Articles

Over the last 30 years, the internet has accumulated the breadth of human knowledge and experience and placed it at our fingertips. You can find almost anything on the internet—the answer to any question, the text of any book, or a survey of the research of any particular field. AI enthusiasts and tech companies poised to profit off of AI promise that, having been trained on this breadth of knowledge, AI will deliver new ways of retrieving data from the internet to answer just about any question....

It’s been a little while since I watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the Soviet director’s 1973 movie adaptation of a classic sci-fi novel of the same name written by Stanislaw Lem. But the other day, it suddenly struck me that, for being a work from the Cold War, Solaris provides a metaphor that I have been grasping for—a metaphor that helps explain how large language models are able to learn and how they can generate information based on their learnings....

I just played a surprisingly fun Earthbound-style text adventure in ChatGPT. After this, I’m convinced that we are not very far away from (simple) custom games tailor-made to your tastes. It’s also quite easy to imagine playing an AI-generated Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Prompt: I am playing a text adventure game whose theme is Earthbound, the SNES game. You present me with specific commands to look around my environment and keep track of my inventory....

I’ve been reading The Productive Programmer for a book club and it’s put me on a productivity binge. It’s an older book and many of its recommendations no longer apply, so I got excited when, while researching modern alternatives for some of the tools the author recommends, I happened to stumble on Alfred. Alfred is a replacement for the Mac spotlight that has already changed how I work. In fact, I was so excited by Alfred that within ten minutes of downloading, I immediately bought a “mega-supporter” license!...