Francis Spufford - "Cahokia Jazz"

amazing noir detective set in an alternative reality of America

Great language and descriptions.

But when two figures came picking their way through the backlot beyond the diner, in clothes made for office floors and not rubble and weeds, it was plain from Drummond's silent surprise that the one in the lead must be the party that he had been trying to be discreet about. He was a plump, baby-faced takata in a Homburg hat and a bow-tie. The fine chalk stripes of his suit were so far apart that they would have looked almost jazzy, had it not been cut with a loose, expensive neglectfulness. He was only about forty, but both a toddler and an ancient would have been equally at home in his outfit. Behind him came a secretary carrying a couple of items in cardboard. She was labouring with difficulty to extract the points of her heels from the broken ground.

    "Oscar, move this gentleman," the Man said.
    Oscar cracked his knuckles. His black gloves were the size of baseball mitts.The Pinkerton's man only regarded him with a melancholy professional interest, and resettled his jacket minutely, to show the holster bulge. Oscar nodded in a similar minimal spirit. Then he made his way unhurriedly back to the Duesenberg, and through the fog they heard the sound of a door opening and closing, and something metallic being cocked. He came back with a tommy gun twin to the one Barrow had seen at the House of the Moon. The Hashi family must have been buying in bulk.
    The guard moved.

Ken Liu - "The Hidden Girl and other stories"

just as amazing as his first collection.

At some point, got a bit tired of the "Singularity" story, it dragged on a bit too much, but the later stories were great again.

Also, found out Netflix' Love Death + Robots, "Good Hunting" story was based on one of Liu's stories.

(Ghost Days)

"The character forms from the Zhou Dynasty were a bit different from later forms," his father said, as though William was still only a child being taught how to read and write. "So collectors from later ages would sometimes carve their interpretations of the script on the vessels. Like the patina, these interpretations also accumulate on the vessels in layers, build up over time."

宇  字

    "Have you ever noticed how similar the character 'jyi' - for the universe, which is also the first character in your name - is to the character 'zi' - for writing?"

    William shook his head, not really listening.

    This entire culture is based on hypocrisy, on fakery, on mocking up the appearance for that which cannot be obtained.

    "See how the universe is straightforward, but to understand it with the intellect, to turn it into language, requires a twist, a sharp turn? Between the World and the Word, there lies an extra curve. When you look at these characters, you're convening with the history of these artifacts, with the minds of our ancestors from thousands of years ago. That is the deep wisdom of our people, and no Latin letters will ever get at our truth as deeply as our characters."

(used https://dictionary.writtenchinese.com/#sk=zi&svt=pinyin for finding the characters. But this is Cantonese, so https://cantonese.org/search.php?q=Jyu would have been better) 

(Thoughts and Prayers)

One time, Hayley drove home drunk; another time, she stole from me and lied until I found the money in her purse. She knew how to manipulate people and wasn't shy about doing it. She was fiercely loyal, courageous, kind, but she could also be reckless, cruel, petty. I loved Hayley because she was human, but the girl in that video was both more and less than.

Josh Dzieza - "What do you love when you fall for AI?"

https://www.theverge.com/c/24300623/ai-companions-replika-openai-chatgpt-assistant-romance

thoughtful essay

Naturally, people presented with a technology that uses language with human fluency and invited to interact with it as if it were human immediately started ascribing to it other human faculties. Often, this meant mistaking ChatGPT’s confident style and expert vocabulary for the sort of accuracy they would signal if coming from a human. Others spooked themselves by cajoling the system into saying it was sentient, in love with them, or desiring freedom and power, not realizing it was mirroring back human-written fantasies contained in its training data. These errors were by no means limited to laypeople. More subtle forms of anthropomorphization persist, even among those working on AI. For example, it’s common to say models are progressing from toddler-level intelligence to high-school and PhD levels, when these measures of human education are a poor fit for systems that can explain quantum physics in iambic pentameter but struggle with basic arithmetic. 

These systems can generate language that seems astonishingly human, Shanahan wrote, but the fundamentally alien process they use to do so has important implications for how we should understand their words. To use Shanahan’s example, when you ask a person, “What country is to the south of Rwanda?” and they answer “Burundi,” they are communicating a fact they believe to be true about the external world. When you pose the question to a language model, what you are really asking is, “Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of text, what are the words most likely to follow the sequence ‘what country is to the south of Rwanda?’” Even if the system responds with the word “Burundi,” this is a different sort of assertion with a different relationship to reality than the human’s answer, and to say the AI “knows” or “believes” Burundi to be south of Rwanda is a category mistake that will lead to errors and confusion. 

There is another perspective, not necessarily contradictory, which is that how we treat AI matters not because AI has any intrinsic moral standing but because of its potential to change us.

People often respond to the perceived weaknesses of AI by pointing to similar shortcomings in humans, but these comparisons can be a sort of reverse anthropomorphism that equates what are, in reality, two different phenomena. For example, AI errors are often dismissed by pointing out that people also get things wrong, which is superficially true but elides the different relationship humans and language models have to assertions of fact. Similarly, human relationships can be illusory — someone can misread another person’s feelings — but that is different from how a relationship with a language model is illusory. There, the illusion is that anything stands behind the words at all — feelings, a self — other than the statistical distribution of words in a model’s training data. 

"The Eternal Mainframe" by Rudolf Winestock

 https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html

    If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

    -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Kinds of Kindness

directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, him of Lobster

Quite weird, but good. Three different stories, same actors. William DaFoe and Emma Stone amongst them

LaRoy, Texas

Very Coen-brothers like film.  Quite enjoyable

Cyberpunk: Edge Runners

eh, ok