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(Obviously there's lots of places where semi-fictitious data is fine, like idea generation, art, idle talk, and what we called "spraffing": the conversational annealing that comes to you when you lie horizontal on grass and just talk without logical or artistic intent)

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My hardware prof said "bad data is worse than no data, because it deceives us".

This is where I am with LLMs; why I still don't use em (outside of research). I can believe that the fourth beast is no worse than most of you lot. But I was already struggling to process you.

Project Euler shouldn't be as engaging as it is. It asks for bullshit arbitrary things like the count of the parity of the lengths of the cycles of the partial denominators of the continued fractions of irrational square roots & somehow I go "hmm yep that's worth an hour of life"

You can throw this back and say that "modern" simply doesn't mean recent anymore; that it instead has post-impressionism and century-old modernism as a referent.

But that fails immediately since: why did that change?

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spotted in London: the eternal modern, the aesthetic end of history.

(Cézanne died 116 years ago, but his paintings are still considered modern. This is more to do with our stagnation than his prescience.)

Provine: bias towards explaining human behaviour in terms of cognition and consciousness.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/293428

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Various kinds of "philosopher's syndrome":

funniest example of Gell-Mann amnesia I have ever seen

i feel you, entire staff of microsoft research, i feel you

'Often the “tech sector” feels less a product of market incentives than a massive, weird, and opaque public works product, orchestrated by eccentrics like Masayoshi Son, ultimately organized on the aesthetics & moods of its architects, not “doing business” in conventional sense'

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