My head hurts. The cold I caught on my flight back, to start with, passed the mike to a sinusitis that is still in effect. Among numerous other symptoms, sinusitis comes with headaches and neck pain out of the box, both of whom hit it off with my migraine susceptibility like a house on fire. Still can’t do sports, either—going to the grocery store feels exhausting enough for the day. (Also, I couldn’t afford to stop working last week, which sure didn’t help.) Another thing that makes my head hurt is my LinkedIn stream of which I read too much when I couldn’t sleep the other night. I don’t expect people to understand or even read the more serious papers on LLM/GenAI they enthusiastically cite while getting most of the conclusions wrong—hey, it’s LinkedIn! But there are also the shared bogus papers, and these just kill me. Their delusions of and obsessions with a godlike AI intelligence that’s just around the corner and will either annihilate humankind, solve humanity’s every problem, or both, have so much in common with the volatile eschatological stew of salvation and annihilation from Evangelical rapture pamphlets, it’s eerie. Sure, the challenges we face can feel overwhelming at times. But settling with a Second Coming derivative that adds even more problems to those we already face and hoping for the best doesn’t strike me as a workable strategy.
Thus, not counting a last-minute conference proposal, I didn’t write a lot last week except one post on Cognitive Offloading: LLMs in the Classroom and two linked-list items referring to an LLM satire and an article on model collapse, respectively. And I forged ahead with editing more photos I took in Taiwan—there are now eight album buckets on Flickr I’m slowly filling up, encompassing urban, natural, historic, and religious motifs and places. And, as usual, there are my daily squaries on Pixelfed.
For the Sunday Funnies, here’s an office accessory you don’t want to miss and a little kitty who excels in playing pool. Also, I found a 10-year-old but well-timed and pretty cool montage music video on YouTube that juxtaposes Zager and Evans‘s 1969 “In the Year 2525” with footage from Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis.
Enjoy!
J.
Thus, not counting a last-minute conference proposal, I didn’t write a lot last week except one post on Cognitive Offloading: LLMs in the Classroom and two linked-list items referring to an LLM satire and an article on model collapse, respectively. And I forged ahead with editing more photos I took in Taiwan—there are now eight album buckets on Flickr I’m slowly filling up, encompassing urban, natural, historic, and religious motifs and places. And, as usual, there are my daily squaries on Pixelfed.
For the Sunday Funnies, here’s an office accessory you don’t want to miss and a little kitty who excels in playing pool. Also, I found a 10-year-old but well-timed and pretty cool montage music video on YouTube that juxtaposes Zager and Evans‘s 1969 “In the Year 2525” with footage from Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis.
Enjoy!
J.