Thinking about yesterday's post and whether it really went anywhere, and whether the same criticism I levelled at the waffly IT blog post might be levelled at my own writing here, which doesn't need to come up to any real standards of coherence or clarity. That's what editors are for …

Setting aside the question of whether LaMDA is sentient, or whether the Turing Test is valid, or whether general AI is possible or likely—there are a lot very strongly held opinions on the matter out there if you want to go looking for them—I've been thinking about what …

Here's a meme I made a few months ago. Have a good weekend.

I used to do a Bloomsday blog post every year until last year, which was the first time I forgot to commemorate the day in any way for as long as I could remember, and I almost forgot this year as well. Maybe the pandemic shook something loose. It's not …

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

London: Chatto and Windus, 2022

Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

I bought this as soon as I saw it, after having read a review of it in the LRB - it follows the lives and careers of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth …

I've been reading a bunch of books this year about the history of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and the linguistic / analytical turn it took in England under the influence of Wittgenstein and A J Ayer, most recently Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman's Metaphysical Animals …

So I have opinions about the Google engineer who thinks that his chatbot is sentient, because of course I have. One of the things about people who work with computers is that we have opinions about AI which are not necessarily grounded in anything real about either intelligence or computers …

I'd had goat, I'd had rabbit and duck, I'd had quails,
I'd had clams, I'd had squid, I'd had fungus and snails.
Oh, so many odd foods I was willing to try,
But I couldn't do wallaby! No, not I!

I thought I'd try it all—from a cook whom …

I know it's bad that Epic have bought Bandcamp, and when that was announced I made sure to download a copy of everything I'd bought there, but I still rely on their emails to not just let me know what's new but also what's old. It seems that I should …

In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from the Proceedings of ESTAR(SER) London: Strange Attractor Press, 2021

D Graham Burnett, Catherine L Hansen and Justin E H Smith (eds.)

It is said that Zeuxis went back to work on that painting, in the hopes of improving the child …