Adrian Boutel

Selling AI Software Isn’t as Easy as It Used to Be — The Wall Street Journal AI software vendors say potential customers are taking longer to evaluate purchases, and shopping less eagerly than they were a year ago

Hark, I hear the tinkle of falling pennies

(Apple News link)

stocks.apple.com/AeC0ueEjFRvG...

The thing is, thinking and working through ideas is one thing, writing essays is another. Students will talk about philosophy into the wee hours because that’s more fun (and less pressure) than writing it down. I suspect that being baffled by this distinction is a sign of a productive philosopher.

(I decline to call them by their gaslighting French name)

Today in Schweizerische Volkspartei.

Ironically I am more optimistic about this than OpenAI is. “Fundamental statistical and computational limits” won’t stop AI getting the facts right—if we manage to add knowledge to it. But that will involve going beyond LLMs.

It looks like they’ve found quantitative relationships between “hallucinations” (factual errors in generative output) and other kinds of machine-learning error, which is interesting if right. But it’s not why machine learning makes errors!

It’s good for various reasons that they’ve acknowledged the bottom line here. But “fundamental statistical limits” are not the problem. LLMs are just not in the truth business.

This, and that this won’t be changed by more training data or more processing power. It’s a matter of architecture, not scale.

And it’s true that knowledge is a thing neural nets can do, viz us. Maybe I will be a urprised again. But neither theory, nor practical results, so far give *any* indication that mere hyper-scaling is going to get us there.

In that mindset, the objection that stable, updatable representation is a *different kind* of performance and won’t be conquered by just-more-training-data looks like a failure of imagination, if not Searleite biological chauvinism.

I’m trying to understand the AI optimist position. The best I can come up with is that the startling progress of generative AI in the early 2020s led people to think that remaining performance limits (hallucination) would be crashed through just as quickly.

I know this will annoy some, but imo philosophers *on their staff* who are helping them push this “maybe they’re already minds 🤔” stuff should not be treated seriously as philosophers.

I know the field has to include holders of absurd views by definition. But not actual sophists!

Right. No sympathy. But the argument that tax rises are counterproductive because, er, half a dozen named people left in response is pragmatically self-refuting.

New Siri Runs Into Problems, Features Could Be Pushed to iOS 26.5 and iOS 27 Apple has "run into snags" testing the more personalized, smarter version of Siri that's planned for iOS 26.4, reports Bloomberg. Because of the issues, the upcoming Siri features will be spread acros...

My guess is what we’re seeing here is Apple torn. They want to release an AI assistant, but (unlike everyone else in the space) they can’t bring themselves to release it until it’s reliable. Which it can’t be, because LLM.

No obvious way out…

www.macrumors.com/2026/02/11/s...

Boss of private equity group Permira quits UK for Switzerland Kurt Björklund is the latest addition to the growing list of wealthy financiers to have left the country

Yeah if a news story gives the *individual names* of the rich people leaving a country of 70 million, it is not describing an exodus.

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

I don’t like most of those, but I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

Proof Without Content

The sadly neglected paradox of the Truthteller

xkcd.com/3201/

The Rebirth of Pennsylvania’s Infamous Burning Town Sixty years into the fire that left the town condemned, Centralia is now a haven for wild plants and butterflies.

Hi perhaps you would like a little break from the news in the form of an essay about my trip to Centralia, Pennsylvania, the town that’s been on fire since 1962—a place where surprisingly I found a great deal of hope, wonder, and mystery.

Said Trump on 5/1/2021

Two gondolas are about to pass each other in the mountains above Churwalden, Switzerland

New Year’s Day in Switzerland (above Churwalden)

May have said this before, but I am amused that hidebound Cambridge, with its 100% closed-book end of year exams, finds itself on the cutting edge.

how wild is it tho that the fuckin king of england is the one clapping back at white supremacy and labour is the one pushing it

See also the Swiss “Union démocratique du centre », which is more honestly named across the Röstigraben as the Schweizerische Volkspartei.

Rest - Etymology, Origin & Meaning "rest; a bed or couch; intermission of labor; mental peace, state of quiet or repose,"… See origin and meaning of rest.

Couldn’t tell you if it’s an adverb or what, but it should be “merry”: it’s parallel to “keep you merry”. www.etymonline.com/word/rest last entry

Non, le "froid" ne rend pas malade: ces mythes qui persistent au sujet des maladies hivernales | RTS Chaque hiver, les mêmes conseils reviennent: couvre-toi bien, ne sors pas les cheveux mouillés, sinon tu vas "attraper froid". Pourtant, la science est formelle: le froid ne rend pas malade. Ce sont l...

My peeve is that this is the gateway version of “I know about the germ theory of disease but also I know better.” Good luck RTS.

Wearing warm clothes is better than declining vaccines, obvs. But the anti-vax Facebook memes have to work on something.

www.rts.ch/info/sante/2...

I hate this. GDP per capita didn’t regain 2007 levels until 2015. There should have been a rebound, not just “some growth”. Osborne is celebrating that he only choked the economy and didn’t garrotte it.

Lineup of Grover Zampa wines for a tasting at their Bengaluru winery

Proper Bangalore wines at Grover Zampa.

I’m normally that “Apple know what they’re doing, get used to it” guy, but now I know the Truth About Alan Dye, I am reverting liberally.

At least 60,000 murdered in Sudanese city, which resembles ‘a slaughterhouse’ Satellite evidence shows extent of paramilitary massacre in El Fasher

So, El Fasher looks like one of the worst single event atrocities to happen this century so far, but the evidence has come in such a trickle it seems to only now be getting verified

Guilt by association, presumably. If you mean, what is their official reason, I’d say guilt by association “and you can’t be too careful about tarrism”.