Everybody's Lost Their Minds
A pretty great rant about all things AI.
The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic's con
An article in which the author talks about the con played by psychics, and how large language models pretty much do exactly the same thing.
The "contrarian dynamic" is that HN threads (and internet comments generally) ar... | Hacker News
A pretty good description of why, early on in the lifecycle of an article somewhere, the hate comments tend to be rife. I think it's fair to say it's even worse on HN.
Was the Iran War Caused by AI Psychosis? | House of Saud
Is the current state of the US government, and its war on Iran, down to use and abuse of AI?
Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.
Doesn't say what I didn't believe to be the case anyway, but it's worth having to hand. Also something worth guarding against.
Care: The missing ingredient
Someone saying that giving a shit is what matters when it comes to writing good code. I agree.
Willingness to look stupid is a genuine moat in creative work
It's not exactly a new take, but I like how this is worded: the better you get at something, the less likely you are to take risks; mainly because you know it's a risk at that point.
Grief and the AI Split
I think this is an interesting take on something I touched on in a recent post on my own blog.
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
Having spent a few days finally taking an "agentic" approach to building a project, one thing I noticed was I didn't personally enjoy the process. I enjoyed the outcome, I enjoyed the result, but the actual process was a boring slog. I also felt that I was losing something too.
This covers this concern.
The consequences of outsourcing thinking | Neil Sainsbury
Yet another post about the impact of the use of "AI" on our ability to learn and do things. It was hard not to nod along to this one too.
Outsourcing thinking – Erik Johannes Husom
A pretty good post going over the issues of relying on LLMs. I found myself nodding to a large part of this.
I’m autistic and don’t speak. Here’s what I want you to know
Interesting insight into being on the spectrum and being non-verbal.
It's Time to Stop Giving Unsolicited Advice
While not the best-written article (it seems to want to appear to be knowedgable, but also seems to do the common misuse of "passive agressive") it does cover some helpful examples of why unsolicitied advice is a shitty thing to provide.
How mindfulness can make you a darker person
Mindfulness can be a useful tool, and is rightly suggested as a tool in the toolbox of good mental health. But like all tools it can have its problems if not used correctly.
To quote form the start of the article:
"Mindfulness is thought to have multiple benefits – but it can also make you less likely to feel guilty about wrongdoing and derail your moral compass."
Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever
Article going over methods of control that can be used by abusers; and also abusive employers.
The Insensitive Ruins It All: Compositional and Compilational Influences of Social Sensitivity on Collective Intelligence in Groups
A group's collective intelligence reflects its capacity to perform well across a variety of cognitive tasks and it transcends the individual intelligence of its members. Previous research shows that group members' social sensitivity is a potential antecedent of collective intelligence, yet it is still unclear whether individual or group-level indices are responsible for the positive association between social sensitivity and collective intelligence. In a comprehensive manner, we test the extent to which both compositional (lowest and highest individual score) and compilational aspects (emergent group level) of social sensitivity are associated with collective intelligence. This study has implications for research that explores groups as information processors, and for group design as it indicates how a group should be composed with respect to social sensitivity if the group is to reach high levels of collective intelligence. Our empirical results indicate that collectively intelligent groups are those in which the least socially sensitive group member has a rather high score on social sensitivity. Differently stated, (socially sensitive) group members cannot compensate for the lack of social sensitivity of the other group members.