John's blog

Talking about technology (mostly)

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

Posted on 2023-10-22 [Sunday] by Jay Jay

This on IRC today: The Tyranny of Structurelessness. It’s an essay about human organizations by Jo Freeman from back in the seventies.

Postscript on the Societies of Control

Posted on 2023-10-19 [Thursday] by Jay Jay

My friend sent me a link to Postscript on the Societies of Control by Gilles Deleuze. I’m not sure if I agree. I might need to read this one again.

The Problems of Philosophy, further reading

Posted on 2023-09-16 [Saturday] by Jay Jay

At the end of The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell says:

The student who wishes to acquire an elementary knowledge of
philosophy will find it both easier and more profitable to read some
of the works of the great philosophers than to attempt to derive an
all-round view from handbooks. The following are specially
recommended:

Plato: Republic (especially Books VI and VII)
René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy
Baruch Spinoza: Ethics
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Monadology
George Berkeley: Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous
David Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Immanuel Kant: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

cathode ray dude dot com

Posted on 2023-09-10 [Sunday] by Jay Jay

This guy, Cathode Ray Dude [CRD], does some fun stuff. He’s on the web via HTTPS at gekk.info and HTTP at www.cathoderaydude.com.

Why AI Is So Dangerous & How It Could Destroy Humanity

Posted on 2023-08-03 [Thursday] by Jay Jay

Ah, click bait. Sign of the times! MEGATHREAT: Why AI Is So Dangerous & How It Could Destroy Humanity | Mo Gawdat.

Mo Gawdat is an Egyptian entrepreneur and writer. He is the former chief business officer for Google X and author of the books Solve for Happy and Scary Smart.

Mo says there are some things we shouldn’t waste time talking about because they are going to happen, inevitably. These are:

There is no shutting down or reversing AI, we can’t stop it
AI will be significantly smarter than humans
Bad things will happen in the process of developing AI (the specifics to be determined)

…and the fourth inevitability? Utopia..?

ChatGPT Shared Links FAQ

Posted on 2023-05-27 [Saturday] by Jay Jay

Hell yeah! ChatGPT Shared Links FAQ. I see many links in your future.

6 Phases of the Post-GPT World

Posted on 2023-05-27 [Saturday] by Jay Jay

6 Phases of the Post-GPT World. A good read. Some interesting ideas. Many quotable bits but this was my fav: “In short, we’re about to multiply the creative output of planet Earth by hundreds of orders of magnitude.”