Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

Sometimes I think about learning Unity or Bevy or something and dedicating several years to doing this the way I want it done. Then I remember this is a spectacularly terrible idea. But I do have a text file of funny species names in case someone does.

I would spend my entire yearly entertainment budget on a modern, richly implemented, beautiful, highly replayable version of SimEarth (1990) or SimLife (1992).

Someone decided in 2018 or so that all “friendly” software would be eggplant-colored and I just want to ask them a few harmless questions.

Coming up on 70 years of person A going “You see, software will never be able to do X!” and immediately being proven grotesquely wrong, then person B going “You see, this software is basically a person!” and immediately being proven grotesquely wrong, and so on like the world’s most evenly matched and annoying game of table tennis.

What’s the more familiar, less lit-class way to talk about Keats’s negative capability? Intellectual humility? Tolerance for uncertainty? The ability to begin without knowing or even having faith in the end? I need more of that and so does the world.

It would be extremely funny if the big social media companies’ lobbying and PR* against Tiktok is what gets us a real privacy law.

https://mastodon.social/@jameeljaffer/110084814863743927

* Think about how many stories you’ve seen about Upsetting Tiktok Trends from outlets that don’t normally cover social media. That’s PR spoor. And the current dominant platforms’ predecessors did it to them.

Another exhausting and lonely day in the being right factory.

I’ve closed a lot of tabs of “well, obviously cognition is computation” or “well, obviously cognition is not computation” or “clearly, truth is/isn’t XYZ” or whatever. These are far-reaching arguments that depend in super nuanced ways on a whole shelf of context. They’re weighing you down, not helping, when you want to say is “merely” something like “this model is/isn’t useful in that context and will have these larger consequences”.

Free scare quotes to distribute as you see fit: “ ” “ ” “ ”

Perhaps there is a narrower way to make your case about what the software is doing, and it might make your case more convincing to people who don’t happen to subscribe to that particular grand theory of how cognition works.

Maybe a better way to say the thing I’m trying to say is that a whole lot of people who feel a desperate urge to tell the world (1) “ANNs are better than us and also the new bitcoin, which is good” or (2) “actually, ANNs actually aren’t even real, actually” is: If you start by tying your sense of what a piece of software is doing to a massive, categorical, totally abstract philosophical idea about the nature of being itself, maybe go outside and look at the stars for a minute.

For now, I need to work on developing more stretch without knocking it down too much. Next time I might roll them out. Or maybe I’m too worried about knocking it down.

Have given up on this “let’s find a moderate perspective on ‘AI’ and stop yelling” essay about a dozen times, then restarted it about a dozen times when I read something that got under my skin, and now it’s just 7,000 words of me pointing out that everyone other than me is wrong without a conclusion, so I guess I’m going to work on my baguette shaping technique some more.

Power’s out, so I guess I’ll just sit here and watch the barometer fall.

Looked up some archaic medical terms and apparently a thing that appears on death certificates is “body trouble”. I’m sure this is a euphemism for something incredibly sad, but I’m just imagining a doctor shrugging like a mechanic. “Best as I can tell, they had a problem with their insides.”