a conversation with Parth Agrawal about play, ritual, and the weird edges of LLM interactions
Well-intentioned obscenity
An LLM lied about me at the office and I'm cranky about it. That interaction makes me think a lot about how LLMs are becoming normalized, though, and what we're looking at in terms of their role in human-to-human interactions in the future.
What Happens, Exactly, When a Person Talks to an LLM?
A phenomenology of thinking with a model.
LLMs and self-referentiality
I woke up yesterday with the following thoughts, which are probably either obvious or dumb. A central thesis that many readers, including me, took from Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach when y…
Meet the Pirates of the RAG: Adaptively Attacking LLMs to Leak Knowledge Bases
Meet the Pirates of the RAG: Adaptively Attacking LLMs to Leak Knowledge Bases
The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think — LessWrong
This article contains spoilers for At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and other works by H. P. Lovecraft. …
The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway.
I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, but I don't think I am alone with it.
The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway.
I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, but I don't think I am alone with it.
Against False Indulgences in LLM Alignment
Unnecessary moral concern, and the false indulgences that drive it.
Entangled Magic in the Medieval Latin West
This article focusses on the history of learned magic in late medieval Europe, breaking a period of about 500 years into chronological stages to explore how medieval supporters and critics of magic represented the art and responded to each other’s arguments, then reframed their own in a continuous dynamic entanglement. In this period learned magic texts from diverse religious and cosmological traditions (primarily Christian, Jewish, Arabic and Greco-Roman) circulated among people familiar with, and emotionally invested in, a great variety of institutional and informal rituals. Sources reveal a vibrant culture of exchanges of texts between members of religious orders, physicians and lay men, clerics and lay women – a culture of entanglement: discussion, borrowing, critique and adaptation alongside practitioner-client relationships and necessary secrecy and concealment.
Game over. AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there.
First slowly, and then all at once, dreams of LLMs bringing us to the cusp of AGI have fallen apart.
There's Something Fundamentally Wrong With LLMs
LLMs aren't trained on the "vast majority of speech," experts warn, a major blind spot that could have sweeping consequences.
