Political propaganda surely plays an important causal role in the world as we find it. But propaganda is often unfortunately akin to pornography as being something we know when we see it, but something that kind of resists theorizing. It would be nice to make discoveries about propaganda, to predict…

Living in Qing China, you’d probably smoke opium. You’d thereby embroil yourself, one way or another, in the opium wars of 1840 or so, in which the Brits force-sold opium to the Chinese to rustle up the cash needed to buy tea from them. …

(I’m periodically editing this stylistically as a sort of informal A/B test to see if any style works better. At the bottom, if you make it that far, you’ll see the former intro paragraph; I changed the title too, which was formerly China’s ‘interim measures’ and the future of AI…

I made this znpp.glitch.me For people who want to see how the story has unfolded over the past year or so. It’s a record of hopefully all the stories from the Ukrainian language Ukrinform about the plant, with English translations, searchable pretty nicely. If people find it useful I’ll add some more features. Feel free to ‘remix’ it and apologies for the woeful coding.

Some large language models like GPT-4 do best in English. Others, like Baidu’s Ernie Bot or SenseTime’s SenseChat 2.0 do best in Chinese. What follows from these facts? The topic reveals interesting and surprising interconnections between recent history, fine details of technology, and more speculative questions about intelligence and language. …

It’s natural to wonder for pretty much any task whether current generation LLMs or other ‘AI’ systems can perform it. …

Some predict that superintelligent AI will command all the world’s resources, including us, and will use those resources — including, unfortunately for us, our atoms — to further its goals. This atom-borrowing will lead to the death of everyone, these people think. Call this prediction doom. What I want to…

Last week I took a look into what Irish far-right had to say about the anti-refugee protest and violence in Sandwith street in the centre of Dublin. I noted a couple of things: first, how it was odd that, among people concerned with this issue in Dublin domestic affairs, it…

(edited with a couple of additions 15/05) On 12 May, in the centre of Dublin, there was a protest against an area where refugees had been sleeping rough. It ended: With the area the people had occupied burned and with protesters and their supporters self-congratulating: Take a moment to admire…