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Into the Cozycourse
No, this is not a post about “cosy horror”, it’s a meta-post about the nature arguments inspired by some of the extraordinarily stupid arguments I’ve seen in the recent “cosy horror” discourse. Let me start by pointing something out. It may surprise regular readers here that in some spaces I have a reputation as a…
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Sometime in the near future, a machine will generate a good short story
But not yet and I can’t say when and it is a terrible idea to attempt it. Firstly I want to deal with an objection. People may reasonably object that short of the machine being actually intelligent, it cannot possibly generate a good short story. There are a set of arguments of this nature that…
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Binomial misnomers
I was reading a thing about “effective altruism” or at least the version of the term adopted by tech/finance gurus. The term rapidly headed from an interesting philosophical position to a way for wealthy people to rationalise the way the power of wealth can be abused through philanthropy. A longer discussion on the term is…
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GPT and the Chinese Room
One of the many famous philosophical thought experiments is John Searle’s so-called Chinese Room argument. There’s an extensive encyclopedia entry on it here https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ which quotes Searle’s own summary of the argument: “Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together…
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I’m counting pronouns
I woke up late because I was working late on things from the mundane physical world, which means ploughing through spreadsheets and making columns think they are rows and rows think they are columns. This meant this morning I had less time for my entertainment, which means ploughing through spreadsheets and making columns think they…
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How to talk about Russia?
I’ll confess at the start that this post doesn’t have an answer to the question in it’s title. Also the title could have been “How to talk about China?” or Israel or the USA. I’ve granted myself permission to talk about Britain and Australia in any damn way I like 🙂 but they aren’t examples…
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It’s Voynich time again
Which means another round of breathless headlines, as I discussed in 2017: [https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/08/29/speaking-of-fantastical-drawings/ ] That time the theory was that the author was an Italian Jewish doctor. This time the theory is the author was a nun who lived here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aragonese_Castle The peer-reviewed paper [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566 ] presents a plausible case that the writing is in…
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Ye Olde Skull & Lobster: Reading Vox Day So You Don’t Have To: Part N+1
When P.Z. Myers is cited positively and unironically by Vox Day, you know there’s something amiss with the universe. There’s heresy in the air and right-on-right attacks going down. On the one hand, we have Jordan Peterson: transphobic right-wing purveyor of semi-coherent self-help books for people frightened by women going to university. On the other…
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CoOrDiNaTeD aTtAcKs!
Cast your minds back to April 7 2015. The Notre Dame Fighting Irish were beaten by the Connecticut Huskies in the NCAA Division I women’s basketball championship and Senator Rand Paul announced he was going to run for the Republic nomination for President of the United States. Meanwhile, in Sad Puppy related news, Larry Correia…
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Is HAL 9000 a robot?
HAL 9000 is the artificial intelligence controlling the Discovery One in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Arthur C Clarke’s related novels. HAL is generally referred to as a computer and not as a robot. He is generally referred to as a computer or as an AI. Even in his entry in the “Robot Hall of Fame”…
Camestros Felapton
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Camestros Felapton 