People have had it with the AI slop. I have been hearing the frustration for months. But the root cause is misunderstood. It’s not low effort; it’s low bandwidth.
Continue reading “In defense of slop”Category: Society
The AI Landslide Is Happening
When it comes to AI changing the tech world, we’re at a juncture where you’ve either:
- seen some shit with your own eyes or you believe your imagination of where this is going
- or, you haven’t and you’re dubious
It feels like people are living in a fractured reality. For the moment, that is stable. But reality is not completely subjective. The way we each get to live in the world is shaped by things outside of our subjective perspective. That is going to hit all of us, regardless of what we believe.
Continue reading “The AI Landslide Is Happening”Edtuchen: Should my town merge?
In my town, a surefire way to make everyone mad at you is to suggest that we consider merging with the much larger town that completely surrounds us. But I can’t resist.
New Jersey is a high tax state, and the property taxes in Metuchen are the highest in Middlesex County. Some people are interested only in using this as a political cudgel, but I’m interested in the question of why, and what options are there to bring the costs down? The question of whether merging with Edison, our neighbor on all sides, would bring down our taxes is an obvious question to consider.
I decided to do some digging.
Continue reading “Edtuchen: Should my town merge?”LLMs think
It’s interesting to see scientific people categorically reject the notion that LLMs “think”. People write them off as “fancy autocomplete” or regurgitating their source material, and conclude that they do something categorically different than what humans can do. That it’s all just a parlor trick. I think1 that’s wrong.
Continue reading “LLMs think”Intersectionality is nonlinearity
My sister, who is a Ph.D. sociologist, first introduced me to the sociological concept of intersectionality. Like many academic sociological terms, it is often misunderstood and misrepresented in popular discourse. But I found a simple way to approach it by thinking about it with my math brain1. I think I can explain it in way that is easy to understand, however you might feel about math.
Continue reading “Intersectionality is nonlinearity”The AI Big Bang
I generated this image with the prompt “big bang happening in someone’s brain” using Stable Diffusion
2022 has been an astounding year in AI. I don’t think anyone needs a recap (and I’m not the guy to provide one), so I’ll namedrop Stable Diffusion and GPT as examples of what I’m talking about.
While only the most jaded person could see what’s going on in AI and not be completely blown away, there is debate around exactly what the socioeconomic implications of this new phase of AI will be. On one hand, you have people already predicting that we’re in the end game for white collar workers, such as artists, writers, and software developers. Other folks, perhaps more attuned to the limitations of the AIs we’ve seen, are urging a much more sober outlook. I see massive change on the horizon, but along a different axis than some of the more simplistic predictions.
Continue reading “The AI Big Bang”Ableism: the sneakiest “ism”
Fighting the prejudice within myself is a lifelong battle. One of the -isms I struggle most with is ableism. It comes through in my language, and as I’ll explain, I believe it underlies a stubborn prejudice in my heart. It is completely normalized to demean things and people as “stupid” or “crazy”. If you want to know why this is a bad thing, this article does a good job of explaining. Please read it, and do try to suspend the voice in your head that thinks it’s maybe being a bit excessive. Just for a minute.
All done? Great, because instead of stating the point they’ve made so well, I want to talk about why I accept it.
Continue reading “Ableism: the sneakiest “ism””A bitter pill
Several years ago, I returned to Baltimore for the funeral of one of the kids I coached in basketball. He was stabbed to death in an altercation at a gas station. I almost wrote a piece about my feelings, but never did.
Last week, I learned that a student I taught was found shot to death on the street. I don’t know anything more about what happened. There’s no news story about it. If you know the intro to the track Straight Outta Compton…well, almost 30 years later, not much has changed.
This kid was one of the kids who defined my experience as a teacher. He was funny as hell, complex, brilliant, stubborn, inquisitive, and energetic. In one particularly out-of-control class period, he got carried away and was standing on his desk ring-leading the chaos. Floundering to figure out how to regain some semblance of control, I play-lunged at him, and he quickly scrambled back down, saying something probably like “Mr. Johnson ain’t playing”. I earned a little cred, the wrong way. (Not my proudest moment as a teacher, but I never claimed to have been great at the job.)
He and I didn’t always get along, but we also had moments of the two years I taught him where I think I really reached him. On my last day with the students, I let them write reflections about their time with me, if they wanted to. Each one was almost shockingly introspective and grateful for what I had at least tried to accomplish. But this kid’s was hands-down the most heartfelt. That day may have been the last time I saw him, and I’m presuming our lives diverged significantly from that point.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to get enough information to make it back to pay my respects and just express my support to his family and any of his classmates that would have come. But it’s also a reminder of how marginal I am in that world, where media, justice, economics, and just about everything else are entirely different than in the bourgeois world I inhabit. Premature death is so common in Baltimore that young people talk about how they want to be memorialized on a t-shirt in the same way that I might think about a living will.
When I returned to Baltimore for that last funeral, it hit me in the gut that, in a sense that is almost too literal for comfort, I helicopter in and out out of that world at will. But my former students, that precarious world is their default, and they venture out only with incredible difficulty, as the forces of concentrated poverty constantly pull them back in. The people who stay in teaching in places like Baltimore choose to be permanent residents of that world, and a bridge to other worlds. I’m forever in awe of those who stay in the career.
America, the pitiful
I don’t know enough about immigration to say whether this sort of thing is meaningfully different from previous administrations. But one thing’s for sure, our current administration exudes a hostility to foreigners that is unprecedented, and that perception matters quite a bit.
When I read about this and:
I have to think that if things don’t change, we’re witnessing the self-inflicted end of America’s role as the nucleus of human culture and knowledge.
We’re not becoming great again. We’re decaying.
The tinderbox
This is the most important thing I have to say about the Trump administration:
Bad policy is something most of us can survive and undo. But what will hurt us for a generation is how this regime responds to an actual crisis, and how they use it to seize power. The overreaction is in progress already, even though nothing new has happened.
