I was doing a lot of thinking about why I find certain women so attractive. It isn’t one thing, and while yes there are certain things I like – heart shaped faces, cute face framing hairstyles, and big expressive eyes – these are not any sort of requirement. I just want to find a girl who has already found her final form and slays. That’s really it. There is no hidden agenda for me. I’m too old for silliness: I just want a companion I can adore and make happy. But no, people (especially the gorgeous female ones) want to be immature and let themselves be dominated by stupid bullies and clueless idiots…and it’s very frustrating.
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I like what this guy said about AI in schools, and I have to agree with him. We have to assume that AI is always being used outside the classroom, but teach kids how to be able to live without it. It’s sort of like the calculator… although this is a far more disruptive technology of course. What I do like is that homework, basically, now becomes a useless endeavor; I’ve always thought homework was stupid. If you’re in class all day, you should learn all you need to do there!
“A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights:
1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All “detectors” of AI imo don’t really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI.
2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later.
3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don’t want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it’s doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped “prompt”), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators.
4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher’s discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc.
TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings.”
https://sublime.app/card/www-x-com-karpathy-status-1993010584175141038-6221c53376ce4a81
I am amazed this quality of post is still on X… must be a fluky occurrence. Anyway, banning the use of AI at all is simply counter-productive. Hell, I use it constantly! Just not as much as most people. It’s not evil at all, but how it’s pervaded everything is; as usual, it’s not the tech, it’s the lazy and scheming people ruining it for everyone else.
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This is a great quote:
Doris Lessing on reading:
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
https://sublime.app/card/doris-lessing-on-reading-there-is-only-one-way-t
I’m glad I came back to actually using the Sublime app. The staff picks lately have been phenomenal! This part of the quote is particularly interesting to me: “Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.” I feel like many things I write are just not the things a lot of people who read them are ready for just yet. I’m ahead of my time I suppose in some ways, or other people are just not ready to accept certain aspects of reality.
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“The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above all, an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us and sometimes even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express.”
– Pope Leo XIV, https://sublime.app/card/the-logic-of-algorithms-tends-to-repeat-what-wor
Yes, the Pope said this. I’m impressed. And really, the algorithms are by their very nature propagators of the status quo. They don’t know any difference. Machine learning has its limits. At least for now. So much creativity is being buried under generative outputs, some of which are actually pretty strong considering it’s basically a room full of a million monkeys on typewriters inside of your device. But generative AI can only imitate… it’s how you use it that allows YOU as the human being to iterate and expand upon what’s existing. It’s why I actually find AI hallucinations useful… you see where the gaps in its “thinking” occur and where the model is either not properly trained or what concepts it can’t somehow grok just yet.
And yes, I intentionally used the word ‘grok’ to bring to mind Elon Musk’s xAI project. I refuse to use it, but apparently, it’s quite impressive. I have considered messing with Perplexity more, as it’s the one AI product even anti-AI people seem okay with using. I’m certainly not anti-AI, but I did need to step back and gain perspective on how it was actually making me cognitively lazy. But many of us already were cognitively lazy long before ChatGPT went viral; as usual, disruptive technologies bring out both the best and worst of humanity, but we focus mainly on the worst. For all its faults, LLMs have actually helped my writing overall more than hurt, even if the end result was often lacking, the process of discovering WHY it was lacking is quite insightful.
[To be completely honest, I only use AI for search and messing about just to see what it iterates. I don’t use it at ALL for creative or even creative-adjacent tasks anymore, just to give me some potential digital gardening material, and just to track the progress of the viability of the technology in certain areas that impact creative fields. It’s not nearly as close as we think to actually being anywhere CLOSE to human level. Just FYI. It’s all smoke and mirrors.]
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The Sublime app is a treasure trove for Potent Quotables, for sure. I keep saying to Emily that a collected works will be coming in the next year or so. I think it will be longer than that. [Yes, it’s planned for 2027.] Writing essays doesn’t really excite me anymore. I need to focus on much broader things… but not plan it out too much, either. Basically, I’m just gonna play it as it lays.
… I never cease to be amazed just how truly stupid I can be. What I mean by that is I’m astounded by my own ignorance of things that I probably shouldn’t be ignorant about.
There is no point forcing myself to create content for a nonexistent audience. [So, I basically just started writing the content I’d want to read. We’ll see how this goes, as it’s still not getting much traction, but it’s getting at least SOMETHING!]
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Anne Reburn had a really sweet cover of Tay’s Opalite.
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Cinzia (Lady of the Library) had a very good video about self education:
She said a lot of great stuff, but one thing really stood out. The best parts of education happen in times of reflection and in pauses. Clearly I burned out just like she did. It does actually make you physically ill… [So, I was still trying to heal from my own lifelong burnout.]
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Oh, Jess of the Shire talked about a new Tolkien book. Yes, I am serious.
It’s called the Bovadium Fragments. He was literally trolling Oxford. It’s hilarious. Basically, archaeologists are digging up ancient ruins that were once Oxford after civilization fell because of cars. I am dead serious. He absolutely hated cars. I never made the Morris automobile connection, who basically took over the university town. Yes he did have a car later, but he did correctly identify a lot of the problems. Like Jess said, we have to drive everywhere. The suburbs are a stupid invention. But Emily and I can’t help but drive either. We didn’t ask to live in this world. But we should work towards something better and I agree.
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I need to get away from tech more often… I’m not sure exactly how I will do that, as handwriting is actually physically painful for me, but the idea should be that I’m not letting tech just eat away my day… But as I said earlier, I’m extremely burnt out. [Playing games like Master Duel] is part of my recovery process. And I do need to just brain dump more often, let words just spit themselves out onto the page and make sense of it later. Or perhaps, that trying to make sense of all that is the problem I’m having. Perhaps it doesn’t have to make sense at all, long as you enjoy the process.
