Marc Fernandes

Lot of great gags in this movie 😂

a few weeks ago someone called work without AI “tradwork” and i can’t stop thinking about it

Addendum: How I did it -- once. My only start-quick novel was Ender's Game. I had had some traction with the novelet “Ender's Game,” and I had already committed to its main character as the protagonist of Speaker for the Dead. I needed a novel version of Ender's Game to properly set up Speaker, so readers of the EG novel would be prepared to pick up the story 3,000 years later. (Time dilation in lightspeed flight allowed frequent travelers to live through millennia.) I already knew, from expanding Mikal's Songbird into the novel Songmaster, that you don't novelize a short story by tacking twenty chapters onto the end. If the short story works, you start way earlier, developing characters and situations leading up to the same climax and resolution that worked so well in the short form. (If they did not work well, why are you novelizing it in the first place?) So to set up the story of EG, which began when Ender was given command of his own “army” in the orbiting Battle School, I went back to when he was chosen, and chose, to be taken out of his childhood home at around the age of six. Rigorous testing had led to Ender Wiggin being one of the most promising young recruits (draftees) to be trained to fight the invading hive queens. To show Ender's childhood family, I handled it quickly by putting Ender in my own family, back when there were only three of us kids. In my family, my sister was eldest, and a four-year gap between me and my older brother made us anything but close. So Ender grew up with a hostile older brother and a protective and kindly older sister — both of whom had come close to being drafted themselves. Every vile thing Peter did to Ender, my own brother had done to me. Every in-joke between Ender and Valentine was based on real memories shared with my sister. In this tiny cell, the parents seemed as distant as prison guards, quite unlike my own parents, who were in the main much more nurturing and involved. 1/3 🧵 ➡️

Terence Tao put it plainly: there is no evidence that LLMs exhibit genuine creativity. Yes, they have solved some Erdős problems. But these are low-hanging fruit, questions that attracted little attention and that yield once the right existing techniques are applied. That is not creativity. That is search plus recombination. Yes, LLM outputs can look impressive. But look at who is impressed: typically non-experts. Experts know very well that LLM performance gets terrible when you approach the frontier of human knowledge. And this is not a temporary gap. It reflects a structural limitation. We do not fully understand human creativity. But we do know a key property: Conceptual leaps: the ability to generate new representations, not just recombine existing ones. LLMs do not do this. They interpolate in representation space. They operate within existing conceptual frameworks; they do not create new ones. This is why we haven’t “yet seen them take the next step”.

My bechamel for the potatoes was pretty, pretty good!

This argument keeps coming up, and it’s based on the wrong comparison. It’s not $3M versus $70k. It’s interceptor cost versus expected damage avoided. If a $70k drone can impose hundreds of millions in losses, then a multi-million dollar intercept is economically rational. Air defense is a loss-prevention problem, not a unit-cost comparison.

This strike—and the strike on Larijani, if the reports are confirmed—underscore a difference between this air campaign and those of earlier decades: the extraordinary military revolution in targeting, and the now (relative) ease of decapitation strikes.

Whoa!! These alerts hit wire: * DONALD TRUMP WARNS NATO FACES ‘VERY BAD FUTURE’ IF ALLIES FAIL TO HELP US IN IRAN - FT * ASKED TO SPECIFY THE HELP HE NEEDED FROM NATO, TRUMP SAID “WHATEVER IT TAKES”- FT INTERVIEW * TRUMP SAYS ANY DANGER TO ALLIES MOVING ASSETS INTO THE GULF WOULD BE MINIMAL SINCE US AND ISRAEL HAD DESTROYED IRAN’S MILITARY CAPACITY- FT INTERVIEW