactly what Obamacare means, so more people believe that the Democratic Party are the corrupt ones.

Hype, Hope, and Hazard My Best Perspective on AI Technology After Two Decades of Work and Study

My latest newsletter lays out my perspectives on the hype & controversies surrounding LLM technology. I'm also giving some of the intellectual background in my career as a researcher that qualifies my opinion beyond being just some guy.

for-all-our-futures.beehiiv.com/p/hype-hope-...

Do any of them wonder how they let their lives become this way?

If I were a worker in this position, I would take this order so literally that customers would think I was a pod person & I would speak entirely in my salesman voice

an arc where the former governor of NY loses increasingly inconsequential elections until the series finale is him trying to run for senior class president at a local high school and getting his ass kicked by some 17 year olds.

I LEARNED THE ANSWER TO THIS

Chris's Steakhouse was a New Orleans landmark

Chris Matulich periodically got bored, sold it, waited for the new owner to fail, and bought it back cheap

The sale conditions: Can't move it, can't change the name

He did this six times

Then he sold it to Ruth Fertel

Did they later die of radiation poisoning?

File this under, things that make me want to eat a lot more vegetables

I've heard some of these arguments many times from conservative libertarians who themselves don't have a lot of wealth, especially that those who would ask the very rich to pay more of their fortune to support state institutions are simply bitter & envious of the wealthy. Hayek said the same thing.

Mike Solana’s Selective Populism There’s a new species of populism emerging from Silicon Valley: billionaires performing outrage on behalf of the people they exploit.

Are you one of Solana’s “low vibration humans”? If so, you’re not going to like him very much.

Very thoughtful thread about how misogyny insidiously makes men’s lives terrible too

Doesn't everybody's?

Most interesting discovery in this research for me: that optimizing LLMs to sound more human tends to come at the expense of outputting content that a human would actually say.

If I can summarize the most important takeaways from that tradition I want you to get from this large and complicated body of work and discourse, it’s this. The full capacities of human thought and knowledge are rooted in language, logic, and linguistic meaning When thinkers in this tradition wanted to discuss meaning, they talked about the meaning of sentences. When they wanted to discuss thoughts, they talked about logical propositions and declarative statements. When they wanted to discuss truth, they talked about the truth-value of individual declarative statements and logical propositions. Thought was language, and language was thought, which assembled the mind. Intelligence was the ability to understand and make use of language. Some philosophers considered thinking itself to be an inner language, as in Noam Chomsky’s conception of language as a hardwired set of rules for calculating how to assemble bits and phrases, or Fodor’s cheeky concept of “Mentalese” as the inner language of thought.

The core of my critical perspective on AI technology is that LLMs can't really produce artificial intelligence because they can only produce meaningful text & manipulate language tokens. But you'll believe they're artificial intelligence if you think that's all intelligent thought is at all.

Hype, Hope, and Hazard My Best Perspective on AI Technology After Two Decades of Work and Study

My latest newsletter is out, where I try to summarize my last three years (also last twenty years!) of research, learning, & applications of AI & LLM technologies. I hope you'll subscribe if you find this interesting and worthwhile.

for-all-our-futures.beehiiv.com/p/hype-hope-...

I have my suspicions that it’s going to be an eggs-ellent film!

Hundreds of thousands of people, dead because of a decision made by the world's richest man

I doubt Elon takes them as people anyway

“The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!"

'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social.

In human terms, most ethical... There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness."

― Ursula K. Le Guin

How a thrown sandwich became a symbol of D.C.’s resistance In an already surreal moment, Washingtonians have embraced bread puns, sandwich flags, and sub-themed street art as a form of protest.

Sean Charles Dunn’s moment of culinary resistance — he wouldn't be subservient, one could say — has become a symbol of D.C.’s refusal to accept the federal occupation quietly.

Earlier today, D.C.'s own "sandwich guy" was found not guilty of the charges against him.

Subsequent court decisions may find that unwrapped sandwiches can be considered assault, but premeditated only if it can be proven that the attacker knew of an officer’s allergy beforehand

Probably the worst aspect of that toxic relationship is that I have a much more skeptical attitude to people’s good intentions & it took me a long time to recover my confidence to make something of myself in my career beyond just earning a wage

A lot of what I deal with in therapy comes from the hangovers of a toxic relationship 2013-8, the mental strain of the pandemic, & now the stress of my career pivot over the last couple of years

Sometimes I feel like I need to start therapy again, at least every three or so weeks. Last time I stopped, it was because of finances when my job was taken down to part-time hours & because probing my feelings of self-dislike made me dislike myself more

Trump's Nigeria Delusion Most Americans are probably surprised to learn their country could be preparing for military action against Nigeria.

"The irony of Trump now threatening military action against Nigeria, even as uncertainty lingers over his intentions in Venezuela, is as obvious as it is bitter. In both places, he seems poised to reinvent America’s failed global war on terror from scratch, using new justifications."

Gift link.