To escape stagnation—and thus slow the rise of the far right—Germany needs a policy approach that renews the economic model and generates broadly shared economic gains. Instead of the one-sided approach of the Merz government, Germany should be embarking on a real and balanced reform of the debt brake and European fiscal rules.

In Computer Power and Human Reason (1976), he recalled his secretary, who had watched him program ELIZA over many months, sitting down to test the system for the first time, typing in a few comments, then asking him to leave the room. ‘I knew of course that people form all sorts of emotional bonds to machines … to musical instruments, motorcycles and cars,’ Weizenbaum wrote. ‘What I had not realised is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.’

I worry that the existing tendency for divergent experiences depending on cultural capital (the range of symbols available to you, the fluency with which you articulate them etc) in which Claude 3.7 can literally do things for users who can write a lot in a specialised way which it can’t for users who lack these characteristics.

Most of us have watched too much Star Wars. If you have watched zero Star Wars, congratulations! You have watched a perfect amount of Star Wars.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Jollimore, who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving. (..) Williams, and other educators I spoke to, described AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis.

Red-chip art may not need the traditional art world to keep growing. I’m not confident that the reverse is true.

Coming face to face with lionfish in the warming waters of the Aegean Sea, James Bridle traces the unfolding of geology, evolution, and empire that not only occasions this meeting, but binds us in relationship with this “invasive” species.

Perhaps what’s so worrying is that these models, with their trillions of parameters are as vast as an ocean and with these cases we’re identifying users getting ‘lost at sea.’ When it comes to synthetic semiosis, the untethered chains of signification that can completely detach from reality, it’s entirely possible that as the user and AI meld, as they spiral deeper into discourse, meaning detaches from ‘the real’ entirely, entering into a strange, latent, symbolic realm co-constituted by the minds of the user and the AI.

It’s sometimes confusing when we pretend that there’s a scientific conversation happening, but some of the people in the conversation have a stake in a company that’s potentially worth $50 billion.

A standard text-based search with ChatGPT uses a tiny amount of energy. We are not going to make a dent in climate change by stigmatising it or making people feel guilty.

Myself not least, but honour'd of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

These social networks are like a black hole, once we publish them we’re likely never to see them again unless we use specific tools. Some people think that is their purpose – we’re meant to be posting ephemeral content anyway. But I actually cherish these imprints of my selves.

I like to think that a guy that finally convinced his girlfriend to go to a wrestling show with him and this was on the card.

Discourse about LLMs and their role in society has become bifuricated enough such that making the extremely neutral statement that LLMs have some uses is enough to justify a barrage of harrassment. I strongly disagree with AI critic Ed Zitron about his assertions that the reason the LLM industry is doomed because OpenAI and other LLM providers can’t earn enough revenue to offset their massive costs as LLMs have no real-world use. Two things can be true simultaneously: (a) LLM provider cost economics are too negative to return positive ROI to investors, and (b) LLMs are useful for solving problems […]

Of course, Andreessen was correct to claim that software was eating the world, but he had the causation backwards. Software’s high valuations were not the result of its extraordinary technological promise. Rather, the software sector had become the primary locus of innovation because of its high valuations. Its financial characteristics allowed software to attract growth investment while other sectors no longer could.

Church of St Giles, Imber: In a Different Light details the work of the Wiltshire Medieval Graffiti Survey and its discoveries within the church at the abandoned & now militarized zone of Imber upon Salisbury Plain. Comprising of folk art, mason’s marks and historical graffiti the finds are presented using high resolution photography and annotations that provide a unique snapshot of life within the 15th century

An increasingly common sight at the darts of late has been players standing at the front of the stage, both arms raised towards the crowd, gently trying to shush them down. It rarely works. Actually, it never works.

I have never used ChatGPT, which puts me in a shrinking minority. Four hundred million people now use the platform each week. People use ChatGPT despite not really trusting it: in a survey, about four in ten people said that they had little or no trust in ChatGPT to provide them with accurate information about the 2024 election. Why not cede more and more to this technology?

The first version of Zork appeared in June 1977. Interestingly enough, it was never “announced” or “installed” for use, and the name was chosen because it was a widely used nonsense word, like “foobar.”