Et Cetera - Miscellanea of technology, cognition, and the philosophy of the future.

7 Oct

Liar! Asimovian Robots & AI Sycophancy

Several of the best known and exploitable traits of AI wend themselves into memes. One of the most visible of these, easily poked, is the unreasonably high agreeability that has been sometimes call “AI sycophancy.” Unvarying affirmatives (except when instructed)...
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1 Jun

The Use of Code

A lecture* given by a researcher in computing highlighted a dilemma: The lecturer’s friend, with no technical background, taught himself scratch coding skills to cobble together an app. Like many smart and driven people, he was able to learn...
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18 May

The Game Never Stops: Economy – Humanity – Scale

Amazon recently introduced one-hour shipping in many locations. Unmistakably a triumph of logistics, resource planning, and automation, it is also unmistakably a triumph of instant gratification. The argument can be made reasonably that one-hour shipping satisfies a consumer need to...
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14 May

“Now Where Are The Jobs?”

AI puts the squeeze on new grads — and the colleges that promised to make them employable ‘I feel helpless’: college graduates can’t find entry-level roles in shrinking market amid rise of AI Recent college graduates face a new...
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11 May

Back to Baseline

A sharpened stone and an agentic coding AI both offer utility. The sharpened stone assists in mobbing a prehistoric mastodon for dinner. The agentic AI helps reach a working solution with less manual coding. Both are tools, and neither is...
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22 Apr

What Maybe Was — Truth, Pixels, and Trust

There is an image that resurfaces on social media sometimes, sourced from one or two archives which host it, of a young American Indian woman. The archives note her name as O-o-dee, of the Kiowa people, the picture taken shortly...
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15 Sep

Mini Miracle Machine

One of the best immediately current outcomes of “supercharged” AI coding is not its support of enterprise operations, which despite turning out large proportions of new code remains questionable. Of possibly superior interest is the production-ready code it can turn...
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23 Jun

White Paper: CoPilot Organizational Assessment

This white paper was written close to a year ago as of this posting, so some of its contents may have lost accuracy. The analysis framework itself I believe maintains relevance. Preliminary note: The viewpoints expressed in this...
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4 Apr

Cognitive Abstention

“All the talk in the world doesn’t get it unless you listen to the talk in a new way.” — Alan Watts Conversation is a fast-paced endeavor. By adulthood we learn to listen, process, and respond fluidly, and to...
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13 Feb

Learning What to Learn While Learning (What?) — A Lesson in Classic Greek

I’m striving slowly to pick up a little classical Greek, as a tool to aid study in other disciplines (philosophy, history, at al). It’s obviously a fascinating language with a fascinating history, but despite many corollaries to English (vice versa,...
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