Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

In a secret chamber buried deep within Earth's outer core, a gigantic robot named Unix is counting to 2.15 billion. There he has sat undisturbed since January 1, 1970. Unix is up to 1.7 billion. He's very tired, but he must count. One day, 14 years from now, he will have counted to the highest number imaginable. Boiling water will no longer make steam. The moon will emit a Glow That Is Not Light. Out of volcanoes, the winged beasts will emerge. And Unix will finally know what it is to rest

"The artificial intelligence community has prioritized verisimilitude at the expense of veracity. They didn’t have to do that; it was a choice, perhaps influenced by Alan Turing’s idea that an intelligent machine should be able to impersonate a human."

The result: "an endless supply of plausible bullshit"

@gleick in @nybooks

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/11/23/a-genius-for-mimicry/

An important thing about Elon Musk that’s widely known in tech circles but perhaps not in the wider world: he’s an ignoramus.

His technical knowledge is shallow and careless, full of parroting and fantasizing.

People who’ve worked on the small amount of code he actually wrote long ago describe his work as an unskilled mess.

At every company he runs, there are teams of people devoted to keeping him away from the engineers, who largely succeed to the extent that he forgets they exist.

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