America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny. “Few things symbolize our national dysfunction more than the inability to stop minting this worthless currency.” It costs 3 cents to make a penny. 🙃
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Entries for September 2024
The District Sleeps Alone Tonight (Sylvan Esso Remix)
Here’s a newly released remix of The Postal Service’s The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by Sylvan Esso. In addition to YouTube, it’s also available on several other sites. (via sippey)
Even if autonomous vehicles work perfectly, they will likely not decrease emissions or crash deaths because so many more people will use them. “How do people respond when an activity becomes less onerous and more fun? They do more of it.”
Why TV Is Wrong for Tolkien
Amazon’s series The Rings of Power hasn’t gotten great reviews and Evan Puschak hypothesizes that, unlike movies, TV is not the right medium to tell Tolkien’s stories.
I’m skeptical that the Lord of the Rings, or any other story from Tolkien’s mythology, can really work as a TV series. It’s a square peg round hole situation. TV as a form just doesn’t play to the strengths of Tolkien’s vision.
I’d missed that Ray Nayler, author of the excellent The Mountain in the Sea, came out with a short novel earlier this year called The Tusks of Extinction. “Now, her digitized consciousness has been downloaded into the mind of a mammoth.”
Is My Blue Your Blue? A visual perception test that judges what you call blue and green and compares it with others’ results. I am “bluer than 68% of the population.” Now do red/pink, red/orange, and blue/purple!
Colossal, one of my all-time favorite sites on these here interwebs, has launched a spiffing new redesign. Go take a look.
Can AI Make Art?
Ted Chiang with a thought-provoking essay on Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art:
It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.
In the past few years, Chiang has written often about the limitations of LLMs — you can read more about his AI views on kottke.org.
What are we going to do with abundant, free, renewable energy? “[By 2030] solar power will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year ‘pretty much everywhere.’”
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