It's only taken me two decades but I've worked out why I've never liked people using the term "grok", despite being a big nerd who's the right age to have read that Heinlein novel.

Using it is a way of reinforcing your sense of being part of a special group …

Stories about AI have an impoverished visual grammar: bots that look like something from a 90s music video, all porcelain surfaces and dark hydraulic sinews, against corporate vaporwave neon swirls, or junk from DALL-E. I suppose there's a need to embody the disembodied, the same impulse that puts a CGI-rendered …

Like every other nerd, I spent way too much time earlier last week playing with and worrying about Chat-GPT, but you can relax, I've stumped it:

I never thought that my addiction to lipograms would lead to any useful conclusions, but these exchanges seem to capture exactly what Chat-GPT is …

I didn't have as much time as I usually do for National Novel Generating Month, but I think the less time I spend on it, the better the results. I started out with a plan to do a complex, procedurally-generated parody of Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili but only got as far …

Since there's been a big influx from Twitter, here's an updated and shorter version of a Mastodon primer I wrote back in 2018.

For more detail on how federation works, see Elilla's Futuristic Mastodon introduction for 2021.

Get off mastodon.social

There's mastodon.social, which is run by the lead …

This is the presentation I gave last week at eResearch Australasia in Brisbane. There's a page of links to the tools and references mentioned here. The slides were converted to blog form with Peter Sefton's pptx_to_md converter.

PDF version | Powerpoint Version

Hi - I’m Mike Lynch, and I work at …

Hermes Trismegistus driving a schoolbus

Last week I saw someone describe GitHub Copilot—the code-completion tool which has been trained on all of the public source code on GitHub—as a form of license-laundering, and the same thing occurs to me about DALL-E.

Clearly, it's been trained on an enormous …

GLOSSATORY is a bot which posts spurious definitions from an RNN trained on a dictionary, and every morning I use its output as a prompt for little drawings, some of which I post at GLOSSATORY. Today I tried feeding some recent definitions to DALL-E to see what it came up …

"Graffiti art of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard"

Happy Friday.

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 …