An intentionally old school blog on privacy, security, technology, and ideas.
After World War 1, a horrific, antisemitic myth was used in Germany to justify many of the arguments that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis used to rise to power. The myth goes something like this: Germany was far too powerful to have lost a war without some sort of deep betrayal. The leaders in the government who overthrew the German Empire and signed the armistice ending WW1 were either criminals or…
Helen Toner’s latest post is also the latest in a long line of posts to realize that the terminology we’re using to describe how LLM-based technologies work is profoundly broken:
Ben Thompson’s Stratechery article yesterday ended with a take on AI’s effect on security. I strongly disagree with him. Disagreement is an opportunity to learn, so I’ll put my thoughts here, and we’ll see who’s closer to right.
One of the main reasons that I stopped posting here regularly was that everything I wanted to write about was negative. This didn’t feel particularly healthy. When I came across The Broccoli Tree, I really started to think seriously about what I wanted to write about and why. I wanted to share good news, things that make people happy.
Last Friday, Ross Anderson wrote about the rise of China’s scientific research:
It’s pretty clear that we’ve reached the point where the one thing that AI is actually the best at is taking the blame for things that aren’t really its fault. Examples abound. Here are a few.
Google’s purported and now realized quantum computing breakthrough has dominated much of my news cycle this past week. And despite being months and months behind in my goal to share things that make me happy, I thought I would share something about this breakthrough. (You can access the academic paper on Nature.)
I love science and the search for truth. This month, as part of my more-conscious effort of sharing the things I love, I’m sharing a video that gets at a core concept that is widely misunderstood about The Scientific Method: that it is ultimately and fundamentally a human enterprise. First, the video, which is required viewing for the rest of the post.
I am old enough to remember when the popular Internet was new, and one of the most amazing things about it was the sense that it would bring information and education to the masses almost instantaneously. The hype was real.
I recently discovered that John Green from the Vlogbrothers was actually the same John Green who wrote Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, and a few other YA books that you’ve probably seen in stores. This was rather surprising to me. I vaguely liked the Vlogbrothers as producers and supporters of great content on YouTube. I didn’t watch much of their original creations, but I loved the idea…