The Gell-Mann amnesia effect occurs when assessing the utility of a source for a subject we know about compared to one that we don't. Even if is obviously low quality in our known subject matter we will still tend to trust it to inform us in areas we are not familiar with. I get the impression that this is at work with assessments of the utility of generative "AI" where people will say it is good…
Willpower itself isn't particularity effective but conscious decision making coupled with establishing structures that facilitate the alignment of those decisions with your desired outcomes is effective. However, that process isn't visible to others so they perceive it as willpower.
I've been following the commentariat's response to Carney's speech and I'm seeing the short term (electoral cycle; revolutionary) and long term (arc of history; evolutionary) theses develop. Revolutionary: Trump is an aberration who won't last long, and moving away from from US hegemony is too complex to be achievable. Evolutionary: Trump is the foreseeable product of a system that remains in…
AI is creating interesting times which can be hard to follow. As a by-product of organising my thoughts I've written a summary. AI does not mean what you think it means The "AI" we have is mostly LLMs (Large Language Models) so they are the golden hammer. We also have image generators as an example of a different model for a non-language job (even if they use LLMs to process text input from…
You'll lose your job to a "yes man" the management have hired to validate their expenditure on AI.
I have a theory about the current "AI" situation. If you're not very good at something then LLMs make you seem "kind of OK" at it. 1 Conversely, if you are good at something they make you seem "kind of OK" at it. 2 , 3 Now imagine you are a senior manager in a corporate job. Using LLMs gives you the chance to experience being "kind of OK" at something for the first time in your existence so,…
With CSS View Transitions it is possible to instruct the user agent to show transitions during page navigation. Whilst complex transitions are possible, a minimal set of transitions will cover a basic site layout. If we have a page template that contains a header, main content area, and a footer which are semantically marked up: <body> <header/> <main/> <footer/> </body> We can enable CSS view…
jQuery's ready() is a handy way to ensure code is executed after the DOM is ready if called before it is ready, or immediately if it is already ready. This differs from the DOMContentLoaded event which will only execute if called before it is ready. Recently I wanted to use the "fire and forget" mode of operation provided by .ready() so I recreated it using a Proxy . In this version we have an…
As a trial I used ChatGPT to do a task I have professional domain experience of (from a job I did for a couple of years 25 years ago) and I now have a paid professional advisor to handle for me. Doing it myself (i.e. compiling a 13 row, 11 column spreadsheet to compare the options), talking to my advisor, and using ChatGPT all took about the same time (~30 minutes). However, ChatGPT made numerous…
You borrow time from the future in order to get something faster in the present. Then, when the future becomes the present, you find yourself slowed down by having to pay back that borrowed time - so you borrow yet more time from the future.