robert p. baird

I know this is naive (’twas ever thus) and that I should be thankful for any counterpressure we can get to this abominable war of aggression, but it really rattles something deep that increasing gas prices are likely to have more influence on the course and conduct of the war than dead schoolgirls.

Whether LLMs are conscious ought to be a ridiculous Q to anyone who's spent more than a few minutes learning how they work, but/and it sure doesn't help matters that Anthropic baked this nonsense into Claude's training. On this front at least, ChatGPT and Gemini's canned responses are much better.

we are at the stake,
And bay’d about with many enemies,
And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear,
Millions of mischiefs.

My mistake. apologies.

This isn’t hard. It’s bad to make guns easily available. It’s bad to put AI in charge of targeting decisions. Guns and AI can both kill but they can’t murder—they can’t bear moral responsibility—because they’re things, not people.

The substance of the exclusive is an anonymous DoJ employee blaming the computer:

Where does this headline out the blame?

As I suggested before, I’m willing to bet that this is a big (and self-interested) reason Amodei drew a red line at autonomous target selection: it’s not just that he knows how fallible Claude can be but he knows Anthropic would be blamed when things go wrong.

The emerging “Claude killed the kids” frame on this story shows just how easily anti-AI counterhype can end up doing the government’s work for it. If you use a computer to choose targets—esp. but not only if you give it bad data to work with—and it chooses poorly, that‘s on you, not the computer!

Looking for a #longread for your Saturday afternoon? Check out this story, in which I answer all your burning questions about how you can monkeywrench carbon capitalism just by living in a treehouse. (Including the most common q of all: how do treesitters go to the bathroom up there?)

Not today, Satan.

When a reading of text has proceeded by laborious stages within the test-rig of detailed study, pause to allow the overall effect to integrate back into a coherent human reading, and ponder whether your life may even have been changed, just a little, or your beliefs about large questions; whether your habits of feeling have been flattered or boastfully challenged, or whether your relation to the text builds up a kind of trust. This aspect is what you will take away with you when all the study is finished, and it should last you through a lifetime.

J. H. Prynne, on reading

Solidarity today with everyone who has an eighth-grader headed to a public high school in NYC… 😬

The Claude on your desktop knows as much about the data used by a Pentagon Claude as you do. Which is to say: nothing—or at most what it can read on the open internet. Instances share models, so their outputs tend to be similar given identical inputs, but they don't share a Borg-like hive mind.

A real sign of basic LLM illiteracy that people seem to think a Claude instance would have any privileged insight into *how* it "thinks," let alone how any other Claude instance might have been used. Instances "know" what they've been trained on, and what data they've been fed. That's it.

Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending

The use of AI to identify targets (without subsequent specific human confirmation) should be considered a war crime.

And by that I don't mean "we should make a rule" I mean that straightforward application of the existing rules would tell you that it is a war crime.

page one of Peter O’Leary’s <Phosphorescence of Thought>

I'm long separated from my limited experience here, but shooting down 3 friendly F-15s sounds like more than a deconfliction/comms problem, it sounds like an autonomous air-defense systems problem. Good thing we're not, say, recklessly rushing to replace more humans with AI in lethal decision loops

ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

There, then, he sat, holding up that forlorn candle in the heart of that almighty imbecility.

Thanks so much! I’m very glad to hear it, and relieved I didn’t sully our shared cognome.

I just finished The Nimbus, @robertpbaird.com’s excellent debut novel. (No relation, no acquaintance; I learned of it here on BlueSky.) It’s engagingly cerebral, but not at the expense of plot, pacing, or character development. Relevant to today and timeless at the same time. Highly recommended!

Needless to say, I would be very pleased to be proved wrong.

There’s been such a hard-on (technical term, sorry) for war with Iran among so many people in the upper reaches of media for so long that I fear we’re in for a wave of manufactured consent the likes of which we haven’t seen since Judith
Miller was a page-one regular at the NYT.

My god. Things are so bad, and they’re going to get so much worse before they get better. (Mostly, yes, for people whose faces we’ve never seen. But not only them.) I’m trying, with limited success, to remind myself on this 2003 of a morning that it’s it’s not naïveté to expect something better.

It’s always the ones you most expect.

Haha yes for sure! I admit I find it fascinating—feeds the part of my curiosity that almost made me an engineer. To me feels like early days of blogging, when you could make whatever you wanted and put it on the internet without hassle. Except now you can do that with anything a computer touches.

I’m sorry to be That Guy (TM), but I would recommend it. Not to prove to yourself that it will fail at all the things you know it will fail at. It probably will. But it’s qualitatively different than LLMs were even a year ago. I could still be wrong, but this does not feel like a hype-driven mirage.

…But what is technically called their “non-determinism” cuts both ways. And yeah, at some basic level they’re very wittgensteinian, because they run on pattern matching and statistics, rather than on logic. Family resemblances are their specialty.