Feels stupidly good to be deleting ~5000 spam emails (since 9/21) and ~62,000 emails from Trash. I mean, they don't cost me anything directly, but still good to clear out. Also deleted everything pre 1/1/2018; nobody needs more than five years of email archive, do they?
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
Maggie Appleton has a very persuasive article on the boredom that faces us from generative AI and some ideas to deal with it.
I particularly liked:
Easier said than done, but one of the best ways to prove you're not a predictive language model is to demonstrate critical and sophisticated thinking.
Which ought to go without saying, but of course doesn't. And which ought also to include some sort of distinctive authorial voice.
And:
we can prove we're real humans by showing up IRL with our real human bodies
Bring it on.
New Years Eve at some point crossing the Atlantic. Time zones are hard.
I appreciate that other podcasters include transcripts of their shows, but can't you go the extra step of actually checking the transcript against delivery, as those speechifying press releases put it?
Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword
Fascinating deep read, prompting deep memories of my father's abiding interest in cryptic crossword puzzles and prodding me to maybe take up my pen (or more likely pencil) again..Maybe in the New Year.
