Escaping the AI Vampire Castle

...t and suddenly break leaving the world a worse place. We’ve seen this with self driving cars, cryptocurrency, social media, and Elon Musk’s tunnels to nowhere and failed Hyperloop. There’s certainly useful things we can do with these large statistical models. Writing children’s books, however, is not one of them. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of language, how humans gain experience and how creativity works. I met a translator r...

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Saturday Tweets: The Chapel Perilous

Two self portraits by Edvard Munch–one during and one after suffering from the Spanish Flu. Make a simple sifter coffee roaster “Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb on warnings over systemic risks from global pandemics Museums reveal their creepiest objects in Twitter battle It Came From the ’70s: The Story of Your Grandma’s Weird Couch The Bread Influencers Flock of sheep visit empty McDonald’s restaurant during lockdown Super-rich jet off to disast...

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Saturday Tweets: Dogs, Land Use, Kale and Rocket Cats

Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression: https://t.co/No2cjEZ9dO — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 4, 2018 Cities in CA inland areas must make street tree changes to adapt to future climate. @ucanr research finds that trees now in #Fresno, #Ukiah, #Stockton and others expected to do poorly in 2099. https://t.co/Bpi42R6uNo pic.twitter.com/RR5lpIVCOl — Jeannette Warnert (@jwarnert) August 3, 2018 #Breaking – About 100 goats are on the loose...

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Coming Together by Being Apart

...a crisis our moral instinct tells us to come together. Staying apart feels selfish. It’s counter-intuitive that the best expression of community right now is a lack of community. To keep everyone safe we must self-isolate. We must also convince our friends and relatives who are still in denial that they also must stay at home for the good of all. One bit of solace came from listening to a podcast about the 1918 Spanish Flu. All the struggles we’re...

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Cat Litter Compost, Installment #3

...esent in cat waste can’t balance the heavy carbon loads of the litter by itself. (Note: You should be an experienced composter before you try composting cat litter, as I’ve warned before, and so you will of course know what I mean by all this talk of carbon and nitrogen–but for those of you who are incorrigible, or simply curious, nitrogen sources you might add to your pile include urine, natural seed meal fertilizers, dried alfalfa, fresh grass c...

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