Ben Shillito

A new slogan for @davidgerard.co.uk to put on a T-shirt? Spotted in the wilds of Reddit today.

He may talk rubbish but Trump has an eye for beauty, and that is a breath of fresh air | Simon Jenkins The US president promotes classical architecture and loathes ‘ugly’ wind turbines. Keir Starmer would dismiss him as a nimby, but on this Trump has a point, says Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins

Absolute shoo-in for Worst Article in a Respectable Newspaper this year:

He may talk rubbish but Trump has an eye for beauty, and that is a breath of fresh air | Simon Jenkins www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

One for @davidgerard.co.uk and the rest of my fellow AI-sceptics.

Ooh, a thing I’m making. Yay.

Bernard the chihuahua seems to like the @adambecker.bsky.social book as much as I do. Apparently he finds tech bro dipshits quite soothing.

New idea. Why don’t we treat “existential risk” AI lies as securities fraud? Doomerism is nothing but dishonest PR targeted to attract investment, so why don’t we prosecute it? If the EU could pull this off, it would make @edzitron.com dance, and we all want to see that.

That feeling when you finish a 200 page script, but it’s 11pm and nobody wants to read it right away. Bastards.

What Has a Foundation Model Found? Using Inductive Bias to Probe for World Models Foundation models are premised on the idea that sequence prediction can uncover deeper domain understanding, much like how Kepler's predictions of planetary motion later led to the discovery of Newton...

Here’s something interesting. Maybe a palate-cleanser for @alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social on their next trip to A.I. hell.
arxiv.org/abs/2507.06952
Well-explained here: youtu.be/jxB-lQyAAxU?...

I took the plunge and ditched my windows PC and google phone, for an iPhone and MacBook combo. It took a few minutes to disable all A.I. features and set privacy settings to 11, and I feel so much better.

Just finished the 180 page script I started writing less than 3 weeks ago. Not a bad rate. Now I sleep for a week. #writing #writer

Imagine telling a child that they must worship Immortan Joe because the richest idiots on earth thought autocorrect was alive and their friend

SuperIntelligent AI = Prosperity Gospel for people who don’t believe in God.

I never thought Skynet would have the personality of an edgy teenage memelord. Reality is fucking broken.

I was the same when I got the reissue of Bitches Brew. I wanted to take that thing to parties and pass it around. Makes me wonder whether urges like that are why I don’t get invited to parties.

With bitter irony, blocking someone who insulted him is probably the only bit of critical thinking he has done this year, maybe ever.

“The only thing that grows forever is cancer.” Brutal. Love it.

I guess I could do this, as long as it was a character who didn’t have a bad end or do anything immoral or dreadful in the story. Now I just have to find such a character in my work …

Somehow managed to get well over 30 pages written this weekend. I’m up to page 139, and it’s the end of act two. This script is a bit long …
#writing #writer

The reaction of the MAGAts to the Epstein chicanery reminds me of the advice given by Pink Floyd in Dogs: “You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to, so that when they turn their backs on you, you'll get the chance to put the knife in.” Hope that nice Donald fella doesn’t forget …

Not gonna lie, it kind of rankles that the finest work of literature since Joyce’s Ulysses was written by an American named Jeff.

Advice columnists, despite appearances to the contrary, are sentient.

Or they changed the model weights to amplify certain views and downplay others. It’s pretty simple.

The proper word for Kurzweil is pillock, but sadly it’s not commonly known in the US. It would make the whole discourse so much easier if we could just say “here’s an interview with the noted pillock Ray Kurzweil”, or “Sam Altman, chief pillock of OpenAI, said this on twitter …”

The 2023 Reddit logo update is apparently “sleeker and more professional” than the old one. Somehow I’d never noticed the alien dude has five o’clock shadow and glassy eyes. He looks like someone who has spent too much time reading Reddit.

There’s fuck-all on the front end, so they’re clearly just buying the people in the hope of getting some of their own fuck-all. Once you reach a critical mass of fuck-all, SoftBank reaches for the infinite chequebook.

Today, London is hot. I can tell because of my sheen of sweat, disinclination to do anything, and the fact that Bernard is posing like a fucking model on the picnic table.
#chihuahua #dog #model

I’ve reached the point where I’m so frustrated with “A.I.” bullshit, and the amorality of the industry, that I am now forced to write and produce a satirical existential crime thriller about it. I’m sorry, but they drove me to it.

OK, I'll just add this to my reasons to have a crush on Ed Zitron ...

Sometimes, yes. Roughly once every 8 to 9 days, apparently.

Hence "At the sign of the Prancing Pony" in LOTR. Most English place names and street names work the same way, as literal descriptions of how to find things. There was only one ferry in London that took horses, so the road that leads to it was the horse ferry road, now called Horseferry Rd. Etc