The say, about wars, that the first victim is the truth. In the misinformation skirmishes so far about A.I. watchers and their worst fears is an interesting study. When the history of humans is written, the only thing which might have an 'extinction event' is truth.
Thanks for writing a great piece.
I enjoyed it and I trust that you wrote it using tools ....
Thanks Mark. For us truth might be experiencing an extinction event, but the truth for the apparently 60% of vertebrate animals that our species has wiped off the face of the Earth is that extinction has already happened for them. If there is anything close to real karma, we certainly had it coming.
p.s. As for the tools I used to write this post, you're looking at it. Just Substack. :)
Thanks for the note; when I referred to tools I expected it to be 'grammarly' which is auto-installed on Substack, I wasn't implying that software wrote it for you !
I wonder, how many species have come and gone in 6 billion years; we've standing erect for about 300,000 years - and I'm wondering what portion are human caused vs. inevitable change?
Hi Mark, thanks for the time to comment on Birgitte’s article and bring up tools.
I wrote the text of my college thesis on a typewriter, an electric one with an eraser parallel band, and eventually evolved to using a computer and a printer. I bring up the printer since I still back up my important writings, and computer code, on paper.
Each tool has had its own “Hallucinations” and nothing is infallible. Computers can inconveniently forget their content, hard drives crash (“No Raul, check my directory, you never wrote that report”), flash-based drives’ storage cells age and become unreliable to erase/rewrite (“Look, there was a car in the middle of the air!” when analyzing recorded camera footage); printers jam at the most inconvenient moment (“I am tired, no more printing before you get to the airport.”) ; cloud accounts get hacked (“Welcome Raul! glad you can be in Europe and America at the same time!”); computer programs have bugs (“I know you meant to delete your photo collection overnight.”); and finally paper burns too if the room where it is held burns.
Substack is a tool too, and it cracks me up that the tool itself suggests that its name is misspelled.
Where am I going with this?
I’m writing a tool for writers, something that occurred to me to aid my writing style and that of my family, and I hope to make available to other writers in the near future. I will craft that tool using my 40 years of experience (1) programming computers and I will add the algorithms that other writers need. Not sure if it will become something like Grammarly but it will help people see and understand statistics about their writing and maybe suggest their next token in their style. I’ll do my best to put out a tool without errors, but there might be a lot of other tools in the way, yet I hope I help users move forward a bit thanks to this tool.
Oh no worries. No offense to Grammarly but it exasperates me :) I didn't know it was auto-installed, thanks for warning me!
The planet has seen multiple extinctions, some pretty brutal ones. Life is fiercely persistent though—it will return again and again, each time in different forms. I wonder how directly related all that richness and variety are to the quantum nature of the universe... all that potential spinning in multiple dimensions until someone, or something, takes a good look and locks it in place. I'm not sure we can ever truly know the extent of the damage we've done and how much of it was intentional vs ignorant vs indirect or accidental. What we should be focused on now is how to rebalance what we've got, or at least how to step out of the way a bit and let Nature do her thing.
Thanks for another great article Birgitte! You bring up many interesting points. If you recall, YouTube figured out that it could not escape copyright violations of music used as background by its users, so there was an “Uber moment(1)” where they chose to allow those violations BUT find a way to compensate the music copyright owners. Not sure if it was fairly, but the users didn’t have to change their new ways and I don’t see a raging legal war over copyrighted background music in YouTube.
More later on another comment.
(1) Medallions, imagine if writers had to have a Medallion to write on the Internet!
My pleasure Raul, thanks for popping in :) As is usual here in the valley, you ask for forgiveness rather than permission (sigh). As with (sadly) many if not most matters of copyright and IP, it all hinges on how much power and money you have to enforce your ownership and legal rights.
The say, about wars, that the first victim is the truth. In the misinformation skirmishes so far about A.I. watchers and their worst fears is an interesting study. When the history of humans is written, the only thing which might have an 'extinction event' is truth.
Thanks for writing a great piece.
I enjoyed it and I trust that you wrote it using tools ....
Cheers,
Makr
Thanks Mark. For us truth might be experiencing an extinction event, but the truth for the apparently 60% of vertebrate animals that our species has wiped off the face of the Earth is that extinction has already happened for them. If there is anything close to real karma, we certainly had it coming.
p.s. As for the tools I used to write this post, you're looking at it. Just Substack. :)
Thanks for the note; when I referred to tools I expected it to be 'grammarly' which is auto-installed on Substack, I wasn't implying that software wrote it for you !
I wonder, how many species have come and gone in 6 billion years; we've standing erect for about 300,000 years - and I'm wondering what portion are human caused vs. inevitable change?
Cheers,
Mark
Hi Mark, thanks for the time to comment on Birgitte’s article and bring up tools.
I wrote the text of my college thesis on a typewriter, an electric one with an eraser parallel band, and eventually evolved to using a computer and a printer. I bring up the printer since I still back up my important writings, and computer code, on paper.
Each tool has had its own “Hallucinations” and nothing is infallible. Computers can inconveniently forget their content, hard drives crash (“No Raul, check my directory, you never wrote that report”), flash-based drives’ storage cells age and become unreliable to erase/rewrite (“Look, there was a car in the middle of the air!” when analyzing recorded camera footage); printers jam at the most inconvenient moment (“I am tired, no more printing before you get to the airport.”) ; cloud accounts get hacked (“Welcome Raul! glad you can be in Europe and America at the same time!”); computer programs have bugs (“I know you meant to delete your photo collection overnight.”); and finally paper burns too if the room where it is held burns.
Substack is a tool too, and it cracks me up that the tool itself suggests that its name is misspelled.
Where am I going with this?
I’m writing a tool for writers, something that occurred to me to aid my writing style and that of my family, and I hope to make available to other writers in the near future. I will craft that tool using my 40 years of experience (1) programming computers and I will add the algorithms that other writers need. Not sure if it will become something like Grammarly but it will help people see and understand statistics about their writing and maybe suggest their next token in their style. I’ll do my best to put out a tool without errors, but there might be a lot of other tools in the way, yet I hope I help users move forward a bit thanks to this tool.
(1) I can finally say that this year!
Oh no worries. No offense to Grammarly but it exasperates me :) I didn't know it was auto-installed, thanks for warning me!
The planet has seen multiple extinctions, some pretty brutal ones. Life is fiercely persistent though—it will return again and again, each time in different forms. I wonder how directly related all that richness and variety are to the quantum nature of the universe... all that potential spinning in multiple dimensions until someone, or something, takes a good look and locks it in place. I'm not sure we can ever truly know the extent of the damage we've done and how much of it was intentional vs ignorant vs indirect or accidental. What we should be focused on now is how to rebalance what we've got, or at least how to step out of the way a bit and let Nature do her thing.
Some bakers will always want to bake their bread the same way forever.
Hey, as long as they're trained in Italy, France, or San Francisco...
Or at Donner's in NYC... 😛
Thanks for another great article Birgitte! You bring up many interesting points. If you recall, YouTube figured out that it could not escape copyright violations of music used as background by its users, so there was an “Uber moment(1)” where they chose to allow those violations BUT find a way to compensate the music copyright owners. Not sure if it was fairly, but the users didn’t have to change their new ways and I don’t see a raging legal war over copyrighted background music in YouTube.
More later on another comment.
(1) Medallions, imagine if writers had to have a Medallion to write on the Internet!
My pleasure Raul, thanks for popping in :) As is usual here in the valley, you ask for forgiveness rather than permission (sigh). As with (sadly) many if not most matters of copyright and IP, it all hinges on how much power and money you have to enforce your ownership and legal rights.