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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • This classic xkcd led me down a long rabbit hole years after reading it that ended in the belief that the universe itself is an abstract instantiation of pure mathematics, and exists only in the sense that any such self-consistent mathematical structure must exist from its own point of view. I won’t get into the details here because it’ll turn into a long incoherent rant, but the general gist is that the idea in the comic should work - but then that the rocks themselves aren’t even necessary: The fact that a universe can exist is enough for it to exist, even if no one ever simulates it. Just like the question “What is the 10^(10^100)th prime number?” exists and has a definite answer, even though nobody will ever and can never calculate it, the answer to “What does a universe, with these initial conditions, and these laws of physics, look like at t = 13.7 billion years?” has an answer too, and it looks like you reading this comment.





    • “AI should serve as a scaffold for cognitive construction rather than a substitute.”
    • “…the teacher’s role is shifting from knowledge transmission to instructional design and behavioral facilitation… Teachers must develop digital literacy and data fluency while acting as safeguards against over‑automation, ensuring that human judgment and educational values mediate AI adoption.”
    • “…while AI offers efficiency and feedback advantages, traditional teaching remains essential for tasks requiring cultural interpretation, discourse depth, and emotional connection. A blended model—AI for repetitive or procedural tasks and teachers for critical discourse—appears most effective.”

    This study explicitly does not advocate for replacing teachers with AI, and repeatedly cautions against doing so




  • Our internal slack channels contain more and more AI-written posts, which makes me think: Thank you for throwing this wall of text on me and n other people. Now, n people need to extract the relevant information, so you are able to “save time” not writing the text yourself. Nice!!!

    I think this is one of your best bets as far as getting a real policy change. Bring it up, mention that posts like that may take less time to “write”, but that they’re almost always obnoxiously verbose, contain paragraphs that say essentially nothing, and take far longer to read than a hand-typed message would. The argument that one person is saving time at the expense of dozens (?) of people losing time may carry a lot of weight, especially if these bosses are in and read the same Slack channel.

    Past that I’d just let things go as they are, and take every opportunity to point out when AI made a problem, or made a problem more difficult to solve (while downplaying human-created problems).



  • I mean, what’s the alternative here? The Swiss government, which they are subject to, issued a legal warrant. Any email provider you want to use will be subject to warrants. All of them.

    They are technically incapable by design of complying with warrants for email data. In this case they were able to provide personally identifying payment data because the person paid for their account with… a credit card. They offer crypto payment options, and would not have been able to usefully comply had the person used that method.


  • Their retraction article makes it crystal clear that their reporters are not allowed to use AI output in articles at all, unless it’s explicitly for demonstration purposes. That rule was broken. They took appropriate action, apologized, and made a commitment to do better.

    I, frankly, believe them - ars is the news outlet I’ve frequented longer than any other for a reason. I understand if it’s going to take more for you to believe them, but it’s just one mistake. It’s also not clear to me what they could have done in this situation that would have felt like enough to you? Were you hoping for a play-by-play of who entered what into ChatGPT, or a firing or something?

    I’m also not sure I’d consider the saga over. It wouldn’t overly surprise me if at some point this week we get a longer article going into more detail about what happened.



  • My take on their comment was that they know this but consider it their ‘religion’ anyways because they don’t understand the process and so, in the absence of true understanding, take it on faith alone that the process actually works out

    But the evidence is all around us even if you don’t understand the processes themselves: Science built us a moon landing, religion built us the dark ages