David Brooks, now with added vocal fry!

by liberal japonicus Perhaps I’m being overly grumpy, but with Ezra Klein forgoing the guest and giving an earnest solo performance suggests to me he is slipping into Brooks’ role. And I should add, Klein is missing something that almost everyone else does as well, which is the whole AI narrative is that these problems … Read more

病菌与钢铁 redux

by liberal japonicus A decent discussion of the approaches to AI in China versus the US is found here, but to me, because it starts from a misguided assumption, is China and the US are playing the same game with regards to AI, they can’t see the forest for the trees. The US and China … Read more

Seaxna cynn hit is, la!

by liberal japonicus A thread to invite Hartmut and any others to weigh in on the AfD’s electoral victory in Saxony-Anhalt. This was the Rest is Politics duo talk to German journalist Paul Ronzheimerx and I wonder what other points people might raise. The title is just to note that English speakers might be more … Read more

And then, you’ll be a man, my son

by liberal japonicus The NYTimes Headlines reports that an OpenAI has just solved one of the Millenium problems, the Navier-Stokes equations. Yay, us! Err, just a second. Quanta has this at the end of their article. OpenAI admits that their work on the Navier-Stokes equation was inspired by rumors that Alpöge and Buckmaster had solved … Read more

How much suspension is too much?

by liberal japonicus I thought it was Aristotle who came up with ‘suspension of disbelief’, but apparently, it was Samuel Coleridge. Aristotle argued that a convincing impossibility in a story is preferable to an unconvincing possibility, but Coleridge came up with the phrase. This is prompted by seeing clips for the TV series Lanterns along … Read more