Passiflora: like Electron but 1/500th the size. I used to be in academia. I got better. Neither a "liberal" nor a "conservative".
Joined October 2025
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It seems vitally important to some to know whether a text was composed by a human or an AI.
I don't understand *why* this is so important (surely the text should stand on its own merits, or lack of them?) but I concede that such people exist. Okay, fine. There are people who claim that they can hear a difference if they replace the plastic knobs on their audio equipment with wooden ones. In itself, this isn't going to harm anything (other than their bank accounts) and provides some harmless amusement at their gullibility for the rest of us.
The AI v. human people are constantly searching for a "tell" — some simple-minded segmentation algorithm by which AI-written and human-written texts can be separated.
(OMG! I used an em dash! Some are going to stop reading here. 😀)
Most of these "tells" are are just plain dumb.
Let's say someone observes that architects use the word "fascia" far more often than non-architects (I haven't tested this, but I feel pretty confident that it's true).
Can you then conclude that any text containing the word "fascia" was written by an architect, or even was *likely* written by an architect? No, you cannot. Non-architects use the word all the time. Maybe the person was talking about the home repair he did last weekend. Maybe it's an internal memo at Lowes, talking about which items should be listed in this this week's flyer. Maybe it's someone with such terrible keyboard skills that his spell checker has confused "fascist" with "fascia", and he's blindly accepted the suggested change. There's absolutely no way to tell based on the presence of the word per se.
Now, if you had a large sample of texts written by the person over a long period of time (the time period is also important — our homeowner might write a lot of "fascia" texts while the repair is in progress, then never use the word again), which *as a whole* contained a disproportionate number of uses of "fascia", you could start to feel more confident that he is an architect (though maybe not even then... he might be a building contractor — or a surgeon).
From a single example? Sheer nonsense.
(Oops! I did it again! Twice! Definitely a bot!)
Why is this important? If it were just a matter of people making fools of themselves (like the wooden knob folks), it wouldn't be important at all. However, people are being given bad grades, perhaps even losing their jobs, based on one of these alleged "tells". That is completely unacceptable.
Even if such a "tell" did exist (which it doesn't), the likelihood that it would continue to work a year from now (or even six months from now) is very small. I follow this field fairly closely, yet I'm constantly surprised at how far each new generation has come.
Rather than wasting time looking for a "tell", teachers should concentrate on adapting themselves and their teaching methods to a world where AIs exist. They should learn about AIs themselves, then teach their students how to use them in a responsible manner. They're not going away.
One interesting idea I've seen: the students are assigned a topic, then given (say) a week to learn as much about the topic as they can. Every source is fair game. Books, Wikipedia, AIs, YouTube videos, you name it. Evaluating the credibility of the source is part of the task. Then they're put in a proctored exam room and asked to produce an outline of the topic. The students should be given different topics, of course. You don't want one student (or a small group) generating an outline for the others to cram.
There are many other things that could be done. Use your imagination! If you don't have one of those, perhaps you could ask an AI for help. 😀
pulpgrinder retweeted
If I was a billionaire I'd use my money to solve world hunger. 😡
Sent from a device purchased with money that could have been used to feed an Ethiopian family for a year, but wasn't because my hypothetical generosity is purely performative.
I have to give credit to PRC for a master play.
A guy as smart as Jensen Huang is gonna be instantly suspicious if a 22-year-old supermodel appears out of nowhere and starts throwing herself at him.... he might not think "spy", but "gold digger" will come to mind immediately.
The cute and smart 42-year-old CEO of a company that does a lot of business with his company? That's way more plausible.
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pulpgrinder retweeted
“AI is for lazy people.”
Yes. Exactly.
Lazy people invented almost everything worth having.
Someone was too lazy to carry things, so we got the wheel. Too lazy to wash clothes by hand, so we got the washing machine. Too lazy to do math on paper, so we got the calculator. Too lazy to walk, so we got the car.
Every great invention in history started with someone saying “I really don’t want to do this anymore.”
Hard work was never the goal.
It was the price we paid because we didn’t have anything better.
Now we do.
Call me lazy all you want.
I’m in very good company.
pulpgrinder retweeted
Maybe they could play competitive GTA for money. I'm totally serious. We already have professional gaming leagues.
We could build a machine that would bowl a strike essentially every time, even with older technology, but no one does that. That's because bowling is a sport. The point is not to bowl strikes per se, but to compete against another human being.
Sports of any kind are pretty much immune to AI.
There are other fields for which this is true, specifically anything for which "hand made" is a selling point. Tailoring. Cooking. Even (despite the fears) art. AI can generate images of pretty much anything you can imagine, but some of us have better imaginations than others. The stuff from people with better imaginations will still be valuable, even if the final image is generated using AI.
I also feel certain that there will be new jobs that we can't even comprehend, any more than a medieval serf could comprehend jobs like "software engineer" or "social media influencer".
We're already starting to see pretentious software projects describing themselves as "AI free". Almost invariably these are fringe projects with one committer and three users (compare and contrast the pro-AI positions of people like @esrtweet and Linus Torvalds).
I'm calling this "organic software", by analogy with "organic" vegetables: 5x the price and full of bugs.
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Ask your favorite AI to make a picture of you using the information it has, and put you in the historical era it thinks appropriate.
🤖 Made with AI
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pulpgrinder retweeted
BREAKING: Linear algebra is now a national security threat. 😂
Matrix multiplication? ILLEGAL.
