Good interview with award-winning writer and scientist Ted #Chiang.

Going to #university is about exercising your brain. The condition for #wisdom. Exercising thinking strength requires the exertion of thinking. Using #AI to write your assignments is doing the opposite.

@Iris

#Chiang Rai #Thailand by Aleksandra B. #travel #tourism #travelpics

#Chiang Mai #Thailand by Bharath Mohan.

#travel #truth #tourism #TravelTruth

Chiang Mai, Tailandia, es secretamente conocido por sus flores de cerezo #cerezo #Chiang #conocido #flores #Mai #por #secretamente #sus #Tailandia #ButterWord #Spanish_News Comenta tu opinión 👇
https://butterword.com/chiang-mai-tailandia-es-secretamente-conocido-por-sus-flores-de-cerezo/?feed_id=12187&_unique_id=67d82c108536d

#Chiang Mai #Buddhism #temple #golden #thailand #meditation
#Buddhismus #Tempel #Gold #Thailand

Today in Labor History February 28, 1947: The Kuomintang government in Taiwan put down an anti-government uprising known as the February 28 Incident. They killed 28,000 civilians. And in the White Terror that followed, the government killed, imprisoned or disappeared 30,000 more. These events helped spark the Taiwanese independence movement.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #kuomintang #taiwan #uprising #formosa #massacre #civilian #slaughter #WhiteTerror #independence #chiang

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.

OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?

This morning in Chiang Mai, I visited the city’s oldest market, didn’t take a river cruise, and visited another wat (temple). Read all about it, including the non-cruise here: https://journeys.klebanoff.com/2024/12/talat-warorot/

#travel #Thailand #Chiang Mai

Ted Chiang on AI and art: Argument AIs can't produce art. I'm more optimistic about AI as a useful tool but he makes a bunch of important arguments very clearly
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art
#creativity #chiang #art #ai #+

Today in Labor History February 28, 1947: The Kuomintang government in Taiwan put down an anti-government uprising known as the February 28 Incident. They killed 28,000 civilians. And in the White Terror that followed, the government killed, imprisoned or disappeared 30,000 more. These events helped spark the Taiwanese independence movement.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #kuomintang #taiwan #uprising #formosa #massacre #civilian #slaughter #WhiteTerror #independence #chiang

In particular, "The Merchant and The Alchemist’s Gate" is an implementation (if you will) in #fiction of Novikov’s self-consistency principle, written in the style of The Thousand and One Nights, for reasons that (if not obvious) #Chiang makes clear in his notes.

But “Exhalation” is a scientistic meditation on the second law of thermodynamics from a wholly unexpected perspective.

Read, and enjoy. Masterful stuff.

#SciFi #fiction #reading #writing

If you like #SciFi and haven’t already read Ted #Chiang, you best hurry up and grab some. Exhalation is an excellent collection

Some authors have great ideas but are crummy writers (China Mieville, Alfred Bester), some have uneven writing and uneven ideas (Philip K Dick), and some have no particular ideas but are great writers (too many to mention).

Being a great writer with great ideas is a very rare thing indeed. See how Chiang adjusts his voice to fit the work.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/538034/

Ted #Chiang wrote”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, #McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. […] By hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, #AI has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says.”

#capitalism 🧶

Google et son robot pipoteur(*), selon Doctorow https://framablog.org/2023/03/03/google-et-son-robot-pipoteur-selon-doctorow/ #lewiscarroll #traductions #g.a.f.a.m. #microsoft #doctorow #sadowsky #chatbot #chatgpt #chiang #google #openai #alice #gmail #yahoo #bing #g+ #ia

Ted Chiang at SFI: Sci-fi author takes a residency at the complex systems science institute.
https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/ted-chiang-joins-sfi-miller-scholars
#complexity #writing #chiang #cormac #scifi #sfi #+

Book Launch in #Chiang Mai in two weeks time with editors Jenny Hedstrom and Elisabeth Olivius, and many contributors present: "Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar" at the RCSD Chiang Mai University:
https://rcsd.soc.cmu.ac.th/event/book-launch-waves-of-upheaval/

A Chiang Mai monk collecting alms #buddhism #Chiang mai

A new #Chiang in #Taipei: Seven decades after Chiang Kai-shek retreated across the Taiwan Strait to Taipei, the former dictator's great-grandson was elected Saturday as mayor of the Taiwanese capital https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-china-c65773d9-2359-4b57-b777-1fb066dbd17d.html?chunk=5&utm_term=twsocialshare#story5 #axioschina

#Schwarzenegger sued #Chiang’s office. In court papers, Chiang replied that, even if he wanted to comply, he would need ten months to reconfigure the state’s computer system