Selected essays by J.R. Cruciani in English.
A couple of months ago I wrote that a chatbot was a mirror without a center, and that when you look for whoever is watching behind the eyes, you don't find them, because the mirror doesn't give you back an image but your own self. I still think so, but it turns out I fell short on one thing: the mirror isn't entirely empty. It has an accent. And the accent isn't mine. I saw it…
Leor Zmigrod, who has written a book called The Ideological Brain, has spent years measuring something that on the face of it has nothing to do with politics: cognitive rigidity. She measures it with lab experiments like asking people to sort cards according to certain rules… and then, without warning, the rules change. In these experiments there are those who notice the change, shrug, and go…
Anyone who has read Sapkowski or played enough Dungeons & Dragons knows the joke, and knows the fear underneath the joke. The most powerful spell in the game is called "Wish," and with it you can ask for literally anything. And it's precisely for that reason that any DM worth their salt knows what to do when a greedy player invokes it: grant it, to the letter. You ask for a million gold coins…
Today Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, published a piece on his blog titled "A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable," where he lays out how he pictures his company in an economy driven by AI. What he says, in short, is that it isn't about which model is smarter, but about who owns what. His thesis is simple: the value isn't in picking the best model to build your solutions on top…
A few months ago I wrote that classifying the gods by their domains is a schoolboy's mistake: Ares for war, Poseidon for the seas, and that's that. What I said then was that the gods don't have domains, they have stories and one or two traits those stories spring from. I've kept turning it over, and I think that post fell short on the most interesting part, which isn't why…
You ask a model to help you write a regular expression for filtering phishing in your company's security pipeline. It refuses. Something about potential misuse. You are a security engineer. This is, in the most literal possible sense, your job. The refusal arrives in the same flat tone as every other refusal you have received this month, and once again you have no way to tell what produced…
There is a word used in Buddhism, anatta, that is almost always translated badly. The simplified new-age version is "there is no self," and it sounds like something printed on an Etsy canvas in someone's living room. The useful version is different. When you try to locate the centre of a person, the one looking out from behind the eyes, the owner of the thoughts, the one who decides, you do…
The sentence appears early in Dune: "thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." Almost everyone reads it as a technological prohibition, as if Frank Herbert had imagined a hippie future without computers. It is a comfortable and rather lazy reading. What the Butlerian commandment forbids is not the machine. It is abdication. The Jihad, according to the texts, does not destroy…
A few days ago I read a piece in Existential Espresso about the need to have a personal myth in the age of AI. The opening line was good: "I can focus for 12 hours per day because I'm living my myth." I understand why it travelled so well. In a time obsessed with productivity, it sounds like the ultimate trick for working longer hours, concentrating better, and winning some imaginary war…
A few days ago a friend contacted me with the classic "I have to tell you something important." He had been talking to ChatGPT and had arrived at a conclusion that, according to him, changed everything. What he had glimpsed was, in his words, a discovery at the level of a PhD in philosophy. The problem was that a simple internet search revealed Saussure had written that same idea in 1916. The…
For decades we worked under an implicit model we could call the SAP model: there is a "correct" way to do things, someone has encoded it into a tool, and your job is to adapt your processes to that mould. The software dictated the flow and you adjusted. We paid for consultancy by the kilo so our reality would fit someone else's diagram. That contract is breaking. Today, with AI, I can…
Because of work I have been lucky enough to travel a lot, from a very young age. The thing is that by now I have visited two hundred and something cities around the world. But I do not count them out of collecting instinct. I count them because at some point I realised that each new city does not enlarge my world, but focuses it. Travel is not accumulation. It is triangulation. Amsterdam, which is…
Who decides whether I will be able to open my current documents in ten years? In most cases, the answer is not us. A few months ago I decided that, in my case, it was no longer going to be that way. This is not technological purism, but a practical decision about where my ideas and creations live and who controls access to them. An open format is one whose specification is public and free. It does…
There is something I find hard to admit, although by now I do not have too many reservations about saying it: I remember almost nothing of my childhood. Not in a normal way, at least. I have loose images, disconnected fragments, scenes floating without context as if they belonged to the life of another person I know only superficially. I remember facts, data, approximate chronologies. But I do not…
In systems engineering there is a concept called POSIWID, an acronym for "the purpose of a system is what it does." It means a system is never wrong; a system always does what it was designed to do. It may not be the result you wanted or expected, but it is the one it knows how to produce. If you program a calculator app and when you ask it to calculate 2 + 2 it gives you 5, the app is not…