Gradient descent? Straight to jail.
Backpropagation? 25 to life.
And don’t even THINK about multiplying two tensors without a federal permit.
Apparently the next great technological revolution must be stopped before someone accidentally invents a better algorithm.
Somewhere in China, an engineer just read this and laughed his fucking ass off. 💀
pulpgrinder retweeted
Linus Torvalds, the creator of git and linux(arguably the most two important pieces of software ever created) has called NOT using AI "Utterly Stupid"..
pulpgrinder retweeted
The majority of people have always been afraid of progress. But we drag them into the future anyway.
Ai will be no different. We're not asking.
"We need to stop advanced AI development"
The entire history of human progress is basically a tiny minority dragging the rest of humanity into the future.
A handful of visionaries, inventors, scientists, and builders push civilization forward, while the overwhelming majority doubts them, mocks them, resists change, or actively tries to stop them.
Then, a few years or decades later, everyone happily enjoys the fruits of the very progress they once opposed.
Without that tiny minority refusing to accept the world as it is, we'd probably still be living at medieval levels of civilization.
pulpgrinder retweeted
- Je ne vois AUCUNE raison de continuer à entraîner des modèles d’IA toujours plus puissants.
- Guérir le cancer ?
- Oui bon. Mais à part guérir le cancer ?
- La possibilité de vieillir en bonne santé, sans oublier qui sont ses enfants, sans porter des couches ?
- Admettons. À part le cancer et la vieillesse en bonne santé ?
- L’espoir pour les personnes handicapées de retrouver la parole ou la vue ? De traiter la maladie de Charcot, la sclérose en plaques et Parkinson ? D’inventer de nouveaux vaccins pour qu’un parent ne voie plus jamais son enfant mourir ?
- Tu ne vas pas me faire tous les progrès médicaux un par un ! À part le cancer, la vieillesse en bonne santé, la fin du handicap ou de la mortalité infantile ?
- Des robots pour que plus personne ne soit obligé de nettoyer des toilettes, de déboucher les égouts, de porter des sacs de ciment sous la canicule, de risquer sa vie sur un chantier ?
- Je te concède tout ça ! Mais à part le cancer, la vieillesse en bonne santé, la fin du handicap ou de la mortalité infantile et la disparition des métiers pénibles ?
- La démultiplication des rendements agricoles pour que tout le monde sur la planète mange à sa faim ?
- Admettons. Mais à part le cancer, la vieillesse en bonne santé, la fin du handicap ou de la mortalité infantile, la disparition des métiers pénibles et des famines ?
- L’invention de nouvelles technologies vertes ? Une énergie abondante et propre ? Faire reverdir les déserts ? Dessaler l'eau de mer pour offrir de l’eau potable à tous ? Vaincre le réchauffement climatique ?
- Bon. Mais à part le cancer, la vieillesse en bonne santé, la fin du handicap ou de la mortalité infantile, la disparition des métiers pénibles et des famines, et le sauvetage de la planète ?
- Un monde d’abondance où chacun pourra se loger confortablement, se chauffer l’hiver, et ne plus regarder les prix au supermarché ?
- Ok mais à part le cancer, la vieillesse en bonne santé, la fin du handicap ou de la mortalité infantile, la disparition des métiers pénibles et des famines, le sauvetage de la planète et l’abondance ?
- L’exploration spatiale ? La résolution des mystères de l’univers ?
- Qu’elle s’occupe déjà de nos problèmes concrets…
pulpgrinder retweeted
If you’re actively trying to stop AI development, you’re my enemy and an enemy of humanity.
I consider what you’re doing a direct attack on humanity’s future.
Every disease that could have been cured, every life that could have been saved, every person who could have escaped poverty.
Every opportunity lost is a direct consequence of your actions, and those lives are on your shoulders.
You’re willing to sacrifice all of that because you’re terrified of progress.
I have absolutely zero tolerance for this.
Your movement deserves to be politically defeated, intellectually dismantled, and remembered as one of the greatest obstacles to human progress in history.
A question has arisen: How will people "make a living" if robots become capable of doing "any job"?
Note that people still pay good money for handmade clothing, "artisanal" food, and all manner of such things, not because they're necessarily any better, but simply because they cost more. The economists call these things "Veblen goods", and the phenomenon is called "conspicuous consumption". Those things are not going anywhere as long as people are status-conscious. If robot waiters are ubiquitous, going to a restaurant with human waiters becomes a luxury good. Note there's effectively no upper limit to this. If weekend vacations to the Moon become affordable, the Cool People will start vacationing on Mars.
Consider shirts (just as an example). Almost all shirts are made in countries like China, Bangladesh, and so on. Some of them, however, are "designer" shirts, which basically means they have some person's name written on them. There may be minor differences in quality, but it's not really a better shirt than a Walmart store brand shirt in any meaningful sense. It might come out of the same factory. Heck, it might even be made by the same person. Yet people will pay 10x the price for the "designer" shirt just because it has different words written on it. Above that, of course, you have the hand-stitched bespoke clothing one gets from Savile Row tailors, for yet another massive increase in price.
None of that is going away, and that's just looking at things we already have. I feel certain that there also will be new jobs that don't even exist. We probably can't even comprehend them, any more than a 10th century serf could comprehend jobs like "software engineer" or "social media influencer".
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